I want a society that’s designed to make everyone moderately wealthy, and not only five people astronomically wealthy. The damage and misery caused by unmitigated inequality has been demonstrated over and over again, for millennia, yet we fall for the lie over and over again.

In the US, we choose inequality because we are taught to believe the blatant lie that we might one day be one of those five fabulously wealthy people. But look at the numbers: there are only five of them among millions; the odds are staggeringly against you.

It’s like a middle-school sports enthusiast thinking they will become a top-billing star in some major league, and make tens of millions of dollars a year: the numbers simply do not work out; there are only so many quarterback positions available, and tens of thousands of applicants. Yet they are raised to cling to that selfish “dream” instead of focusing on building something that everyone (including themselves) is likely to benefit from.

The constant hunger for “hitting the jackpot” and becoming fabulously wealthy corrupts everything one does. The goal of one’s social activities shifts from service to extraction. No one is a friend; everyone is a mark. Nature exists only for exploitation; society exists only for you to steal their money.

It’s a hollow, ghoulish existence. The numbers in your E*TRADE account become your self-worth. You don’t live; you “hustle”. Your thirst for the next jackpot causes you to reduce humans, animals, nature, resources—everything—into numbers on a spreadsheet, waiting to be “optimized” to drive out “waste”. You hire laywers and CPAs to minimize dollars leaving your portfolio, even when they pay for the common good. You think of politics in terms of Return On Investment, because fuck people. There is nothing you can’t represent as a dollar figure, even your soul.

You become a parasite.

I’ve never liked anyone who said the primary reason they started their own business is “to make money”. When your top reason for a business venture is “to make money”, I know you’re already a ghoul—nothing else matters.

There is a way to start profitable businesses that become net positives to the community, that provide products or service at a reasonable price, that give people ways to ease their burden and enjoy their lives. And that way is to have the product or service as your primary reason for going into business, and to make the money work secondarily; and then to resist enshittification forever. But there is one major problem with this kind of business: they tend to only be moderately profitable.

The lure to become fabulously rich is always there, even after a good company becomes successful. Sell it to Private Equity and make a bundle! Begin enshittifying and raise your margins! Go public and make the shareholders your lords and ride the stock price!

Asking individual business owners to become heroes and resist enshittification on their own does not scale, at least not without widespread pushback from consumers. The rules of the game reward businesses that grow and monopolize and exploit and extract and corrupt government, so that’s what we expect businesses to do. The system creates parasites, because the rules make it profitable to be a parasite.

• #opinion