为什么美国人崇拜超级富豪？

为什么美国人崇拜超级富豪？

Why Do Americans Idolize the Super Rich? 

鹧鸪哨

译文简介：如今人们常说，如果你认为美国存在衰落、盲目、愚蠢和自我毁灭的问题，那么你一定憎恨富人。但是，不，我不讨厌富人，我觉得我可怜他们。

正文翻译

It’s often said these days, that if you think America has problems, of decline, of blindness and folly and self-inflicted ruin, that you must hate the rich. No, I don’t hate the rich. I think that I pity them.

如今人们常说，如果你认为美国存在衰落、盲目、愚蠢和自我毁灭的问题，那么你一定憎恨富人。

但是，不，我不讨厌富人，我觉得我可怜他们。

Here’s a little secret. I grew up among the super rich. Not the American super rich — that’s the minor league in comparison. I mean the genuinely global mega-rich. People so bizarrely, gruesomely rich they’d have towering Italian palazzos shipped over tile by tile, painstakingly rebuilt by hand, put behind gleaming gates, surrounded by opulent gardens, and guarded by little armies. I don’t say that to boast, because it didn’t happen by my design — but only through a quirk of fate. My grandfather and father were courted by them, the super rich who grew that wealthy by siphoning off the wealth of the countries my forefathers were trying to protect.

告诉你一个小秘密：我是在超级富豪中长大的，不是美国的超级富豪，相比之下，那是一个小群体——我指的是真正的全球超级富豪。

这个群体富有地离奇、可怕，他们会把高耸的意大利宫殿一砖一瓦地运过来，费尽心思地用手工重建，放在闪闪发光的大门后面，周围是富丽堂皇的花园，并由小型军队看守，我这样说并不是为了自夸，因为这一切都不是我故意安排的，而只是命运使然，我的祖父和父亲曾被他们追捧，这些超级富豪通过吸走我的祖先试图保护的国家的财富而发家致富。

And so as I grew up, many of their kids became my friends. We’d play, innocently, as kids do, unbothered by the fact that I was just a relative pauper, and they were ulta rich. But as we grew up, I observed something strange. Which seemed to happen so predictably, I started to put a countdown timer on it. These kids hated themselves — deeply and badly. Their parents treated them like little obxts, trophies, prizes. The families were like corporations, not human tribes, full of warmth and laughter. Mom and dad couldn’t bear each other. Nobody had a job — but everyone was busy, every day, forever, battling everyone else over that pile of money. Nobody seemed to have any inner sense of meaning, worth, or purpose.

随着我的成长，他们的孩子许多成为了我的朋友，我们会像孩子们一样天真无邪地玩耍，没有被我只是一个相对贫穷的人这个事实所困扰，而他们是超级富翁，但随着我们的成长，我发现了一些奇怪的现象，这似乎是可以预见的：

这些孩子痛恨自己——深深地痛恨自己，他们的父母对待他们就像对待小物件、奖杯，奖品一样，家庭就像企业，而不是人类的家，充满了温暖和欢笑，父母无法忍受对方，没有人有工作——但是每个人都很忙，每天，永远都在忙，为了那一大堆钱和其他人争斗，似乎没有人有任何内在的意义、价值或目标感。 

That can true of everyone, of rich and poor — but this was different. Predictable, chronic, systemic, implosive, soul-destroying. I could set my watch to it. Families would blow up. Kids would turn into despairing addicts. Marriages would blow up after months. Grandkids would be disowned. Sibling would be pitted against sibling. Entire families, and lives, would come apart at the seams. In the middle of all this — throbbing, pulsing wounds of grief, rage, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and emptiness. And still, despite all that, that they’d cling to their money like a security blanket, even as it cost them everything that should have mattered more. It was the only thing they seemed to know, understand, or appreciate.

