I’ve never known anybody like who I’m talking about here. Not closely, anyway. But I can see how a person who’s never had to scramble and claw, or screw other’s over, to succeed could be superior in human qualities to most others.
It’s easy to say “That which doesn’t kill you makes you strong”, but in my experience that’s BS. People who haven’t had to struggle seem nicer, in general, than those who really have had to.
America doesn’t have blooded aristocracy, but does, I think, have a yearning for it. Humans have an intristic need to find something which sets an individual apart from the rest of mankind and makes them “better.”
In the United States, bloodlines matter little unless you’re a racehorse. There are too many millionaires to make merely having money a sufficiently exclusive club, so the concept of “Old Money” was developed to create a smaller social class.
My family came from money. Old money, too - the European nobility kind. Castle and all. I wasn’t born early enough to see any of it, but my mother was.
Most of the money was lost during the Soviet takeover of our country, and from that point on, my family was middle-class, if such a thing existed. When we immigrated to the US in the late 80’s, I was seven and we became poor.
So now - it seems to me that, in my family, the earlier a person was born, the higher his/her sense of entitlement. There is a feeling that you can have everything you want - why shouldn’t you? Even though we were often having financial problems, my mother considered it a given that we would go on European vacations, to Italy or Germany or wherever we wanted to go. And when our situation improved a bit, why not hop over to England for the weekend? This seems like it would be really bad and irresponsible, but it was actually a wonderful thing to do. I grew up truly believing that I could go anywhere I wanted and do anything I wished. This sense of entitlement, believe it or not, helps very much in gliding through life.
I will make the claim that people who come from old money are generally smarter than their poorer counterparts. I don’t mean to say that they work harder in school, or that they study better - just that when the parents are well-educated, as old money often is, and they have tons of free time to spend with their children, or, if they prefer, enough money for a tutor or governess, the children just tend to know more than the average kid entering school.
As Scott Fitzgerald once said(believe it was in “THE GREAT GATSBY”)…“the rich are like you and I…only, they have more money”!
A few years ago Congress was considering getting rid of the estate tax. A number of Fortune 500 folks said they should keep it. ‘I worked hard to get this rich. I want my kids to have to work hard too. I don’t want a dynasty of people who do nothing but live off their inherited wealth’.
The self made rich do have qualities most people don’t. Dave Thomas and Henry Ford are almost total opposites. But both had the vision, drive, and self control to found companies and turn them into massive successes.
Or look at Herbert Powell and Mister Burns. Reduced to nothing, both were able to build new fortunes.
Have you seen The Osbournes?
F. Scott Fitzgerald said “the rich are different from
you and me.” He did not say, “they have more money”, a common rejoinder. The book shows just how different.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Seems to describe the snot nosed kids at Hollywood High, no?
And other people do clean it up, don’t they.
But I don’t think many of the kids I’m talking about go to Hollywood High.
It sounds more as if these people are better educated, not necessarily smarter. IMHO, money has nothing to do with a person’s innate intelligence or IQ.
IMHO, no qualities really have that much to do with a person’s wealth or lack thereof.
After all, by what criteria are we judging “better”?
Success? Okay, then you have to define success. Is success having the most toys when you die? Or is it having loved, lived and enjoyed one’s life to the fullest (and I’m not saying that the two are mutually exlusive).
Toys? Again, you have to define toys, the person who’s not making much but who is relaxed and relatively stress free because he doesn’t have some long existant “family duty” imposed upon him from old money, isn’t his stress free time spent with family, kids and the simple pleasures “toys” in a manner of speaking?
And so on and so forth.
This study revealed that:
Even an exceptionally bright child can lose interest in learning if he or she is not encouraged.
But innate intelligence and IQ only go as far as, say, three years in determining how “smart” a person is. Outside stimulation plays a huge role in the development of a child’s mind, a much larger role than anything the kid is born with. So, yes, I agree with you that rich kids are not born any smarter than poor ones, but that’s not really the point. The point is that rich kids are usually raised smarter.
Expectations, huh? I guess there is something to that. That, and the availability of assistance for the low-achieving child.
And to define “better”? That’s hard, but I think Dr_Paprika maybe nailed it. It’s largely a matter of who makes the messes versus who cleans them up.
Like pornography; “I can’t define it, etc”.
Surely if rich people are better than us we should just dismantle our democratic systems of government and hand them the reins of power? After all, would you rather have a normal person, or a better person ruling you? Better people will produce better decisions.
In fact, taking this idea a little further, we could divide up the poor people and assign them to rich people. The rich people, being better, should make all the decisions for their assigned poor people. This would probably have to have some basis in law of course, maybe saying that the poor people are bound to their assigned rich person.
I don’t know why we bothered to get rid of the feudal system in the first place, its now obvious to me its the best one.
Alas, Planet, if only it were that simple. Trouble is, there are all these middle class and sorta rich between the elite and the poor. And the elite are just better, not perfect. Good plan, though. The feudal system failed because the rich abused their poor people. That’s why we need democracy. And Liberals.
Don’t the people 0f the UK revel in the idea that the Royal Family are their betters?
Bah. Mere arrivistes, purely noveau riche nobodies. They don’t have a single estated among them that they’ve even held continuously for a mere 400 years. How on earth can that be called “old money”?