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In reply to the discussion: Costco vs. Walmart - Lessons from investing in employees [View all]tblue37
(66,148 posts)The villain is a super wealthy guy (played by Robert Vaughan) who has blackmailed a low-level employee who happens also to be a computer genius (played by Richie Pryor) into helping him with his evil schemes. I dont remember the plot details, but Mr. Rich SOB forces the Richie Pryor character to help him engineer a total rip-off of the worlds wealth, or something like thatyou know, the typical over-the-top evil mastermind plot.
Anyway, at one point the Richie Pryor character asks Mr. Rich SOB why? He points out that the rich guy already has more wealth than anyone else in the world and couldnt possibly spend it all no matter how long he lived. The villain utters this line, which has stayed with me all these years: It is not enough that I win; everyone else must lose.
I think that is at the bottom of a lot of the evil the super wealthy and super powerful do. They want to see the peasants desperately scraping and scrambling to barely surviveand they delight in watching the little people fight each other, even to the death, for the few crumbs that fall from the tables of the wealthy.
That need to watch others suffer and scrape is far more important than profit to such people. (Think about how much of a loss Murdoch and Clear Channel are willing to suffer to keep FOX News and Limbaugh, respectively, on the air despite advertising losses.)
They might not even be conscious of that vicious need in themselves. No doubt they twist their own perception of reality (we all know how easily they do that) to convince themselves that they are actually protecting their profit margins and that they really, really need to do those evil things to protect their wealth and their business success. Most of them probably also convince themselves that they are not being selfish, but actually going the extra mile to protect liberty and the rights of the individual.
But what they are really doing is feeding their Jabba the Hutt-like need to watch others tremble, suffer, and be destroyed so that they can feel supreme in their own power and control.
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