每个人都可能是这样，无论贫富——但他们不同，是可预见的，慢性的，系统性的，内爆性的，摧毁灵魂的，我可以把表调到一个时间，时间一到—— 这个家庭会被炸毁，孩子会变成绝望的瘾君子，婚姻会在几个月后破裂，孙子会被抛弃，兄弟姐妹会隔阂对立，整个家庭和生活分崩离析：悲伤、愤怒、焦虑、沮丧、孤独和空虚的悸动、搏动的创伤——即使如此，他们还是会紧紧抓住他们的钱，就像一条安全绳，即使它让他们失去了一切，失去本应更重要的东西，钱，是他们唯一知道、理解或欣赏的东西。

Getting seriously rich, I soon learned, had a very, very steep price. All the things which really mattered in life: human bonds, a sense of meaning, a higher purpose, and even a sense of inherent self-worth. Which is why I never bothered to worry about it. Now, I don’t mean to give you a preachers’ homily. But I do want to point out that in this life, from what I’ve seen, you can’t have it all. You have wealth, or you can have worthiness — but can you have both? To answer that is also to answer the question: should we hate, vilify, or scorn the rich?

我很快意识到，越来越富的代价非常、非常高昂，所有生活中真正重要的东西都会失去： 人际关系、意义感、更高的目标，甚至是内在的自我价值感，这就是为什么我从来不担心这个问题，我并不是要给你说教或者布道，我想指出的是，在我这一生中，从我所看到的来看，你不可能拥有一切—— 你可以拥有财富，也可以拥有价值，但你能同时拥有两者吗？

回答这个问题也就是回答另外一个问题 : 我们应该憎恨、诋毁或蔑视富人吗 ？ 

Now, it’s obvious to say that a poor person probably isn’t going to be very happy. Let’s dispense therefore with the idea that I’m saying “wealth bad so poverty good!” Far from it. I’m suggesting that maybe there’s an optimal point of wealth for human beings to have — and beyond that, the moral, social, and emotional costs of riches far outweigh the benefits, which are nonexistent to begin with, because you can’t spend that much anyways, nor can you take it with you. But we don’t think about this in America, do we? We lionize wealth — it symbolizes all our deepest value: selfishness, greed, individualism, superiority. And yet that can only be because we are fragile, feeling little and inferior, deep inside. I’ll come back to all that.

很明显，一个穷人可能不会很快乐，因此，让我们打消说 "财富不好，贫穷好！"的想法，事实远不是这么简单，我认为也许人类的财富有一个最佳点，超过了这个点，财富带来的道德、社会和情感成本远远超过了其本来就不存在的利益，因为你无论如何也花不了那么多钱，也带不走，但在美国，我们不考虑这些，不是吗？我们将财富狮子化，我们崇拜财富——它象征着我们所有最深层的价值：自私、贪婪、个人主义、优越感，然而这只能是因为我们内心深处脆弱，感到渺小和自卑——这些我们以后再谈。

You need science, probably. Very well. As people get richer, they lose their empathy, wisdom, compassion, and so forth. Whatever positive attribute it is that you want to study, it seems that the more wealth you amass, the less of it you will have. But we shouldn’t need science to tell us this. Aeschylus told us this story millennia ago — and so did Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Sartre.

你可能需要科学，随着人们变得越来越富有，他们失去了同理心、智慧、同情心等等，无论你想研究出什么积极的属性，似乎你积累的财富越多，你就会拥有的就越少，但是我们不需要科学来告诉我们这些，埃斯库罗斯几千年前就告诉了我们，还有菲茨杰拉德、斯坦贝克和萨特。

One of the truest differences between Europe and America is also an almost invisible one. In America, the rich are lionized, adulated, and worshipped. There’s something like a bizarro aristocracy of the oligarchs, and Americans curtsy and bow politely, like servile things, before a rich person. Before Donald Trump was President, a nation admired him — weirdly — as a kind of modern-day hero. Americans, weirdly, unique among nations, equate wealth with all the great virtues: intelligence, courage, sophistication, wisdom, creativity, compassion. If you’re rich, you must be as smart as Stephen Hawking, as spiritually advanced as the Dalai Lama, and as wise as Aristotle. They have really bought into the myth that a wealthy person is a better person. Is that true?

欧洲和美国之间最真实的区别之一也是一个几乎看不见的区别是，在美国，富人被狮子化，受到崇拜，类似于寡头政治集团的怪异贵族，美国人在有钱人面前，会像奴仆一样，礼貌地屈膝鞠躬。

在唐纳德特朗普当总统之前，这个国家崇拜他，奇怪地把他视为某种现代英雄，美国人怪异地在各国中独树一帜，把财富等同于所有伟大的美德：聪明、勇气、老练、智慧、创造力、同情心，如果你很富有，你一定像斯蒂芬 · 霍金一样聪明，像亚里士多德一样智慧，他们真的相信富人是更好的人这个神话，但这是真的吗？ 

But in Europe, to be rich carries with it a faint whiff of distaste, of derision, of scorn. Americans think they prize humility — but it’s European prime ministers who cycle to work. Which is better for a society? Let me answer that backwards.

Imagine I gave you ten million dollars. If you were smart, you’d buy a little villa in France, retire, never check the internet again, and tend to your puppies, grandkids, and garden. But — and here’s the problem and the key — this never seems to happen. I’ve known many, many rich people. And the moment that they have ten million, something odd seems to happen. It needs to turn into a hundred. And the moment it turns into a hundred, it needs to turn into a billion.

而在欧洲，说你富有就带着一股淡淡的厌恶、嘲笑、蔑视的味道，美国人认为他们崇尚谦逊——但骑车上班的是欧洲首相。

哪种方式对一个社会更好？我们倒着来回答这个问题。

想象一下，我给了你一千万美元，如果你够聪明的话，你应该去法国买一栋小别墅，退休，不上网，不争论，照顾好你的小狗、孙子，打理好花园，但问题和关键在于，这种情况似乎从未发生过，我认识很多很多有钱人，当他们拥有一千万的那一刻，奇怪的事情就发生了：一千万它要变成一个亿，一个亿的时候，它要变成十个亿。

In other words, as we get rich, a great and fatal moral perversion seems to occur. Virtue seems to become vice. Something snaps deep down in the human soul. Greed, avarice, covetousness, pride, cruelty — all of these seem to replace humility, gentleness, kindness, wisdom, and truth. You don’t have to look very far to see it. Why is Jeff Bezos shooting rockets into space instead of funding college for every kid in America? Why are the American mega-rich building something like a theofascist kleptocracy instead of funding school and healthcare for every child on the planet?

换句话说，随着我们变得富有，一个巨大而致命的道德扭曲似乎发生了，美德似乎变成了罪恶，有些东西在人类灵魂深处啪啪作响：贪念、贪婪、妄羡、骄傲、残忍，这些似乎都取代了谦逊、温柔、善良、智慧和真理，你不需要看很远就能看到它。

为什么杰夫贝佐斯要把火箭射向太空，而不是资助美国每个孩子上大学？为什么美国的超级富豪们要建立一个类似于法西斯国家的窃国政府，而不是为地球上每个孩子的学校和医疗提供资金？

“Why should the rich help anyone else?!” you cry. The answer is very simple. What we really are after through riches — through anything at all — is moral sentiments. Happiness is the experience of one’s own moral goodness. Meaning is the experience that one is a moral significance to others. Fulfillment is the realization of one’s moral possibilities. Do you see how that works? Can money buy you these things?

“富人凭什么一定要帮助别人? !”你哭喊着，答案很简单，我们通过财富——通过任何方式——真正追求的是道德情操，幸福是一个人对自己道德善良的体验，意义是一个人对他人具有道德意义的体验，履行是一个人道德可能性的实现，你明白是怎么一回事了吗？钱能买到这些东西吗？

You need a sense that your life has really counted. “This person has given me something! They educated me, they taught me, they encouraged me, they lifted me up when I had fallen!” Now you have a sense of meaning. But it has come only through moral significance — that you have really cultivated a life that is not your own, and thus, what you have done has mattered.

你需要一种感觉，需要让你的生命真的有意义。

" 这些人给了我一些东西! 他们教育了我，教导了我，鼓励了我，他们在我跌倒的时候把我扶了起来! "—— 现在你有了一种意义感，但只有通过道德意义，你才真正培养了你自己的生活，因此，你所做的一切才真有意义。

Now we can answer the question, can’t we? Indeed, the mega-rich should be doing things with their lives that carry great and enduring moral weight. But they are not. That’s because getting rich has cost them something priceless: their moral consciences. Hence, happiness, meaning, and fulfillment seem to elude them. That’s why the ten million has to turn into a hundred, and then a billion. It’s why you never see someone living out the fantasy of retiring to that villa in France when they’ve made a few million.

