It should come as no surprise that a rallying cry with its origins in the French Revolution is seeing a resurgence in modern-day America. “When the poor have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich,” often attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Geneva, retains a certain resonance today thanks to parallels in the social conditions present in pre-revolutionary France. Much of what we consider modern political and economic thought derives from Rousseau and his Age of Enlightenment contemporaries. Income and Social Inequality aren’t unfamiliar to us today.

Almost all of us, whether we recognize it (or choose to acknowledge it) or not, live in a state of perpetual, low-grade fear. We know–at least deep inside–that everything we have can be taken from us. That we can lose everything, including the false sense of security we shelter ourselves with in our day-to-day lives, is something few of us can afford to ignore. And no, I’m not talking about a natural disaster, a freak accident, or a random act of violence. This isn’t one of those things about which we go through every day thinking, “It can’t happen to me,” while being mostly correct in our assumption.

I’m talking about a layoff, an extended or severe illness, a kidnapping (because it isn’t deportation when you’re an American citizen), or an arrest by a federal agency with no respect for your rights or the concept of Due Process. That last one becomes an even greater fear if you happen to be part of one or more marginalized/vulnerable groups. And the root causes for those fears are only becoming worse and more pronounced.

I’m tempted to argue that the biggest problem is that there’s a whole class of people who have forgotten what it is to be afraid. Over the centuries, they’ve forgotten the lessons of the French and Bolshevik Revolutions. They’ve spent so long believing they’re untouchable that they don’t recognize they’re only untouchable because of a shared reality (and morality) among the rest of us, thinking that they are. We believe the lie, and they perpetuate it.

This isn’t a Republican or Democrat thing, nor is it really a wealthy or poor issue, though wealth is one of the components that enables certain people to begin feeling as if they’re untouchable.

It is possible to be ethical and to accumulate wealth. That’s one thing most of us sincerely agree on, and an issue I have with a small minority of people on the fringes of the left. The assumption that wealth equals predation, cruelty, and exploitation is erroneous. Certain people hear the phrase “eat the rich,” and assume it applies to anyone with wealth above a certain quantity, but that’s not the case.

Professional athletes (by and large) don’t accumulate their wealth through unethical means. They dedicate their lives to the pursuit of goals, often placing themselves at significant risk of injury in the process. For the small minority who can find success in that arena, they can hardly be considered predatory or exploitative in achieving it. Whether we agree that they deserve what they earn for these pursuits is irrelevant. If people are willing to pay to see them display their athletic prowess, then that’s not our place to condemn it.

Musicians, filmmakers, and actors/performers who have managed to overcome the predatory behavior of record labels, film/TV/streaming studios, producers, and large venues to accumulate wealth haven’t done so through any unethical means. They, like all of us, may behave unethically in their personal lives, but their success is not derived from that questionable behavior.

Successful medical specialists, surgeons, and research scientists may accumulate wealth without ever displaying any unethical behavior. It’s not greedy doctors who are increasing the costs of medical care in the United States. Those rising costs can be laid almost squarely on the shoulders of insurance providers who receive as much as 70% of their profit through government subsidies, while raising the operating costs of hospitals by requiring additional layers of bureaucracy for submitting claims and fighting the denial of them.

People have started successful and thriving businesses that provide value or fill a need, while still taking care of their employees and without benefiting from child labor, overseas slave labor, exploitative practices, or price gouging. Some of those business owners manage to become wealthy in the process, depending on how you define “wealthy.”

People can (and do) make wise investments with the finances they have access to, and are consciously involved in where their money is going. Several of these individuals are careful to avoid supporting unethical corporations or ventures, and some of them manage to become wealthy along the way as well.

There is even a small minority of wealthy authors and artists out there in the world, many of whom haven’t behaved in any way that could be considered unethical. I may not be one of them, but they most certainly exist. What they do with the money they’ve earned can certainly be unethical and cruel, but there’s nothing inherently unethical in how they’ve obtained their wealth. Unless they’re stealing from others in the process, whether through direct theft or through the consumption derived from Generative AI, they are simply creating things that other people find beautiful or otherwise worthwhile.

So, it’s wrong to simply assume that “the rich” are the enemy or that they’re somehow morally compromised because they’ve met with success. Many of those people also dedicate resources to charitable organizations, causes important to them, and improving the lives of people who haven’t experienced their good fortune. I’ve known several people who are quick to condemn anyone with wealth and success, but who have done proportionally far less to help other people than some of those wealthy individuals they malign.

This, of course, isn’t to say that people who obtained their wealth through ethical means aren’t subsequently putting that money to use in unethical ways, but it’s disingenuous and reductive to assume most people are like that. Successful people are not a monolith any more than unsuccessful people are.

I fully agree that those who accumulate their wealth through unethical means or use their wealth for unethical purposes should be held accountable. They should be treated as enemies. Simply having wealth, however, does not make someone an enemy, despite what a small number of people will tell you, and despite what fear-mongers who oppose social and economic justice will claim is meant by the people who say, “eat the rich.”

“Eat the rich” is a great slogan. But like all slogans, it’s simple and lacking in nuance. We have to trust the people reciting slogans to understand that they are not comprehensive philosophies, and we need to trust the people hearing and seeing them to comprehend that a call to action needs to be pithy, for it to catch on. The same was true with the rallying cry of “defund the police.” For most people, it wasn’t about dismantling the justice system and getting rid of police, and most people recognized that. It was about bloated police budgets, militarization of law enforcement, and a lack of accountability for those hiding behind the thin blue line.