re: #63 Absalom, Absalom, Obdicut

And our low estate taxes continue to make a mockery of the idea of a ‘level playing field’. And kind of incidentally ruin rich kid’s lives, too.

I just finished up some Durkheim work, and I’d forgotten about his stuff on suicide. In Durkheim’s day, he found the highest number of suicides among the wealthiest classes. He identified this sort of suicide as ‘egoistical’ suicide, where there are no natural limits to check you, you know that you’ll never accomplish anything and feel that it’s really yours because of the advantages you started with— there’s no satisfaction to life.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean every rich, unbound person who inherited their wealth kills themselves. But out of the kids of really rich parents I know, only two of them aren’t severely fucked up, and they were the two that were most shielded from privilege.

“Richard Corey”