现在我们可以回答这个问题了吧？的确，超级富豪们应该用自己的生命做一些具有巨大而持久的、有道德意义的事情，但他们没有。

那是因为致富让他们失去了一些无价之宝：他们的道德良知，因此，幸福、意义和成就感与他们无缘，这就是为什么一千万要变成一亿，然后是十亿，这也是为什么你永远不会看到有人在赚了几百万的时候选择退休去法国的别墅。

What happens instead? Because they’ve lost their moral bearings, virtue has become vice. Avarice, greed, cruelty, selfishness. All these things are soon turned on the very people that they love. Wives are discarded, husbands thrown away. Kids are treated like either little princes or paupers. And worst of all, no inherent sense of self-worth, has ever developed, because the illusion has been created that money can gave it to you.

会发生什么呢? 因为他们失去了道德观念，美德变成了邪恶，贪念、贪婪、，残忍，自私，这一切很快就会发生在他们所爱的人身上。妻子被抛弃，丈夫被抛弃，孩子们不是被当作小王子就是被当作乞丐，最糟糕的是，人们从来没有产生过内在的自我价值感，因为人们创造了一种错觉，认为金钱可以把它给你。

A person with a sense of inherent self worth knows this much. Money cannot give you what only morality can. You cannot buy happiness, meaning, and fulfillment. You must earn them, with actions which carry human weight. Those which lift up lives. The reward for the actor is the experience of moral goodness, moral significance, and moral growth, which we call happiness, meaning, and fulfillment.

一个有内在自我价值感的人，都知道这个道理，有些东西钱不能给你只有道德才能给你，幸福、意义和满足感是买不到的，你必须用行动来赢得它们，那些提升生命的行为人得到的回报是对道德之善、道德意义和道德成长的体验，我们称之为幸福、意义和满足。

But if you have been living all along under the delusion that the hole in your soul, that inherent lack of self-worth, self-coherence, selfhood, can be filled up with money and obxts — and you make ten million — that ten will have to grow, grow, grow — and still you will never be filled up inside. You need to feel big because you feel little. But the little part of you needs only to grow into something beautiful and true, all the more so because it is delicate — not something all-powerful and possessing.

但是，如果你一直生活在一种错觉之下，认为你灵魂中的那个洞，那种内在的自我价值、自我凝聚、自我身份的缺失，可以用金钱和物品来填补—— 你赚了一千万，那一千万就要增长、增长、增长——那你的内心还是永远不会被填满。

你需要感觉自己很大，因为你觉得自己很小，但你小的那一部分只需要成长为美丽而真实的东西，它是精致的，而不是全能的、占有的。

Remember Americans and Europeans? Americans have internalized the values of capitalism — greed, selfishness, and so on. But they are not rich, and they will never be rich. These values serve only as kind of false self, where a true one should be. So they’re left in a haze: is greed good? Or is it bad? Is using people OK? Or is it wrong? Capitalism has cheated them of a sense of intrinsic self-worth — which also means you can answer the questions above. They think that you’re not a worthy person unless you’re wealthy. But they don’t really know that the opposite isn’t true. You can be as wealthy as Croesus, and still never think of yourself as worthy.

还记得美国人和欧洲人吗？美国人已经内化了资本主义的价值观——贪婪、自私等等，但他们并不富有，也永远不会富有，这些价值观只作为一种虚假的自我，真正的自我应该在哪里？于是他们陷入了迷茫：贪婪是好事吗？还是很糟糕？利用别人可以吗？或者这是错误的？资本主义剥夺了他们内在的自我价值感——这也意味着你可以回答上面的问题了，他们认为，除非你很有钱，否则你就不是一个有价值的人，但他们并不知道，事实并非如此，你可以像克里萨斯王（注：吕底亚国最后一位国王，大富豪）一样富有，但仍然永远不会认为自己是有价值的人。

Europe is more successful precisely because by scorning the rich, it has made getting rich something not to proud of, to be a little ashamed of. It is not a substitute for living a genuinely worthy life, whether one of action, of letters, of ideas, or of discovery. It is barely a life at all, many Europeans would probably tell you, to get rich. Hence, wealth itself is something which is met with derision and scorn. Very different norms emerged — Americans idolize riches, and Europeans disdain them.

