Good people don’t get rich

On 9 August, the Guardian reported that Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht had repeatedly declined to assist a nearby boat calling for help off the coast of Alaska.

Most of the anger under the story needed no interpretation. A distress call is the one message at sea that is not open to argument, and if the report is accurate, fury fits the act. One commenter went further than judging the act: “You can’t be a billionaire and a decent person.” A single refusal at sea had become a rule about money and character. The rule implies a threshold, some exact sum at which decency stops being possible. Nobody names the figure. It floats, conveniently, somewhere above whatever one happens to earn.

We cannot know what the sentence meant to its writer. The rule is worth taking personally anyway. If money makes people worse, then wanting more of it starts to feel like evidence that something is already wrong with us.

This is how that looks on a Tuesday morning. We stay in work that underpays us and call ourselves unambitious. We give away hours we cannot afford and call it generosity. Somebody has power over us because they pay for things, and we depend on them, and we have started to hate it. Some of this is circumstance, and circumstance is real; some of it is not, and telling the two apart is exactly what the belief makes difficult. The dentist can wait. The moral high ground has no dental plan. And we tell a child that something is not important, because admitting we cannot afford it hurts too much to say out loud.

The wound comes twice. First we do without the thing: the house, the treatment, the freedom to stop working for that person. Then, because it is painful to know what money would have changed, we stop wanting it. The renaming is gradual. Vulgar. Unnecessary. Not who I am. After enough years it becomes impossible to tell what we freely chose from what we learned to call a choice because nothing else was affordable. Contempt usually arrives at the end of that process, to make sure the renamed wish stays renamed.

In exchange, the belief keeps its promise. I am not greedy. I have not sold out. I am still one of the good people. There is a satisfying arrangement on offer here: he keeps the yacht, we keep the cleaner soul. It is not an equal division of assets, but it has its consolations.

Then comes the resentment. We do not ask for more, because asking would show how much we want it and would put a number on our worth that someone could refuse. So we wait for it to be offered. The employer will notice by himself. The client will suggest a higher fee. The partner will understand without being told. They rarely do. After a while we start to feel used, and maybe we are. But we never asked, so we cannot know whether asking would have worked, and the anger settles on the other person while the silence that produced it never comes up for discussion, since discussing it would mean admitting what we wanted.

Money also decides which refusals we can afford. Leaving a job, a partner, a country: every serious “no” has a price. The deposit on the next flat, the lawyer, the ticket, the months without income. A person with savings can say no and survive it. A person without savings often cannot. So someone who forbids themselves to want money is also, without noticing it, forbidding themselves the no. They stay, because staying is the only thing they can pay for, and they call the staying patience, or loyalty, or love. That is a lot to pay for a clean conscience. It is not the whole explanation of anyone’s dependence; markets, origins, illness and luck decide far more, and no belief explains a rent bill. The belief just ties its own knot into the rope.

Some people fail to get rich out of loyalty.

Ricky Gervais has described the same conflict from the other side, at the moment the money actually arrives.

In a 2013 GQ interview he said the first serious money from The Office brought shame along with everything else; the money, in his telling, spoiled his pride in the work. He had grown up poor, there had been a kind of nobility in that poverty, and his parents died before he became rich. He found himself explaining to people that he had never done it for the money. The success he had wanted and worked for. It was being paid that needed defending.

His shame was not a fear of becoming greedy. He had learned what being good meant in a poor house, from poor parents, and being poor was something the family did together. The money arrived after his parents died. They stayed poor for ever, and he became rich alone.

Keira Knightley described a smaller version of the same fear when she told Glamour she capped her own spending at around fifty thousand dollars a year: an expensive lifestyle, she said, alienates you from the friends who cannot live it.

Neither of them was afraid of becoming worse. They were afraid of becoming different, and different means alone.

None of this makes criticism of extreme wealth mistaken. A society in which one private boat costs three hundred million dollars has questions to answer, and a person can put that case with no unconscious agenda at all. The psychoanalytic question is different: not whether the belief is true, but what it is doing for the one who holds it, and what it stops them doing.

For some people it funds a bargain: if money belongs to bad people, goodness can be preserved by not pursuing it. The bargain can be entirely sincere and still do this second job, and both can be true at once, which is exactly why the arrangement survives inspection. The commenter under the yacht story may have been doing none of this. But the sentence they wrote is available for it, to anyone, at no charge.

The next time contempt for somebody’s wealth delivers that instant feeling of moral clarity, it is worth asking what the clarity just paid for. The dentist is still waiting.