When Will We Learn the Virtue of Enough?
From Congress to Wall Street to Silicon Valley...
If you’ve been following Ken Klippenstein’s work here on Substack, you’ve seen his series about our gerontocracy in Congress. This Congress is among the oldest in history, especially the leadership, and it has resulted in injuries and embarrassments—a few of which are shown in the photos above. You may have also seen the recent story about current Congresswoman Kay Granger, 81, who was found with dementia in a nursing home after quietly slinking away from the Capitol six months ago.
And then there’s the matter of Joe Biden, whose empty-headed performance in his first and only debate against Donald Trump last year was emblematic of this whole issue. As Ellie Anderson points out, “The two oldest living presidents are now the incumbent president and the president elect.”
What’s going on?
Part of the problem is that too many people in Congress refuse to pass the baton to the next generation. They refuse to admit when enough is enough. Retiring is for other people. Democrats need Nancy Pelosi to win elections! Republicans need Mitch McConnell to get stuff done! And yet Pelosi has not been winning elections and McConnell has not got stuff done.
It’s not just Congress. America’s rich and powerful almost uniformly lack the capacity to practice the virtue of enough. Wall Street and Silicon Valley fixate on quarterly returns at all costs, regardless of environmental and societal destruction. Jeff Bezos flaunts his $500 million properties, Mark Zuckerberg flaunts his $900k watch, Elon Musk flaunts his $277 million investment in politics (which led to a $200 billion post-election return). Bill Gates flaunts his philanthropy while somehow managing to also keep himself on the world’s “top ten richest people list” year after year. (Gotta stay in that sweet spot between giving just enough to help the personal brand without giving too much to hurt the personal brand!) They all have more money than they could possibly spend in several lifetimes. Like our career politicians in Congress, they have no sense of enough.
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I’m reminded of a haunting scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Spirited Away.
A creature named No Face enters a bathhouse and starts offering gold to the guests. As the guests grab the gold, wide-eyed with greed, No Face gobbles them up, growing larger and more ferocious with each bite. He lunges down the hallway with his spindly legs, gulping anyone who takes his gold.
And then No Face comes to Chihiro, the story’s main character, who is looking for a way to turn her parents back from a spell that changed them into pigs after they snarfed down a feast that didn’t belong to them. When No Face offers Chihiro overflowing handfuls of gold, she shakes her head and refuses to take it, saying, “You can't give me what I want.”
“You can’t give me what I want.”
It’s a scene that stands out to me in part because the message feels foreign to the American mind—the virtue of refusing to take more than you need. The virtue of enough.
In so many ways, we live in an era of abundance. We have enough food to feed the world. We have the capacity to create shelter for everyone. We could offer basic healthcare to all, such that most people could live long, happy lives.
In short, we’ve already achieved the potential for paradise. Eden is a few feet away!
But a few feet away isn’t here.
I’m not making some ageist argument—that the elderly have no place in society. Nor am I spouting a blind screed against the wealthy. What I’m saying is that America must learn how to celebrate people who know what “enough” is—people who can relinquish the insane drive to always be at the center of attention, people who know what it means to have sufficient for their needs. We must celebrate the virtue of enough.
What if we were to collectively look at all the surplus that’s being shoved toward us, all the status games and posturing and empty calories, and emphatically say, “You can’t give me what I want”?
Such an important message for our day. Thank you for writing it.