Modern Kings And Peasants

In our traditional stories, the King is almost always depicted as a good man who has his people's interests in mind, he is maybe a little bit naive, but ultimately benevolent. It's almost never a queen, and if it is, she's usually evil; only princesses are good in their faithful subservience to their mighty fathers, and their sole responsibility is to wait and hope for a good and handsome prince to ask for her hand in matrimony.

Yes, the patriarchy is real and the sex of the glass ceiling is male. And no, kings are not benevolent, don't care about "their" peoples and are certainly not naive; they make use of the knowledge and expertise combined in an entire subservient class of advisers, lawyers and currently even the lawmakers, and use that knowledge and the laws to not change anything, and they use their sizable platforms to maintain the people's belief in the status quo that serves them so well. The aforementioned stories are a significant part of their strategy and is willfully repeated over and over again, not just in fiction, but in documentaries and on the news, where today's kings, the billionaires who own the means of production, are depicted as the benevolent class who donate significant parts of their wealth to the charities of their choice.

That's all bogus of course, quite literally a bunch of fairy-tales. The reality brought about by our overarching belief in the for profit system that created our modern kings, is not so much a fairy-tale but a nightmare. A couple of years ago the yearly Oxfam report on the world's wealth distribution concluded that the world's 62 wealthiest individuals owned more wealth than the bottom half of the world's population; that's 62 people owning more than 3.5 billion people. There's no rational, religious or moral argument anyone can make to defend that reality; the problem is that no one has to, because we believe so deeply in the stories we tell each other. We never got rid of the king, and we're fine with it. Here are some more ways to visualize and make real the gross distribution on wealth, straight from Oxfam's latest 2020 report called "Time to Care", that also shows how sexism and patriarchy are strong factors in said distribution:

1. The richest 1% in the world have more than double the wealth of 6.9 billion people

The world's richest 1% have more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people.

Among that 1% are the world’s 2,153 billionaires, who in 2019 had more wealth than 4.6 billion people.

Oxfam has calculated that to amass even a fifth of the average fortune of the world’s five richest billionaires, you would need to have saved $10,000 a day since the building of the pyramids in Egypt.

In reality, almost half the world’s population lives on less than $5.50 a day, according to World Bank estimates.

2. The world’s richest 22 men have more money than all the women in Africa

The combined wealth of the world's 22 richest men is more than the wealth of all the women in Africa.

And Africa is a big continent.

Oxfam has worked out that if the world’s two richest men sat on their wealth piled up in $100 bills, they’d be in outer space.

Compare that to middle-class people in rich countries, who would be sitting at chair height. The vast majority of people would be sitting on the floor.

3. Women and girls put in 12.5 billion hours of unpaid work every day

From fetching firewood and water, so they can clean and cook for the male breadwinner, to looking after children and the elderly, women often bear the burden of essential unpaid work, says Oxfam.

4. Women’s unpaid care work has a monetary value of $10.8 trillion a year

The monetary value of unpaid care work globally for women aged 15 and over is at least $10.8 trillion annually - three times the size of the world's tech industry.

5. Taxing an extra 0.5% of the wealth of the richest 1% could help massively

According to Oxfam, if governments were to increase taxation on the wealthiest 1% for the next 10 years, that would be the equivalent to creating 117 million care jobs in education, health and elderly care and other sectors, to close care deficits.
_{source: World Economic Forum}

Follow the link if you're interested in reading the entire article. If the injustice and immorality spawned by our current economic system isn't quite clear yet, look no further than the below linked video in which the behavior of a modern day king is juxtaposed against the reality of the poorest among us during this time of universal need.

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