In my mind's eye, I picture our society plagued by black holes, voids which devour wealth, energy, labour endlessly.
For each black hole, a billionaire.
I'll elaborate; picture McDonalds, a highly profitable enterprise creating food at an incredibly low price due to its ecological footprint (destruction of rainforest for arable land being a notable example) this profitability is at the expense of local communities, paying terrible wages, creating stress, poor nutrition, taking wealth endlessly and giving nothing back.
And I mean nothing, the ownership of all large corporations is incredibly convoluted and exists to obfuscate profits, mechanisation such as reinvoicing services and obscure fiscal laws make the corruption of the first world an entirely legal affair.
There is no limit to the demands of profitability and at a point, the most logical step for an organization is corporate lobbying to secure a monopoly, a day comes for every corporation where the most logical step for maximizing profit is to circumnavigate taxes, and the combined corporate will dominates the legal system, in fact the law is influenced very little by the will of the people, lobbying is lawmaking, laws are made by lobbying, this is corporate interest, any question to this is to question “The national interest”.
And for every brand you can recognise, every corporation in the public sphere a black hole exists, contributing nothing, endlessly hungry. And it is this endless hunger this drive for profit, the necessity of not one, but two 300 foot long yachts in the Carribean that has burn society out, driven us to the edge of insanity.
One of my work colleges loves cars, and I always remember him watching a video of the latest greatest hypercar being released, maybe a $3 million Bugatti or similar, and a statistic given in this youtube video was that the average purchaser of this car already owns 84 other supercars.
It is simply the case that no number will ever be great enough, no cost to society too great, to limit the desire to consume more, and this drive has consumed us all.