One of my best friends recently chided me for engaging in the foul and immoral act of having interest in the stock market. Now to me, coming from a lower middle class background with no formal education in economics, I (perhaps naively) imagine the wizards of wall street (though now more recently they seem cheap snake-oil salesman) to be the these personal goal-driven, more than likely evil, inept and bloated with power, though certainly self-driven and morbidly intelligent spinners of giant cogs that serve to drive the morally corrosive machine we call the world.
But, on the other hand I also consider them to have more potential to make a realistic change then poor little ole' me. However it seems as part of their payment for this Faustian pact, the ingestion of little less then soul poison rendering the idea of positive change uncomprehendable and "unprofitable" although in return they are awarded more zeros in their bank account then there were in all of my high school cafateria.
Perhaps my harsh criticism's towards them are more rooted in envy then in logic and ethos. Though while both my friend and I tend to be elitist snobs he will, I fear, take refuge for his beliefs behind a PhD and bury his fist of angst into a lectern. (In turn, I fear that I will eventually escape to perhaps only my friends and family (and god forbid co-workers) with lashings against the injustices of the world.) But while society tends to laud those three letters of academic laurels with a particular lavish, I find it alarming that even the educated elite will not respect at least a realistic nature of the dichotomy of power between the poor, and the ultra rich.
In fact, I believe we both agree that there should be drastic change, a drastic overhaul in the distribution of wealth, and a drastic paradigm shift in how society is run. And while the overall capitalist system spins nearly solely on shady economics, unethical finance, and faulty maths, ignoring the methods of the elite does no good for the disenfranchised. The rebellion against understanding how the rich and powerful have become that way, and the forces that maintain them in those stations of power in no way constitutes an effective rebellion.
If on the other hand, the poor embraced an understanding of how they had become slaves to the ultra-rich, a revolution perhaps if nothing more then through their own greed would at least have a chance of coming about. What's the other option, violence? If you are chained to a rock do you refuse to examine the lock because the lock itself must be evil for binding you there?
If the ideology behind rebellion fails tactically, it fails entirely.