But that norm made Europe a much healthier and happier place, too. It meant that Europeans invested in each other, with great public goods, instead of devoted their lives to the futile goal of individual riches. It made Europe a place with less distance between the rich and the middle, so that distrust never grew as sharply as in America. And it made Europe a more humane and fulfilling place, too — because the capitalist values of greed, cruelty, domination, and selfishness were never accepted as decent and sensible things to devote a life to.

欧洲之所以比较成功，正是因为蔑视富人，它把有钱变成了一件不值得骄傲、有点羞耻的事情，它不能代替真正有价值的生活，不管是行动、信件、思想还是发现，很多欧洲人可能会告诉你，致富，只能勉强算得上是一种生活，财富本身就是一种受到嘲笑和蔑视的东西，于是两个地方出现了截然不同的规范——美国人把财富当作偶像崇拜，欧洲人则不屑一顾鄙视财富。

但这种规范让欧洲也变得更健康、更快乐，它意味着欧洲人互相投资，提供伟大的公共产品，而不是把生命投入到个人财富的徒劳目标上，它使欧洲成为一个富人和中产阶级之间距离较小的地方，因此不信任感从未像美国那样急剧增长，而且它也使欧洲成为一个更人性化和更有成就感的地方——因为贪婪、残酷、统治和自私的资本主义价值观，从未被接受为可以为之奉献一生的体面和明智的事物。

So. I don’t hate the rich. But I don’t worship them, like Americans do, either. “What book is Bill Gates recommending?! LOL, what? A rich man who is only a rich man is no smarter than a poor man — in the ways that count, he is all the more a fool. Because he doesn’t seem to know that wealth has its own price — one’s moral conscience. No one escapes the price they must pay time and death, and great wealth, which is only ever an expression of greed and egotism, is a futile search for grandiosity and omnipotence where life, in all its fragility and delicacy should be. It corrodes the character of the bearer, and leaves a hole where a self might have been. A poor man might be a wretch — but a rich man who has never become anything more is a moral fool.

我不讨厌富人，但我不像美国人那样崇拜他们。

比尔 · 盖茨推荐什么书? ！LOL，富人只是富有，并不比穷人聪明——从某种意义上说，富人更像一个傻瓜，因为他似乎不知道财富是有自己的代价的：道德良知，没有人能够逃脱必须付出时间和死亡的代价，巨大的财富，永远只是贪婪和利己主义的表现，是对宏大和全能的徒劳的追求，而生命，尽管脆弱，但精致，财富腐蚀了承载者的品格，并在自我可能存在的地方留下了一个空洞。

穷人也许是个可怜虫，但一个从未有所得的富人在道德上是个傻瓜。

I pity the rich — because I’ve seen happy people, and I’ve seen rich people, but I’ve never seen both. But the same is true for societies, too. Rich societies who don’t set norms and values to laugh at, belittle, due, and scorn the very pursuit of wealth, so they can aspire to higher and better things, soon become just like those rich families I grew up among. Places destroyed from the inside, by their egotism and appetites.

我同情富人——因为我见过幸福的人，也见过有钱的人，但我从未见过两者皆有的人，社会也是如此，一个富裕的社会倘若不设定规范和价值观来嘲笑、贬低、蔑视对财富的追求，从而追求更高更好的东西，很快就会变得像我成长的那些富裕家庭一样，被他们的利己主义和欲望从内部摧毁。

And should you doubt me, take a good, long, hard look at America — the richest nation history ever saw, by a very long way. But also something like the most inhumane, unhappy, lonely, desperate, meaningless, empty, atomized, and nihilistic. And yet also the most greedy, proud, avaricious, selfish, usurious, gluttonous, and wrathful. Wealth costs you, my friends. It costs you your better self. And America is history’s truest example yet.

如果你怀疑我，那就好好地、长时间地、认真地审视一下美国——这个有史以来最富有的，但同时也是最不人道、最不快乐、最孤独、最绝望、最无意义、最空虚、最原子化、最虚无主义的国家，最贪婪，骄傲，自私和愤怒的国家。

朋友们，财富会让你们付出代价，它让你失去了更好的自我—— 美国就是历史上最真实的例子。

评论翻译

Renee Parrinello

Is it because Europe endured two devastating world wars that were created by rich aristocrats?

