好英语网马斯克和特朗普们的真面目：亿万富翁不是救世主
In recent years, a swelling chorus of Americans has grown critical of the nation’s bajillionaires. But in the extraordinary week gone by, that chorus was drowned out by a far louder and more urgent case against them. It was made by the bajillionaires themselves.
近年，越来越多的美国人开始对这个国家的亿万富翁们心生不满。但是，在刚刚过去这不同寻常的一周里，不满已经被一种更响亮、更急迫的反对声所淹没。这一次，是亿万富翁们自己的功劳。
One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class.
四位最著名的亿万富翁，一个接一个出手，将富人阶层精心培育的慈悲救世主形象砸了个稀巴烂。
亚马逊创始人杰夫·贝佐斯。
It is a commendable sacrifice on their part, because billionaires, remember, exist at our collective pleasure. If enough of us decided to, we could enact labor, tax, antitrust and regulatory policies to make it hard for anyone to amass that much wealth while so many beg for scraps. It is not only the vast political power of billionaires that keeps us keeping them around, it’s also the popular embrace of certain myths — about the generosity, the genius, the renegade spirit, the above-it-ness of billionaires, to name a few.
这是他们在做出令人钦佩的牺牲，因为别忘了，这个群体的去留是由我们集体定夺的。只要我们中有足够的人下定决心，当许多人还在为了些残羹冷炙去乞讨时，我们可以实施劳工、税收、反垄断和监管政策，尽可能减少某一些人能揽聚如此多的财富。我们留着这些亿万富翁，不只是因为他们掌握了巨大的政治权力，也因为大众乐见某种神话的存在——比如亿万富翁的慷慨、才能、反叛精神和超然于世。
As of this writing, Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground, with much of the company’s staff fired or quitting, outages spiking and everyone on my timeline hurrying to tell the app the things they have been meaning to say before it departs for app heaven (or hell?).
本文撰写之时，埃隆·马斯克正在把推特推向毁灭，大批员工被解雇或辞职，服务中断频频，在我的时间线上，人们在对这个应用说一些临别寄语，仿佛它就要去应用天堂（或地狱）了。
In tweeting through one of the most extraordinary corporate meltdowns in history, Mr. Musk has been performing a vital public service: shredding the myth of the billionaire genius.
在这场企业史上数一数二的惊人大崩溃中，马斯克的推文成了一项重要的公益服务：他在粉碎亿万富翁天才的神话。
His particular pretension of benevolence is that his uncontainable genius can solve any challenge. Now he is lavishing his mind and time on electronic money, now on colonizing Mars, now on electric cars and solar panels, now on saving Thai soccer players trapped in a cave, now on liberating speech from its liberal oppressors.
他所特有的善意伪装是，他那天马行空的才华可以解决一切难题。看啊，他在慷慨地把自己的头脑和时间用在电子货币上，在火星殖民上，在电动汽车和太阳能板上，在营救困于洞穴中的泰国足球运动员上，在解放被自由主义迫害势力压制的言论自由上。
Mr. Musk’s genius pose has long been undermined by his actual record, which is defined by claiming credit for what others have built and is shot through with complaints of discrimination, mismanagement and fraud.
马斯克的实际作为一直与他那才华横溢的形象不符，他的作为主要靠的是把他人的成就据为己有，并且始终充斥着涉及歧视、管理不善和欺诈的指责。
But it wasn’t until Mr. Musk took over Twitter that his claim of infinitely transferable genius truly fell apart. That what Mr. Musk has called the global town square can be eviscerated in a time period somewhere between a Scaramucci and a Truss makes one wonder if we should be more skeptical of all the other billionaire geniuses with ideas for our schools, public health systems and politics.
但是直到他接管了推特，他那自称文武昆乱不挡的才华神话才真的开始破灭。一个被马斯克称为全球公共广场的地方可以如此迅速地变成一具空壳，崩溃速度堪比斯卡拉穆奇和特拉斯，这让我们开始想，其他那些对我们的学校、公共卫生系统和政治有许多想法的亿万富翁天才，会不会其实也并不靠谱。
For example, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who this week was doing his part to undermine another pretension of billionaire benevolence: the generosity pose.
比如亚马逊创始人杰夫·贝佐斯，这周他也在不遗余力地粉碎另一个亿万富翁善意伪装：慷慨的姿态。
On Monday, he made a big splash when CNN released an interview in which he announced that he was giving the great bulk of his more than $120 billion fortune away, with a focus on fighting climate change and promoting unity.
周一，CNN的一段对他的采访引起轰动，他宣布要把自己逾1200亿美元财富的大部分捐出去，重点用于抗击气候变化和促进和睦。
That sure sounds impressive, but his gesture wasn’t about generosity any more than Herschel Walker’s Senate candidacy in Georgia is for the children. After all, the money Mr. Bezos is now so magnanimously distributing was made through his dehumanizing labor practices, his tax avoidance, his influence peddling, his monopolistic power and other tactics that make him a cause of the problems of modern American life rather than a swashbuckling solution.
这听起来相当不错，但他的姿态跟慷慨没多大关系，正如赫歇尔·沃克在乔治亚州的参议员竞选跟儿童福祉没多大关系。说到底，现在贝佐斯要慷慨施舍的金钱，本来就是靠着不人道的劳工实践、税收规避、权势运作、垄断性力量和其它手法赚来的，这让他成了现代美国生活种种问题的起因，而不是一个行侠仗义的济世良方。
It’s too soon to tell if Mr. Bezos’s philanthropy will help others, but what’s certain is that it will help Mr. Bezos a lot. Mega-philanthropists of his ilk tend to give through foundations, which they establish in ways that save them an immense amount in taxes, sometimes merely by moving the money from one of their own accounts to another. Giving will also burnish Mr. Bezos’s reputation, in that way preserving and protecting his opportunity to earn yet more money — and to do more social damage.
现在判断贝佐斯的慈善事业是否会帮助他人还为时过早，但可以肯定的是，它会对贝佐斯有很大帮助。像他这样的超级慈善家往往通过基金会进行捐赠，他们建立基金会的方式可以为他们节省大量税收，有时只是把钱从自己的一个账户转移到另一个账户。捐赠还将提升贝佐斯的声誉，通过这种方式维持和保护他赚更多钱的机会——以及对社会造成更多损害的机会。
And it will increase his already gigantic power over public life. For plutocrats like Mr. Bezos, that may be the biggest payoff of all. Their wealth is so vast that by distributing even a small fraction of it, they skew the public agenda toward the kind of social change they can stomach — the kind that doesn’t threaten them or their class. Shortly before his big announcement, Mr. Bezos gave Dolly Parton a $100 million “Courage and Civility Award” to spend on her chosen causes. Ms. Parton is indeed courageous and civil, but so are the workers fighting to unionize Amazon facilities, and I don’t see anyone offering them nine-digit thank-you bonuses.
这将增加他在公共生活中本已巨大的权力。对贝佐斯这样的富豪来说，这可能是最大的回报。他们的财富是如此之多，以至于通过分配其中一小部分，就可以使得公共议程偏向于他们能够接受的那种社会变革——那种不会威胁到他们或其阶级的变革。在做出这项重大宣布之前不久，贝佐斯给多莉·帕顿颁发了一亿美元的“勇气与文明奖”，让她用于自己所选择的事业。帕顿确实是个勇敢而有修养的人，但那些努力让亚马逊工厂成立工会的工人也是如此，我没看到有人给他们九位数的感谢奖金。
But once again, instead of the usual critics having to make this case, this week Mr. Bezos took the wheel. Just minutes after his philanthropy announcement on CNN, news broke that Amazon would be laying off thousands of workers, reminding everyone of what was really going on.
但本周，不需要以往那些批评者动手，贝佐斯自己用行动说明了这个道理。就在他于CNN宣布慈善计划的几分钟后，有消息称亚马逊将裁员数千人，这提醒了所有人实际到底是怎么回事。
At first glance, the two stories might seem like matter and antimatter, or at least two opposite realities. But they are the same story: The system that treats human beings as disposable commodities upholds and reproduces itself by sprinkling some fairy dust and hoping that we will forget the injustice that paid for it.
乍一看，这两个故事可能像是物质和反物质，或者至少是两个相反的现实。但它们是同一个故事：这个将人类视为一次性商品的制度，通过撒上一些仙女粉尘来进行自我维持和繁殖，并指望我们忘记支撑这一切的不公。
Then, of course, there was Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto kingpin whose spectacular downfall, along with that of FTX, the company he founded, caused $32 billion to disappear, much of it belonging to hundreds of thousands of regular people.
