Pieter Claesz:
Still Life
(1625)

"As Mark Twain long ago insisted,
Humans are the only animals that blush, or need to."

Prosperity neither appreciates nor requires great wealth. Beyond some uncertain point, wealth becomes more of a burden than an asset, what’s popularly referred to as “An Embarrassment” of riches. This classification includes Scrooge McDuck’s gold coin-filled swimming pool and Midas’ freshly gilded daughter. Any overt display of plenty might quietly qualify: The tacky golden toilet. The personal Jumbo jet. The twelve-car garage. These embarrass because they seem to deflect otherwise perfectly decent assets out of useful circulation. In this world, too often inhibited by absences, taking useful assets out of circulation seems like an extreme example of The Sin of Self-Importance, the most easily avoidable sin on the books. These suggest some lack of discipline, a deeply-rooted emotional problem, perhaps an untreated mommy fixation, something no amount of wealth or show could ever help anyone recover from. An illness.

I suspect that the wealthiest somehow lose their essential gag reflex. They seem to engage in the most personally indicting activities without self-consciousness. We quite literally shudder when we encounter another reckless billionaire publicly displaying their mommy issues with another essentially worthless super yacht purchased for the price of curing cancer. There might be no understandable answer to any reasonable question after why that specific excess seemed so necessary. Where does one’s sacred responsibility go so far astray, and why? The casual indifference replying seems somehow worse than any overt arrogance, for it discloses a disconnection to civilization that seems a long step beyond merely astounding. I understand that anyone might feel free to do whatever they please, but what sort of human being finds pleasure being such a freaking Embarrassment to themselves? One wonders.

I try hard not to become jealous of the vast resources some control. I mollify my worst selves by acknowledging that such possessions possess their possessor most, twisting perspective and, perhaps, even imperiling their soul. I can see that I have my own plenty, perhaps more than I might need. It seems a small sin to maintain such a modest cushion in case some future catastrophe visits. That’s insurance rather than spectacle. I mollify myself by repeating a mantra explicitly meant to mollify me. I command no great wealth. I even insist that if I became rich, I’d give most of that wealth away, though this amounts to a particularly pernicious form of paradoxical thinking. The benevolent rich supposedly give away their great wealth, thereby rendering themselves no longer wealthy, and thereby thereafter incapable of giving away any wealth for the benefit of anybody, even themselves. When might the curse turn into a mere blessing again, and how does the former wealthy maintain their lifestyle after they’ve given away their defining identity? Who do they become after they’re no longer an Embarrassment to themselves and humanity? Can they purchase redemption in anybody’s eyes, especially their own?

Those who exhibit Embarrassments of wealth seem incapable of experiencing the sorts of Embarrassment others feel when observing them. They seem to be on display, as blithely unaware of their audience as their audience might be to how it feels to be that wealthy. We audience members might mostly make up our experience, relying on our own unacknowledged impure projections to fill in the parts of the story we would otherwise never relate to successfully. We might just as well catalog our resulting stories under Fiction, even though they might have been loosely based upon what sure seemed to be somebody’s experience. Our incumbent engages in insider trading. This takes little skin off anybody’s nose. Of course he cheats his supporters. He might be incapable of not cheating, for that just seems to have always been his nature. Am I supposed to feel surprised that this leopard has spots, that the incontinent shits his pants in public? He never seemed self-aware enough to appear any different. Yes, he’s an Embarrassment, but not of riches. He seems the poorest incumbent in the history of that once-rich office.

I might set aside whatever pride I induce in myself when I criticize, for my critiques hardly nurture anybody’s soul. I too easily complain about others’ Embarrassments of riches, but only rarely criticize my own. I’m probably at least as unaware of my wealth as the least of our billionaires, for this seems an inescapable element of the much-vaunted human condition. I embarrass myself but, gratefully, I mostly remain unaware of my trespasses against myself and my own inescapably narrow interests. I seem no more universally giving than the best of our billionaire class, and just being a billionaire seems like an unconscionable sin these days. We each engage in our own personal original sin, and only those who fancy they have tamed theirs seem qualified to throw any stones at those who haven’t. But then, throwing such stones also seems like an unconscionable sin, and has been since just after Old Testament times. As Mark Twain long ago insisted, humans are the only animals that blush, or need to.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz