Rich People and Dirty Boots

My daddy used to frequently remark that you could tell the folks who actually had money from those who wanted to have money but weren’t there yet by listening and looking. If they bragged about their money, they didn’t have any. If they had shit on their boots, they probably had a bit of money, but wouldn’t go round bragging about it. As a kid, I found this observation fascinating and wise.

I’ve been reading the Holy Bible and Aristotle’s The Rhetoric this week, thinking about my daddy, and wondering about rich people.

Where and when I grew up, it seems to me the people who had more money than most of us went to some length not to rub our noses in it. For example, the folks who paid for me to go to summer church camp did it without fanfare.  Christmas baskets were put together for the poor and delivered matter-of-factly and neighborly, without explicit or implicit judgments made toward the giver or receiver.

Of course, we all know what Jesus is noted to have said on the subject of money and wealth—"the love of money is the root of all evils"l (1 Timothy 6:10), and “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24) remind us of two passages.

Jesus was a kind and gentle soul. Aristotle was not. On most subjects, Aristotle, most certainly not a Christian (Christianity had not been founded yet), held positions that were about as far away from Jesus’ as could be. However, in The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, as he talks about what one needs to know about wealthy people in order to persuade them, what he has to say is strong:

Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore there is nothing it can’t buy.… Rich men also consider themselves worthy to hold public office; for they consider they already have the things that give them a claim to office. In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool. There is indeed one difference between the type of the newly-enriched and those who have long been rich: the newly-enriched have all the bad qualities mentioned in an exaggerated and worse form—to be newly-enriched means, so to speak, no education in riches. The wrongs they do other are not meant to injure their victims, but spring from insolence or self-indulgence, e.g., those that end in assault or in adultery. (pp.127-28)

The people of means that I remember in Providence, Kentucky, those from “old money” and from “new money” did not fit Aristotle’s description. For that I am thankful.

But I sure as hell see evidence to support his view today in the U.S.

Despite our Western Cultural religious and philosophical traditions and underpinnings, I wonder what happened to us, and why it is that today we have come to worship wealth and wealthy people? Especially when they flaunt their wealth and rub our noses in it.

I hear rich folks bragging about their money and possessions, but despite my best attempts to find it, I ain’t seen no shit on any of their boots yet.

Wonder if today’s world is making Aristotle look like an even more brilliant man.

And making my daddy’s wisdom obsolete.