接着当然还有萨姆·班克曼-弗里德，这位声名狼藉的加密货币大人物，连同他创立的FTX公司一起轰然倒塌，导致320亿美元消失，其中大部分属于数十万普通人。
Mr. Bankman-Fried embodies another pretension of plutocratic benevolence: that of the renegade, the people’s billionaire. Like many others, he hawked cryptocurrency as a fight against the establishment, against the big banks, against the powers that be, man. He has said his work was motivated by the ideals of effective altruism, a trendy school of thought that encourages people to go out and make as big a heap of money as they can so that they can use it to heal the world. But, as he admitted in an interview this week with Kelsey Piper of Vox, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s claims about the ethical nature of his pursuit were an example of “this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
班克曼-弗里德体现了另一种富豪善意伪装：叛逆者、人民的亿万富翁。像其他许多人一样，他将加密货币兜售为对抗建制势力、对抗大银行、对抗当权者的手段。他曾说过，他的工作是受有效利他主义理念的激励。有效利他主义是一种时髦的思想流派，鼓励人们出去赚大把大把的钱，然后用这些钱来治愈世界。但是，正如班克曼-弗里德本周接受Vox网站凯尔西·派珀采访时承认的，他声称自己追求的道德本质就是“我们这些清醒的西方人玩的愚蠢游戏，我们说出那些正确的陈词滥调，于是每个人都喜欢我们”。
Finally, of course, this week there was Donald Trump (because let’s face it, there’s always Donald Trump), who has incarnated the most dangerous billionaire pretension of all: that of the hero who in all the world is the only one who can save us. He gamed the system so effectively that only he knows how to un-game it; he manipulated politicians so much that only he knows how to drain the swamp; he amassed so much money that only he is above corruption.
最后，这周也少不了特朗普（咱们面对现实吧，哪里都少不了特朗普），他是所有亿万富翁中最危险的自负化身：即全世界唯一能够拯救我们的英雄。他钻体制漏洞是如此有效，以至于只有他知道如何填补漏洞；他对政客的操纵如此之深，以至于只有他才知道如何抽干沼泽；他积累了如此多财富，以至于只有他才能脱离腐败。
On Tuesday night he addressed a crowded room at Mar-a-Lago and, as expected, announced that he was going to run for president again. He said the usual things that politicians are supposed to say, about how he was doing it for America’s benefit. But this time it was no longer possible to imagine that even he believed it. After all, only a week had passed since America had voted in the midterm elections and rejected most of the high-profile candidates he endorsed — in the process, even Republican commentators agree, rejecting him. He dragged the party down so far that it did not regain the Senate and only barely regained the House.
周二晚上，他在马阿拉歌庄园一个挤满了人的大厅里发表讲话，不出所料地宣布他将再次竞选总统。他讲的都是政客的陈词，称他是为了美国的利益才这么做的。但这一次，恐怕连他自己都不再相信了。毕竟，中期选举才过去一周，美国用选票否决了他支持的大多数知名候选人——从而也否决了他，这一点连共和党评论人士都赞同。他拖累了共和党如此之久，以至于共和党没能重新控制参议院，只是勉强夺回众议院。
Fearing even more disastrous outcomes, trusted advisers and allies encouraged him not to run again, or at least to delay his announcement. But they were wasting their time. Standing up there onstage, so low-energy that even Jeb Bush’s son felt compelled to comment, Mr. Trump took in the applause but offered no new ideas or directions. It was a variant of the performance that the others had been putting on, but with one crucial difference: Unlike Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos and Mr. Bankman-Fried, who strain to show us how public-spirited they are, Mr. Trump could hardly be bothered to care.
由于担心更多灾难性结果，他所信赖的顾问和盟友都劝他不要再次参选，或者至少推迟宣布参选的时间。但这都是在浪费时间。特朗普站在台上，无精打采，连杰布·布什的儿子都忍不住置评，特朗普享受着掌声，但没有提出新理念或新方向。这是其他人拿出过的同一种表演的不同方式，但有一个关键区别：与竭力向我们展示他们有多热心公益的马斯克、贝佐斯和班克曼-弗里德不同，特朗普对此甚至都懒得表现出在意。
It was a particularly unsubtle reminder that billionaires are not our saviors. They are our mistake.
这是尤为直白的提醒，亿万富翁不是我们的救世主。他们是我们犯下的错误。