3 ms·
The no obnoxious rich people paradox
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- decode 17y agoInteresting musings, but unfortunately for the author, they're not related to reality. Not only is there no such thing as a "no obnoxious rich people paradox," but the English language has had a special term to describe just one subset of the obnoxious rich for over 200 years: nouveau riche. Likely the French have been sensitive to the concept for even longer: Molière's "Le Bourgeois gentilhomme" was written in 1670. For at least that long, rich people have not been free to do whatever they wanted. In fact, it's the rich themselves who policed "refined" behavior and codified it in the concept of manners.
- hyperbovine 17y agoIndeed, the French has such a problem with the obnoxious rich that they coined another phrase two centuries after Moliere to describe the same problem: parvenu.
- wglb 17y agoThis is fun, particularly "your id is kind of a douchebag".
- vannevar 17y agoThere are no paradoxes: http://bit.ly/bV9xa http://bit.ly/bV9xa
- pmichaud 17y agoThere's a shock that comes when a lower or middle class person spends time with or becomes wealthy, and they discover that their group biases are wrong. They like to imagine rich being obnoxious, arrogant, cold-hearted, etc. The truth is that some are exactly that, but proportionally they are not exceptional. Show me an obnoxious and arrogant rich person, and I'll show you 10 middle class people are just as bad, just because there are so many more of them.