是因为欧洲经历了两次由富有的贵族制造的毁灭性的世界大战吗? 

Chris Harris

Very probably!

很有可能！ 

John Williams

I am inclined to express how much I detest the super rich but it would be construed as envy. Anyhow, their assets must be redistributed in any conceivable manner.

我倾向于表达我对超级富豪的憎恶，但这会被理解为嫉妒，无论如何，他们的资产必须以任何可能的方式重新分配。

Chrissie Powers

Me too. I detest them and pity them, just like author said. They have nothing left to dream about, nothing left to live for. Excessive wealth is as dangerous to the soul as is poverty.

我也是。我讨厌他们，可怜他们，就像作者说的，他们已经没有梦想，没有生活的目标，过度的财富对心灵来说和贫穷一样危险。

Brian Meadows

I’m suggesting that maybe there’s an optimal point of wealth for human beings to have — and beyond that, the moral, social, and emotional costs of riches far outweigh the benefits, whic...

Actually a study done some years ago bears that out: once a family has enough to be reasonably comfortable, is protected from medical catastrophe, can educate the children and maybe go on OK vacations twice a year, the satisfaction more money gives drops like a rock down a cliff!

I don't know whether you've read this article to which I'm providing a lix but if you haven't, I think you'll find it most helpful!

“我认为也许人类的财富有一个最佳点，超过了这个点，财富带来的道德、社会和情感成本远远超过了其本来就不存在的利益，因为你无论如何也花不了那么多钱，也带不走......”

事实上，几年前的一项研究证实了这一点：一旦一个家庭有足够的钱维持相当舒适的生活，免受疾病灾难的伤害，可以教育孩子，也许一年可以度过两次还不错的假期，之后更多的钱带来的满足感就像岩石从悬崖上掉下来一样。

我不知道你是否读过这篇文章，如果你没看过，我给个链接，我想你会发现它很有帮助 ! 

Call me what you’d like

People have been idolizing kings, queens and nobleman long before America even existed, so while i agree with some of what has been said about the folly of being rich, to make this is an American thing is pure nonsense.

早在美国存在之前，人们就已经崇拜国王、女王和贵族了，所以虽然我同意一些关于有钱是愚蠢的说法，但把这变成美国独有的就纯粹是一派胡言了。

Vernon Nickerson

America is so massively and openly intoxicated now because of the idea of “super/ uber wealth. They merely have to see the “ images” of luxurious things to surrender even co templation/ reflection or reading others different points of view. Yet to be fully heard and seen can over time in unconditionally loving communities awaken them from their drunkenness and forgetfulness of themselves amd others.

美国现在是如此大规模和公开地陶醉于“超级富有”的想法，他们只需看到奢华的 "图像"，就会投降，甚至放弃共同模板/反思或了解他人的不同观点，然而，随着时间的推移，在无条件的爱的社会中被充分听到和看到，可以唤醒他们从沉醉和对自己和他人的遗忘中醒来。

Scott S. Bateman

I don't know why you think Americans idolize the super rich. I haven't met anyone in my entire life who thinks that way. Quite the opposite.

我不知道你为什么认为美国人崇拜超级富豪，恰恰相反，我这辈子还没遇到过这么想的人。

joan anthony

Go to Facebook and post something true but negative about Bill Gates. You will receive a massive dogpile. You will be called envious. Told that you don't give what he does to charity (and questioning the real nature of his charity will just be proof of your envy) and that you are too stupid to understand his genius.

You will receive the same even if you comment about someone as obviously odious as Bezos or Musk.

去脸书上发点关于比尔盖茨的真实但负面的东西，大批的狗仔就过来骂你，骂你嫉妒，骂你不像他那样捐款给慈善事业（质疑他慈善事业的真实性只会证明你的羡慕 ），骂你太蠢，不懂他的天才。

即使你评论像贝佐斯或马斯克这样明显可恶的人，你也会收到同样的评论。

Janay Wright

Thank you so much for your insightful commentary. You are so right. The U.S. has internalized the values of capitalism and the results have been disastrous.

非常感谢您的深刻评论，你说得太对了，美国已经内化了资本主义的价值，其结果是灾难性的。