Resentment against the Rich
Sunday, August 1st, 2010Resentment against the rich, is a kind of social mentality with suspicion and negation towards legality, tax payment and other ethics of the rich people. Resentment against the rich is an objective social phenomenon. In the real society, interest among people is the fundamental problem and the phenomenon of resentment against the rich is not the exception. Resentment against the rich is a very important factory for healthy social development.
According to the general characteristics of human nature, the underlying cause of resentment against the rich is that people have strong desire to possess wealth. From the perspective of social reality, it is very common that most people like and pursue wealth. It is just like that all people like beauty. Some survey also shows that 57.1% people think rich people are sumptuous, 52.7% people think rich people are greedy and 45% people think rich people are septic. However, 92.9% people still want to become rich people. From the perspective of theoretical analysis, resentment against the rich is also the natural elongation of love towards wealth. On one hand, people’s desire is infinite. On the other hand, resource is limited. That means if some people can possess more resource, others can just get less resource. In such circumstance, those people will have bad feelings and they vent the emotion through the resentment against the rich people. On the contrary, if a person has thoroughly given up the desire for wealth, he will not have the resentment against rich people. In addition, the more people love wealth, the more resentment against rich people they will show.
The occurrence of resentment against rich people is not only caused by human nature but also caused by the social system. Uneven economic development and institutional imperfections can lead some unreasonable outcomes including uneven possession of wealth among people, uneven wealth flow among people and disorder means to obtain wealth. The three factors will increase normal people’s resentment against rich people.
Resentment against rich people is a double-edged sword. It can promote pursuit of fair but it also produces many disadvantages. Firstly, rich people do not dare to purchase freely. On one hand, people often want to show off trough consumption. On other hand, some rich people also do not dare to purchase freely because they may suffer from jealousy, robbery, kidnapping or even murdering. If consumption is constrained, both rich people and poor people will not get benefit from the society. Secondly, rich people do dare to invest. Investment can also cause jealousy from others and it may also cause some bad results. However, economic development also needs the investment from rich people. Thirdly, rich people do not dare to engage in charity. Charity is another expression to show wealth and many people do not think charity made by rich people is real. Instead, they think the rich people just strive for reputation and they will not show appreciation towards those rich people. Fourthly, resentment against rich people will make rich people to transfer their money to other countries. Such phenomenon is very common in the modern world.
So how to solve the problem? Maybe human beings itself can not find the way.

