Follow the money is wrong — it’s the power

When any human has sufficient money or access to unlimited funds, the actual value of money diminishes. Do you really think that any of these titans of industry who make more in a day than you make in a lifetime are worried about money at all? If Musk, Bezos, Allen, Gates spent $1,000,000 a day, they would have more the next day than the day before, even spending freely for a year, because their wealth is so vast they cannot, physically, spend more than even the lowest interest rate would replenish their wealth. Look, if each of them had all their money in $100 bills, crisp new bills, it would stack up from here to the moon. Yes, that much. It is obscene.

And that’s the point. When a human has that much, and knows that no matter what he does, it’ll never be spent or lost, money ceases to be a driving factor in their lives. Power does. The search for a measure of self-worth has morphed from money-gathering to power-grabbing.

Much worse than financial avarice or desire to beat-the-Joneses, at a certain point in all these billionaires’ careers, they ceased worrying about a paycheck and switched to that ultimate primordial feeling of superiority. The ruthless need for so much power breeds total contempt for the fellow man, government structures, morals and, what is truly awful, the value of life on Earth. Look, these are not stupid people, these are not ignorant people, these people have become so perverted that they have lost the capability to empathize, or care, or prognosticate for the welfare of others, the planet, or the future.

That lack of empathy, nurtured by the need for more and more power to measure their own self-worth, is taking them down a road that can only lead to destruction: theirs or ours, or both.

So stop thinking the game here is making money, using money to buy voters, using money to corrupt politicians. The game here is without value of money, it is about pure, unfettered power, a blind capability to seek to control everything that they can. Like addicts, they need the daily cut and thrust of the exercise of that power. There is no long-term strategy for the individual beyond doing something big, every day, every moment, to impose that power, to feel the capability of that power.

Power is a drug for them. Money means nothing. As the Roman historian Tacitus said, “Those who seek absolute power are those who are intoxicated by their own ambition.” And the possible outcome? Also from Tacitus, “They make a desert and call it peace.”

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.