You're only questioning one half of these ideas.
You're only questioning one half of these ideas.
There's a lot of hard working talented, and well-compensated people here. But that alone doesn't make you rich, merely well-off. What makes you truly rich is investing your wealth in stocks, real estate, or being in the right place in the right time, which is the difference between the guy who built the core systems at a successful startup, and the guy who owns a significant stake of it (which might be one and the same).
But being rich isn't earned in the sense that you work hard for it, you might need savvy, connections, luck, and need to fight others for money, but I'm sure most honest rich people wouldn't describe themselves as their money being the result of their hard work.
And this is for self-made people. People who inherited wealth are even less responsible for their success.
You should define what you mean by rich.
Colloquially, when speaking of 'eat the rich' its typically a reference to people with net worths exceeding 25 million or more with substantial cash generating assets there in[0].
Rather than some SWE's making 250-500K a year and perhaps retire with 5-10 million in assets with smart investments over the course of 20-30 years. This gets edged down into 'upper middle class'. Sometimes the term. 'Well off' is used (somewhat nebulously) to refer to people in that bracket.
Of course there are exceptions, but these seem to be the common trends in these discussions.
Therefore, I ask again, what exactly do you mean by rich? Because the most colloquial definition is unlikely to be common anywhere, even on HN
[0]: Whether folks realize it or not, this is approximately where the real difference between 'well off' and truly wealthy start to set in. It differs a bit by state (in the US) and country, but its a decent enough approximation for this conversation.
This is kind of like asking where one observes the promotion of the absurd narrative that white people are better people. It's rare to get an explicit source, but you have to benefit from it or be willfully blind to it not to believe it's there.
For one example of a reasonably explicit source, a very loud voice in the US agreed that those who benefits from government services are "the parasite class" (https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-musk-reposted-meme-120...). Leaving, therefore, only the wealthy, who (so the narrative goes) impose no burden on others, to be the virtuous, non-parasitic class.
Them being 'better' in any sense of the word is weirdly orthogonal and juvenile statement.
It doesn't matter if you are a breatthakingly handsome hardworking genius, or you are an ugly imbecile - it's about what assets you own - the whole notion of being better on benchmarks of what humans consider better is irrelevant.
And just because something is present doesn't mean it's an intentional or complete narrative being promoted by the author. This is simply an idea that's virtually omnipresent in Western societies, like the acceptance of capitalism or the system of colors. Things that challenge these sorts of deeply assumed ideas often seem like attacks on society itself. If you want an author who intentionally addresses it, Ursula Guin has made it a big focus of her works (e.g. Omelas, the hainish cycle).
https://oxfordre.com/religion/display/10.1093/acrefore/97801...
The idea of prosperity gospel is strong in the US, it doesn't take much more than looking at US elections and seeing the religious poor voting for Trump and using "because he is rich" as one of the reasons for it.
This also ties into Milton Friedman's "everyone runs on greed" idealisms that permeate capitalism.
I think some of this is because you don't live in the US and get to see behavior like this daily.
Curiosly, in Argentina a popular belief is that "nobody became rich by working" and variations. Being rich here is seen as either the result of luck (born rich) or corruption.