PART I
Rich of all Countries, unite!
1.
When I was young and read Karl Heinrich's Manifesto along with his Kapital, I found his whole opus very interesting, but a bit verbose and boring. So, sadly, the snorting reader may dismiss the whole work as rubbish, which only some of it is. Now, to be sure that you won't be scared by the rather large size of my three-piece essay, look at these excerpts as foretaste:
What had in common Mother Theresa of Calcutta, John Lennon, Mistinguette, Che Guevara and John D. Rockefeller?
Why capitalism must be regarded as fecal matter?
What has to do the Poor's happiness with the camel's needles-eye?
Is there anybody so crazy to desire to inherit the Earth?
How can the Mafia be fought by means of a few magic words?
Where to spend your next exotic holidays?
Ask tour operators Fourier & Co.
A specter is haunting the world: the specter of Greed.
Only the Rich will overcome, living a joyous enviable life. Let the irredeemable unquenchable Poor tremble at their inescapable everlasting dispirited unhappiness.
The Rich disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their (very personal, ego-centered) ends can be attained only by the most absolute indifference to the silly opinions of the Poor and of the Fool all around. The Rich have nothing to lose but their occasional boredom and weariness due to others' choking immaturity. They don't care to have a world to win: the Rich already are endowed with their world, they own it.
Rich of all Countries, unite!
Not too bad, eh? And, as I am going to make clear, this is not a provocative parody of somebody else's Manifesto: it is a factual depiction of the Rich's stance. It only requires some bit of exegesis.
First of all, the last exhortation is to be changed in: Rich of all Countries, FEEL united!
I just wrote it that way to make my mockery more lampooning. But in fact, as you shall agree, the most dangerous temptation to eschew is to be sucked into yet any new form of Organization. The Rich know that their very quintessence lies in their individualism.
And now, let's go to the core of the issue, which surely seems obvious to the brightest among you who did guess from the very first words that Rich and Poor is not a distinctiveness based on liquid money or real estate. This would be indeed a rather pointless way to perceive the difference between Rich and Poor, though very popular.
So, let's agree on a basic vocabulary of ours, to enable us to use words with a clear univocal meaning. Let's call Poor a person who is wanting. And Rich a person who is at ease. Money is not the discriminant.