Lastly, would you prefer to part with some of your wealth by choice or be parted with it (and maybe your life) by force when economic inequalities pass a tipping point? Regardless of morality and notions of property ownership and personal wealth, history has plenty of examples of violent revolution when the rich few neglect the many. So, rightly or wrongly, sharing the wealth may be a survival strategy, as it were.
Maybe you need to examine the inequalities in effort that cause so many people to slack of at school and work and spend all their free time watching television or the like, then the inequalities in wealth wouldn't be so surprising to you.
It’d be nice in some ways if it were that easy, wouldn’t it? Poverty would be easily ignored because it’d be chosen. Except, as noted above, even then, when economic disparities pass a tipping point, violent revolution tends to happen. So even if that idea were correct, the rich cannot afford to ignore inequality either.
What's perhaps even stranger is that physically we're hardwired to generally have the same emotional needs, though obviously with some variety, and that most ways of being are different strategies for meeting those emotional needs. This is a topic discussed in Nonviolent Communication and I rather appreciate it.
What I have seen a number of times is that there's a turning point once I see how someone is meeting a basic emotional need with a particular strategy, and the through-line to it. Without that through line, things can be a bit scary as they don't seem to follow causal rules from the outside, and we're all limited in our models.
I don't always stay in really close to people advocating for violence, for example, as that's not a culture I entirely prefer. I've come to a belief after a while that nearly everyone is an extremely rational agent in their decision-making, and that it's actually the information presented to the person inside their brain at the point of the decision-making that is oftentimes the culprit for the vast differences in behavior for certain people. I've seen it from traumagenic mental health disorders to even normal differences in political opinion. Realistically I can't quite get in to that place of reasoning to speak with that person always, and it's not even really my place to do that or maybe even try. But it is humanizing, and it has helped me keep my head on straight instead of writing someone off so I don't feel disturbed by an unknown unknown rolling around some proverbial emotional garden.
Daryl Davis is another person I really respect and like as well. I look up to a lot of how he handled those kinds of clashes, as the way it resolved for him always has been so strange and mysterious to me. Incredible story, tbh.
I'll leave off with this quote from him here. Of course the goal is not necessarily to convert someone always to a different belief system, but I think it can maybe then be reinterpreted here as finding a peaceable middle ground:
"When they see that you know about their organization, their belief system, they respect you. Whether they like you or not, they respect the fact that you've done your homework. Just like any good salesman, you want a return visit and they recognized that I'd done my homework, which allowed me to come back again.
That began to chip away at their ideology because when two enemies are talking, they're not fighting. It's when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy — it doesn't have to be about race, it could be about anything...you will find that you both have something in common. As you build upon those commonalities, you're forming a relationship and as you build about that relationship, you're forming a friendship. That's what would happen. I didn't convert anybody. They saw the light and converted themselves."