Affluenza…what is it? Although it sounds a lot like “influenza,” affluenza (a portmanteau, a word blending the sounds and combining the meaning of two other words such as “affluent” and “influenza”) refers to the disease of affluence. While not a medically-recognized disease, affluenza is known as a “pseudoscientific” malaise affecting rich people.
Wikipedia defines affluenza as a “painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more” or a “quasi-illness caused by guilt for one’s own socio-economic superiority,” but simply put affluenza is an inability to understand the consequences of one’s actions because of financial privilege. Urban dictionary - for example, “Scotty has affluenza and thinks he can shit on people because he has money, and he thinks people actually like him but it’s the $500 a night mountain chalet for free they really want.”
A throwback from South Park: https://youtu.be/bGXV-oMgkWc?si=TaFNAxcsYiKU6l_Z
I remember when I first heard this term in the media, when a rich Texas teenager, Ethan Couch, mowed over four pedestrians/cyclists while drunk and on drugs in 2013, and his legal defense actually obtained testimony from an expert witness psychologist who coined the term as a legal defense - defending Ethan’s actions as “affluenza.” Of course this sparked all sorts of outrage, especially among the victims’ families and the proletariat across the country who work, pay taxes and do right and obey the laws.
There is a great divide in this country and people are losing their houses (home equity loans will be the final demise or similar to the 2008 bubble because people will continue to borrow against their equity while their home values adjust and eventually they will be upside on their loan). How many foreclosures were there in Colorado and Florida in 2022? Google it!
It’s the haves and the have-nots and it was all by design to make us hate each other. We are weaker when we are not United! We are entering the caste system of India where you will have the hyper rich and then the poor and maybe a few academics sprinkled in between. The middle class will completely disappear in the next few decades. Again, by design, Machiavelli said the best way to control the masses is to keep them poor, hungry, and dumb (unable to form an independent thought and completely dependent on the government to provide). Don’t turn off the channel yet! You may wish to program this out because you’ve been socially conditioned to read this as hate. It’s not hate and it’s not anger…it’s truth!
Now getting back to the topic at hand…
The reality is that someone who is born with so much wealth and power knows they can get away with just about anything. For instance their father sold jewelry to people who were so lovesick, they would invest three month’s salary in a shiny rock. Don’t get me started on the DeBeers fortune and how they control the supply by hoarding diamonds but making Americans believe they’re rare gems.
Why do rich people think they can do and get away with anything? One reason is because they face a different justice system and know that if you throw enough money at something it’ll eventually go away. The wheels of justice turn very easily for people with money. The best lawyers with the best records work for the private sector for the rich! Newsflash! The privilege has nothing to do with melanin, it’s how stacked your wallet is (or how much credit you have - in other words you owe for just about everything).
I could spend this time going into theory, like when in 2007 Oliver James, a British psychologist hypothesized that the higher rate of mental disorders in this world were directly correlated with excessive wealth-seeking among consumerist nations. Therefore, he deduced affluenza = selfish capitalism.
So the question is, if the economy is booming (or when it was), why are people not becoming happier? Well, the argument is that affluenza leads to “luxury fever” where you just can’t get enough. You get what you think you want and you hit that one dopamine fix, but then you just can’t stop and always need more to keep filling that empty void. The truth is there is no end to the lust and greed for more and more. Also, the pressures placed upon oneself to always be luxury seeking ultimately lead to the malaise of sickness, alienation, and addiction to drugs, alcohol and/or sex to attempt to hit the dopamine void created from chronic pleasure seeking.
The term affluenza can refer to rich kids who are so spoiled that they’ve eventually lost all empathy for any other human being. Therefore the defense has been made in court that the kids were so rich and sheltered from the world and so privileged that they had absolutely no idea the ramifications of how truly horrible their actions were to other people affected.
I posted a picture earlier in this article. This is me in front of the Menendez home, a murder mansion in Beverly Hills. For my readers perhaps too young to recall this horrific event, Kyle and Lyle Menendez brutally murdered their parents in cold blood at close range with shot guns while they slept. And then the two brothers blamed it on intruders while lavishly spent the money on Jeeps, Rolexes, tennis lessons, and lavish vacations. Obviously it sparked suspicion but nobody thought anything about it. Until that is, one of the brothers felt such guilt and remorse he sought therapy, and revealed he had gone along with his brother to murder their parents and take their wealth.
The therapist, in turn, told his mistress, who then got disgruntled with the therapist and told the press. Later the sons claimed sexual abuse and pulled out whatever they could. When you get caught, it’s just lies on top of lies with these people. But they could have killed them in so many different undetectable ways! Arsenic or poisoning, for example. But they dispatched their parents in the most brutal, horrific way possible AND it was cowardly, while they slept in their bed. They now have life in prison, and are getting their shit pushed in by Big Leroy. Sometimes money will backfire on you especially if a jury of your peers resents or despises people with affluenza.
No matter how you roll the dice, you will always reap what you sow. Don’t take shade from trees that don’t produce fruit, and people will always water what matters to them. A Biblical reference goes something like this, and I think it was from Sermon on the Mount, (and I’m paraphrasing) - where you lay your riches, there lies the desires of your heart.
Love,
Kimmie
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