Billionaires’ pleasure trips to space an insult to the poor

In 1964, while delivering his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Dr Rev Martin Luther King Jr spoke movingly about what he would he later call the three evils of society.

He mentioned these as “war, racism and poverty”.

On poverty, he decried the degeneration of morals in society that led to the abandonment of the welfare of society as the centre of development.

He further raised the alarm on how rapid technological advancement of the 20th century failed to materially generate social benefit.

In summing up the fallacy of technological advancement, he quoted American philosopher Henry David Thereau: “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

Today, we are reminded of the reverend’s observation and Thereau’s dictum by the daring arrogance of modern-day billionaires who have embarked on outrageously expensive leisure trips to space.

The billionaires’s project reveals the stark reality of the degeneration of morals the reverend long called out in society.

It is disheartening to watch the filthy rich hijack scientific advancement that the world has built up for generations, for private leisure.

For so long, the advancement of scientific technology has been praised as a driver of development in society.

The space tourism project has cost billions of dollars to set up. The opportunity cost of the investment exponentially dwarfs the private benefit to the billionaires and the social benefit of the project is immoral.

The billionaires have carefully but misleadingly called their billion-dollar excursion “space tourism” but for the substance, it is not tourism. These are exclusive, pompous and extravagant pleasure trips of the super-rich.

The insensitivity of the timing of the space trips begs more questions than answers on the conduct of the wealthy in the face of a poor global population. In a world where an estimated 2.2 billion people need access to drinking water, including 884 million currently without basic drinking water services, an estimated 4.2 billion people need access to safely managed sanitation and an estimated three billion people need access to basic handwashing facilities, it is provoking for the wealthy to splash billions on a leisure trip.

The billionaires have further ignited the conversation on the taxing of wealthy people, the moral hazard of excessive wealth and inequality.

The pleasure of the wealthy is an insult to the poor. They have shown that none of society’s pressing issues are of concern to them, only their extravagant sense of pleasure.

This behaviour by the superrich will surely deteriorate relations between the rich and the poor.

The poor will look on with envy, with the fact that it is their labour that has made these gentlemen wealthy.

Even worse, their investment might have been supplemented by government grants.

There is no doubt it will provoke the leftist movement which will definitely case study this development and reference it as another call for a socialist society. These men are very often exalted as benevolent philanthropists. There is no need to discount the huge development their benevolence has brought to society but generosity should be both in letter and in spirit.

The latter is fundamentally imperative for the genuinity of the benevolence. Benevolence is part of one’s character, one’s disposition.

The fact that they could flaunt their buying power on financially exclusive space trips in the midst of a devastating pandemic speaks volumes.

Reverend King would go on to state that the existence of poverty is culpable upon humans.

Given the resourcefulness of man and the abundance of resources, there cannot be a strong argument for the existence of poverty other than the lack of convicting willingness to eradicate poverty.

The world is currently being strangled by the novel coronavirus which is wrecking unfathomable socioeconomic disruption to communities across the world.

There have been frantic efforts in pursuit of a vaccine but a 100% efficient vaccine remains elusive.

At such a time, a few pompously rich individuals decide to embark on a self-important trip to space.

One begins to wonder how much the world could have benefited had the resources been given to the World Health Organisation.

The investment on the space trips is a categorical case of misallocation of resources.

The indecency of the rich to flaunt the potent of their riches in a world where hundreds of millions of children are severely malnourished, walk barefooted and half-naked, are deprived access to quality health care, should be condemned with the contempt it deserves.

At such a time, a few pompously rich individuals decide to embark on a self-important trip to space