Tupac on inequality

“Even if you earned it, you still owe.”

A woman wearing a Tupac t-shirt outside the trial of Jeronimo Yanez, the Minnesota police officer who shot Philando Castile in 2016. Photo credit: Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons

Okay, I’m on TikTok. Yeah, it’s sort of ridiculous, but I’m a writer trying to sell books and if you want to sell books these days you need to be on social media, as much as you can or as much as you can stomach. Thus, I’m on TikTok.

I don’t get a lot of traction, to be sure, don’t have a lot of followers and I never go viral. But sometimes I do get some good comments and back and forth, like on this one I posted earlier this week:

@paulvignaPoverty is not inevitable. The problem isn’t people. It’s not lack of resources. It’s the system. It’s the system we created. And the thing at the center of that system is money. I wrote The Almightier to explain how our attitudes about money got to be the way they are. It’s for sale now, available at libraries, who knows maybe you could borrow a copy from a buddy. I will say humbly that I think it explains our beliefs and myths around money better than any other book has. #fyp #booktok #money #inequality

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“Poverty is a choice,” I say. But not a choice of the impoverished. Poverty is the result of the choice we as a collective society have made, about how to distribute resources. It’s basically just me riffing on one of the ideas in The Almightier. That we could feed, house, clothe, educate, and provide healthcare for every person on the planet, but we have an economic system that doesn’t care about that. And, of course, explaining why that is — which I admittedly don’t really do in the post — is the entire point of The Almightier. Somehow the video ended up getting into the feeds of some people who disagreed with it.

“I don’t grow food for free,” a person named fluffy farmer wrote.

“It is the result of personal choice,” another said, talking about poverty.

One argued that the U.S. has been giving out aid for decades and it hasn’t made any difference. Another told me to write a check to the government and tell them what I want it used for.

“Nobody became homeless because they didn’t do drugs,” yet another said.

“Man must work for his food,” another wrote.

This, I thought, was actually is great. That’s exactly what I want. There isn’t much use in me talking to people who already agree with me. What I want is to try and change people’s minds who don’t agree with me. My greatest hope for The Almightier, to be honest, was that it would get picked up on the political right, that I’d have a chance to reach people, some people, on both sides of the divide. Because the thing I’m talking about really does exist beyond political divides. We have made money our religion, and both sides worship it.

And that money worship is what keeps us from seeing the reality of our circumstances. We already grow enough food to feed 10 billion people, and could grow even more. There are vast, fertile swaths of the Democratic Republic of Congo and India that aren’t being tapped. We have ways to grow food with hydroponics and some really sci-fi looking methods. Food scarcity is not an issue. We could clothe everybody. There are mountains of unworn clothes polluting poor nations, where the fast-clothing companies just dump them. We could easily build enough housing; the housing shortage has nothing to do with the resources but is a result of policies. We already in theory provide education to every child; I think we could do it a lot better, and a lot better for kids who don’t live in rich towns, but we do already do it. We ostensibly offer healthcare to everybody. The services exist, we just price too many people out of accessing them. We could generate enough electricity. We could generate enough electricity with fossil fuels or renewables.

Scarcity is not an issue. It just isn’t. And yet, every day I walk by people on my way to work who are indigent, who are homeless, who are begging for money. And it takes some real mental gymnastics to just ignore those people. Like, you really have to compartmentalize your brain to just walk past them, to ignore them. I’m not saying this to call out others; I’m talking about myself. I live in this world, and I work for a salary, and I have access to credit, and I live a fairly comfortable life. It’s not perfect, don’t get me wrong, and I have plenty of stresses and anxieties. But I’m not begging on a street. And you have to really, really wall yourself off from those people to not think about them, to not feel for them, to not want to do anything but walk by and maybe toss a quarter in the battered paper cup they’re holding out. You have to believe in the power of money. And we do. I do, too. I’m not holding myself out.

Well, all that back and forth on my post must have triggered something within the algorithm, because it served me up this post, of Tupac Shakur in 1992 making exactly the same point, only much more passionately and eloquently:

@3.37aem“Even if you earned it, you still owe.” #tupac #billionaires #capitalism #fyp #tupacshakur

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That is a young man who has come into what was probably a fortune, saw himself elevated above most of the rest of humanity, and didn’t understand why. And you can see how much he’s struggling with it, on a very visceral gut level. You can see that he just does not understand the system that allows the inequality to exist. I don’t mean that to disparage Tupac. Most of us don’t get it. I didn’t get it for most of my life. All of us can see it, it’s impossible not to see it, and some of us are bothered by it, some try to do something about it. But very few understand it. And that’s what makes it so hard to fix.

Part of the problem as I see it, a big part of it, is our circumstances don’t match our economics. Maybe 5,000 years ago, or even six hundred years ago, you needed a system that distributed scarce resources as best you could. And the mechanism people came up with to decide who gets those is money. But then pursuing money became the end in itself and the real goal, of distributing resources among a large group of people, became forgotten. And now we are in a situation where there are more than enough resources for everybody but we don’t talk about that because we have turned the pursuit of wealth into our highest virtue. The bigger part of the problem is making people understand that nobody’s success, nobody’s failure, is a result of only their own efforts. You, me, Elon Musk, all of us owe people who’ve directly helped us along the way, and people who have indirectly helped us by crafting this world we live in. None of us would last long without the safety net that is society itself. Even Albert Einstein would’ve just been a slightly cleverer monkey without the whole of society educating and nurturing him. None of us make it on our own. None of us.

“Even if you earned it, you still owe,” Tupac says in the video. And that is the real heart of the matter. The problem is we’ve stopped teaching people that.