Jean Louis Forain: In the Wings (1899)

ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
In this backstage view of a Parisian opera house, ballerinas field advances from elegantly dressed male patrons, who approach them in pairs. The stoic dancer in the foreground, chin up and eyes downcast, absorbs the penetrating gaze of one large man while another looms just behind her, so close that his black top hat overlaps with her orange headdress. In 19th-century Paris, male abonnés (season ticket holders) had special access to a back room where they could socialize while watching the ballerinas warm up. Many took advantage of this privilege to sexually exploit the young dancers, who were well aware that their careers depended upon the good favor of this donor class.

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"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

Question sparked by common misconception

Our culture holds at least ten thousand curious convictions. Prominent among these are the ones insisting that wealth, and especially great wealth, imparts a wide variety of superpowers. Most notable among these must be the insistence that the wealthy are probably the smartest bears in every room, when direct evidence of this seems sorely absent. An inverse insistence might gain greater credence if anybody had the gumption to proclaim it. There does, in practice, appear to be a reverse correlation between great wealth and great wisdom, intelligence, and even kindness. I can inadvertently wound only those closest to me, but the Terribly Wealthy can crush many by simply thoughtlessly turning around, for their range of influence spreads much more widely than mine. I can choose not to go out for coffee, with nobody the worse for it, but let a billionaire opt out of their regular purchase, and it could be the death of a business. The very, very wealthy seem preternaturally responsible for many, and so seem required to practice a mandatory Noblesse Oblige.

Unfortunately, not every Terribly Wealthy person received the memo insisting upon this responsibility. It's come into fashion lately for the very, very rich to pretend that they can be self-centered without creating any collateral damage. We now have a cadre of glittering bulls wandering around in democracy's china shops without regard to the inevitable damage they inflict upon their surroundings. They declared themselves best trusted with the wealth of our nation and immediately set about using their self-presumed wisdom to start chopping away at "waste, fraud, and abuse," the three freshest horses of our eventual apocalypse. Of all the people one might select to identify any of these defects, the very, very wealthy might be the least qualified. Their waste was never once obvious to them. Hell, they fly private at exponentially greater cost to our shared environment than any Joe traveling tourist class. They could choose differently, but usually don’t.

Many of the most enormous fortunes resulted directly from some form of fraud, often inflicted on such a scale that entire societies were defenseless against it. And anyone who can blythely tell anybody they're fired knows more about inflicting abuse than any hundred innocents who've been fired, so the Terribly Wealthy seem at best poorly qualified to manage anybody, especially including themselves and their everyday excesses. Thrifty might as well be their mortal enemy. Economy serves as a slur in their vocabulary. Excess might seem like nothing more controversial than just desserts to those born with a silver serving fork in their mouth. Their Ivy League education was secured through legacy admission and a substantial trust fund, rather than exceptional SAT scores. They were never half as smart as they were lucky, or so suggests the least popular conception.

There was never any correlation between wealth and intelligence. The small talk exchanged between the Terribly Wealthy could bore the tits off even the most sympathetic bore. They could afford to purchase anything, but few decide to cure cancer or fund their local hospice center. They prioritize to sustain their position rather than to improve the fate of their fellows. Of course, there are exceptions, made more prominent by their rarity. These people our incumbent has charged with overseeing our government apparently do not believe in government, especially self-governance. They gleefully rob from the poorest to extend to the wealthiest, with themselves prominently standing very near the head of the reception line, feeling smart while looking downright stupid. They seem like welfare emperors, naked and careless, clueless stewards of a wealth beyond their meager understanding.

We might just as well wonder why happiness seems to have successfully eluded the wealthiest man in the world. He'd had his pick of the most beautiful women, each of whom he seems to have had his way with before abandoning them along with his offspring. He consumes more drugs than any five small countries and regularly appears to have already arrived on his much-promoted Mars. He's the clown charged with identifying waste, fraud, and abuse, and somehow managed to spend more money attempting to save money than was ever spent before he started. Such heresy, that our Billionaire class is essentially financially clueless, makes almost perfect sense if we could only slow down long enough to consider that those counting their final few pennies always know precisely how poor or wealthy they are. In contrast, the Terribly Wealthy might have never experienced a single interaction with anything as pedestrian as a penny.

If you want to be satisfied, forget about getting wealthy. If you want to be smart, gain more experience feeling stupid. If you want to be kind, be needy. If you really want to be free, stop looking for anybody else to govern your affairs. Govern yourself.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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