When Your City Is Burning and Your Billionaires Are in Space
They get to decide the fate of the Earth. Do the rest of us get to judge?
You’ll have to forgive me, I’ve been reading Instagram comments this morning.
It started out innocently enough: I was scrolling through a friend’s Stories, and they linked to a rather spectacular article about the unglamorous realities of life in space, specifically in regards to the various gajillionaires who want to go colonize Mars or whatever while the rest of us slowly burn on Earth.
It hit home for me as a Seattle resident who recently spent several days dissolving into a puddle of sweat while air temperatures in our historically mild-mannered city climbed above 105°. I don’t own an AC unit, like most people I know, because temperatures above 105° are a betrayal of the basic premise of Seattle, and because I couldn’t afford one. But this summer has already made it clear that life without AC is no longer an option, even if we only see these temperatures a few days a year; even if I can personally survive it, I’m too afraid my cat will get heatstroke and die.
Does that sound dramatic? It shouldn’t, because dozens of people did get heatstroke and die.
All this to say that I resonated with thrust of Sim Kern’s article, which is that indulging in the dream of life in space is not going to save us on Earth any time soon, and that our local billionaires should perhaps be more invested in combating climate change than abandoning this planet for the next one. I’d even settle for Jeff Bezos doing both — throw your ungodly power and influence behind real climate change activism, and then you can go camping on Jupiter for all I care.
But in the comments section, which I read against all my better judgment, I saw a familiar repeated refrain:
It’s his money. He worked hard for it. Doesn’t he have a right to do whatever he wants with it? He’s a private citizen — why is this his responsibility? Why don’t you blame the government?
Predictably enough, the comments devolved from there into a flurry of debates over the culpability of various governments and the working conditions of Amazon employees.
I think my personal position on the matter is probably clear by now, but something struck me about the comments this morning that I hadn’t considered: these arguments don’t just exist on opposite ideological poles, they operate on different levels of reality.
It’s his money, he worked hard for it, he has the right to do whatever he wants with it is a fine statement in the abstract. Sure, in theory, it’s not the job of a private citizen to step in where governments across the world have failed. Sure, if you work hard, you should be rewarded for it, and if you make ridiculous amounts of money, it should be yours to keep. You can boil these arguments down to belief in the American dream — that everyone has the capacity to become the richest person in the world, so you should focus on earning your own $211 billion instead of critiquing what Jeff Bezos does with his Scrooge McDuck-esque piles of money.
It’s difficult to argue with statements this detached from reality. Yes, everybody has the right to do what they want with their money, and everybody technically has the capacity to become the richest person in the world. But we live in the real world — a world which is rapidly heating to a point where it will become unlivable for everyone. We live in a world where not everybody can become the richest person on earth, where social and structural inequities run rampant, and where billionaires depend on exploiting working-class people to actually build and sustain their wealth. We live in a world where Amazon doesn’t pay taxes.
And unlike the world of American Dream 101, this world has real consequences and profound dangers and devastating poverty. In this world, specific, preventable, horrifying human tragedies happen daily on a scale that is frankly incomprehensible to our little lizard brains. And we live in a world where people like Jeff Bezos could prevent and rectify those tragedies on a scale that is also, frankly, incomprehensible.
Do billionaires have the right to ignore that and do whatever they want and go to space? I guess, in the abstract. But what about in context? Why don’t we judge them for their actions in the real world?
If your neighbor’s house is on fire and you own two hundred billion fire extinguishers, are you not obligated to put the fire out?
What kind of person would choose not to?
