The rise of the superrich reveals that greed is winning and humanity losing

John Wight
5 min readNov 28, 2022

The one thing upon which the world’s major religions and most schools of philosophy are agreed are the perils and evil of human greed.

Unfortunately, there are some people who didn’t get this particular memo. Take the Waltons, for example, the family behind the Walmart retail empire. According to the financial and money website, Bloomberg, they get richer by $4 million every hour — yes, you read that right, not every week or month, every hour — while at the same time paying their workers (or as they prefer to refer to them, ‘associates’) a paltry eleven bucks an hour.

There is no human being on this Earth who can justify getting (not making, mind, getting) $4 million an hour, and there is no justification for paying any worker a wage as low as $11 an hour. Only the most psychologically dysfunctional or morally empty could conceivably consider such a scenario and wealth gap compatible with progress.

And yes, yes, yes we’ve heard it all before about human enterprise and dynamism and hard work and entrepreneurship. But these are merely words used to legitimize greed and avarice. Words thrown into the faces of the masses like so much dust to blind them as to the reality of the world and their true place in it. That place is as human drones, consigned to a life spent…

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John Wight

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