All of which makes the psychic blow now being delivered by Wall Street’s undeserving ultra-rich particularly maddening. The glorification of merit, it turns out, has a profoundly threatening downside. In the old days, if you didn’t end up on top, it didn’t say anything about you personally. It was God’s will; you were playing your role in the great chain of being; you’d get your reward in the next life. But now, if you’re merely a corporate lawyer or a senior vice president of marketing in a world where your former classmates have private planes, something has to be wrong with you. And if they got the plane by engaging in activity that wrecked the national economy, the insult is even more galling – and the world itself more perverse.
The sociology of this brewing phenomenon is potentially explosive.
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