Am I supposed to feel bad for the tax evading repeat substance abuser who's still sitting on 8 figures but didn't get to cash in on the nepotism fueling his family's fortune? Everyone involved in this story sounds like a horrible person.
Bad people can still be the recipients of injustices or undue hardship. For an extreme example, you can still feel bad for a thief who gets tortured extensively.
You can even feel sorry for people who are led to ruin by their own hubris/etc. For an actual example: It's not insane to feel sorry for Travis Kalanick. Yeah, he sounds like a bad person. It would still really suck to see your "magnum opus" swept away from you. Did he need to be removed? Yes. Would I like to be friends with him? No. Do I still feel bad for him? Yeah, kinda.
Sure, the guy from the article kinda sounds like a dirtbag. Still, he was shunned from his family (and a close family at that) and is essentially losing all of his close social network because of staunch religious beliefs that most of us would call silly. That sucks.
People don't have to fall into this binary classification of "sympathetic" or "unsympathetic". I can feel bad for him losing his family and wife, but feel no sympathy for his financial situation.
As an aside, this is also part of what makes leaving cults so hard: The thought of losing your entire social circle, including your immediate family, is daunting. If you want to know why more people are involved in cults despite being seemingly normal, this is a big part of it.
Do most of us really consider 'don't leave your wife for your mistress' a silly belief? From the article, that really sounds like the reason he was cut off.
If my sister cheated on her husband, I wouldn't stop talking to her forever or kick her out of the family (to the extent that I have that power). I'd be disappointed and it would affect our dynamic, sure, but it's not even close to a shunning offense.
Thinking on it, there's actually relatively few things she could do to warrant that kind of treatment.
Kid: I'm gonna publicly tarnish the family's reputation if you don't give me my money
Dad: I dare you, but if you do, you won't get a cent.
Kid: I care more about hurting you than the money because (I feel that) you abused me all my life
From the purely human part, the Guys has lost his wife and kids and possibly his whole social circle. That can be very damaging, even to very well of people.
Perhaps he is not deserving of sympathy or pity, but his life, and the reasons he is a substance abuser is a cautionary tale.
Perhaps when we talk about the orgy of capitalist conquest that we are collectively part of, we should reflect on the impact on not just the losers -- but the winners to.
What's your point?
And whether or not capitalism's dependency on fossil fuels can be broken before AGW cooks us is still an open question. If the worst case scenario holds true, will you also credit capitalism for it?
...and yet here you are making the exact opposite claims that have absolutely no basis in reality and go against any fact, and somehow you show no concern regarding lack of evidence or facts supporting your claims.
Non-capitalist countries also made huge improvements in standards of living, as they industrialized. Again, industrialization is the common factor, not the economic system.
[1] Short, nasty, and brutish.
Not as much as capitalist countries. That's the point.
However, you need something to multiply for there to be any prosperity.
Capitalism for stone-age people would not have resulted in prosperity, wealth, or rising standard of living, just as it did not cause it in industrial age people. Fossil fuels did. Crediting capitalism is putting the cart before the horse.
Just because electrification happened faster in the West then the USSR, doesn't mean that electricity isn't the reason why both societies became more prosperous.
Life was largely shit for most people for most of history, and it wasn't because because people didn't figure out that private ownership of the means of production is more efficient at producing widgets then state-owned means of production.
When 70% of your population is growing just enough food to feed themselves, and the other 30% are banging rocks together to make tools for the first group, you don't have time to think about inventing antibiotics or bitcoin or bicycles.
Read the story. He had a dad who worked 90 hours a week and contemplated suicide in 6th grade. His life sounds to have been directed and micromanaged well into adulthood, with an objective of keeping up the family brand above all else.
That’s a human tragedy.
That's a silly argument. It's like accusing the concept of motorized transportation of being the scourge of society just because some random family out there might have had a bad experience by measuring their worth in terms of how many cars they own.
I can't speak to the entire family, but in an old service-type job of mine about 10 years ago I would occasionally interact with one of the senior Marriott ladies at her home in Potomac (not sure if it was the patriarch's wife, Angie, or John III's sister). Some of the wealthy people living in that area are decent people, but Mrs. Marriott was not. Rather than speak in a normal conversational voice, she would yell orders across the room; when calling our office, she would berate the receptionist. Icy, cruel person.
Edit: Just found out it was Dick Marriott's wife, the sister-in-law of John III.
I can understand that his childhood was much stricter than average, but so were of many others without mega wealth and they didn't ended up as pathetic amoral wrecks. And of course he wants to milk his family for more.
Everything else pretty much takes care of itself and there are many trust funders who just live lives of little accomplishment and relative obscurity. This guy had most of those things go wrong, but he still made it out, the damage being he lost a zero or two from his wealth.
Given the size of the wealth, I don't know why these people get a negative connotation. It's the job of those with wealth to share with those who don't have. Moreso if it's inherited.