I was invited to a performance of Les Misérables a month or so ago.
Like many people, I arrived with a vague understanding of the plot, several familiar songs in my head, and a childlike excitement that at some point the French become extremely enthusiastic about barricades.
I also had the commonly-held belief that Les Misérables was set during the French Revolution.
It is not, but this turns out not to matter for the purposes of this essay.
Which is a slightly rude thing to say about one of the most celebrated works of French literature ever written.
But whatever.
What interested me wasn’t the uprising. It was the years beforehand. Because history has a habit of glossing over those years.
We remember the good bits: the revolutions. The bayonets, the blood, the barricades.
And we study the boring bits: the series of historically significant events that led to the dramatic end.
But we casually discard the bits where people continued tolerating arrangements that seem more than slightly off when looked at in a text book.
It turns out our tolerance is one of the stranger features of the human condition.
We will tolerate an astonishing amount. And then, apparently suddenly, we don’t.
Which brings me, somewhat unexpectedly, to the world’s first trillionaire.
The headline stopped me in my tracks.
Not because I object to wealth. Personally I would be in favour of more of it. But I’m fairly sure I object to that much of it in one place.
I am just not even sure what it means for a human being to own a trillion dollars. Just quietly, I don’t really know what just a billion dollars looks like either. I know how many zeros each number has, but that’s basically it.
A million dollars still feels like an aspirational amount of money.
A billion dollars feels more like mathematics.
A trillion dollars feels – I don’t know; it feels absurd.
And wrong. Not necessarily evil. But certainly absurd.
The reaction is base instinct, and comes from the same part of the brain that looks at a tree growing through a roof and thinks:
“This probably isn’t supposed to be happening.”
We could argue about whether someone deserves their wealth, or if they have “earned” it, and that might be fun over a couple of beers.
But I think the more interesting question is if a man having a trillion dollars should be an acceptable ambition in a healthy society.
Exceptional wealth allows you to own a larger house and a faster car.
A yacht. A jet. A spacecraft.
A private island. A second private island in case the first island becomes tiresome.
But somewhere in all the consumption and accumulation, we have to confront the moral question: How much is enough?
Is a billion dollars enough?
I’m sure I could find a way to cope.
One man now has an amount 1000 times more than that. One trillion dollars.
Have we reached the point where we aren’t talking about the value of a man any more, but about what society values?
And that, I suspect, is why the headline lingered.
Because wealth and power have always accumulated, but it starts getting awkward when the justification feels like misdirection.
When enough people start to ask “does this feel right to you?” and when the answers feel like someone, somewhere is starting to take the piss.
That’s when things start to feel decidedly French.
There are plenty of examples of societies discovering the limit of what was tolerable.
The difficulty is that the limit is rarely published in advance.
While we are living through it, we only get a feeling. A suspicion.
A trillion dollars.
And the thought:
“This probably isn’t supposed to be happening.”
Anyway.
Do you hear the people sing?