Modern society clings to the belief that money can solve anything — that if only the wealthy shared their abundance, poverty and crime would vanish. It’s an appealing notion, simple and comforting, but also profoundly deceptive. For beneath every call for charity lies a deeper design: a world engineered to keep people dependent, distracted, and divided, while power remains untouched.
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Why Can’t We Solve Crime and Poverty?
A comment on a recent Substack post by Unorthodoxy got me thinking:
“Plot twist — Batman’s the bad guy. With all his wealth he could just donate most of it and solve the problem of poverty and crime in Gotham.”
I replied in the thread but felt it was worth refining and expanding upon my response here.
It’s a common sentiment — and at first glance, it seems perfectly reasonable. But that assumption, in my view, rests on a dangerously naïve understanding of how power, wealth, and control actually operate — both in the real world and in Gotham’s.
It’s far too generalized and amorphous a concept, this idea that donating wealth solves the problems of the poor. It’s a popular notion, revisited time and again by those who, like me, don’t possess great material wealth. It is also endlessly reinforced through cultural and societal narratives — illusions that perpetuate the deception of this otherwise well-meaning proposal.
Yet countless donations, pledge drives, charities, and NGOs across the world — utilizing every means of distribution, from food to finance — have only ever solved a fraction of the “world’s problems,” and only temporarily. These issues are sustained, even manufactured, by the same minority who profit from their persistence. Their resources are funneled into armaments, political divisiveness, polarizing policymaking, and a litany of systemic corruptions that generate, within the empathic and compassionate among us, a familiar reaction: “If only some of these billionaires would donate their wealth, the problems that plague our world would go away.”
No — this simply isn’t true. It isn’t even practical.
The manipulative showmanship and distortions presented by those with the most assets, access, and influence serve only their grandiose games and ongoing scripts throughout the realm. This isn’t something we can simply wish away, nor do we have the time, energy, or resources to resist it while struggling with basic survival — a subjective condition that affects us all, whether we’re living below the poverty line or earning a comfortable six- or seven-figure income. One could fairly argue they’re well-prepared, with secondary and even tertiary contingencies in place should any meaningful resistance arise. It’s all part of the long-game, perception-obscuring plan — and we’re not in the club.
Wealth always concentrates toward the parasitic and predatory. Disparities are not accidental — they’re a feature of the system. The so-called “free market,” and the entire structure that sustains it, are owned and operated by the same cloistered, insular hive mind — the same egregore, if you will — that shapes perception, value, and morality in its own image. In a broader sense, this element of our reality is endemic to the simulacrum itself — a feature, not a flaw. It’s not commonly understood, because, as the saying goes, “we’re not taught that in school.”
That same out-of-phase minority maintains a stranglehold on civilization by propagating fiction — historical as well as real-time distortion — through media, education, entertainment, religion, and even co-opted spiritual movements. It is an all-pervasive force that plays upon our most intimate emotions, our most cherished values, deceiving us into adopting someone else’s priorities as our own. Their narrative convinces the public that their values and interests align with those who love, create, build, defend, and provide — but of course, this isn’t the case. Their first and only priority remains the same, regardless of which Ivy League institution they were preferentially admitted to and further indoctrinated through: success at all costs. The amassing and protection of wealth, passed along for generations, always at the expense of the largely oblivious and routinely exasperated majority.
They aren’t wired like you or me, dear reader. Yet the majority of humanity continues to believe in the slogans of democracy, equality, inclusivity, charity, family, unity — and the endless campaigns to “end poverty” and “fight crime” — despite the fact that the exact opposite is enacted in practice, again and again, across civilizations and generations.
Poverty isn’t solved by donating wealth. Poverty, like scarcity, is manufactured and maintained through conditioning — through a deeply rooted system of mental and social control that convinces the many to worship the few, to see their own struggle as moral necessity rather than engineered dependency. It manifests as self-sabotage, and it has many faces, facets, dimensions, and capabilities — all elements of our humanity weaponized against us.
Enter the Dark Knight
In my view, Batman, for all his flaws, isn’t blind to this. When written with a deft hand, embracing all of his humanity in contrast to the sensationalized and oddly juxtaposed world he exists within, his heroism, vigilantism, and embodied archetype speak to us deeply. He represents our ingrained helplessness and lives out our projected hope, quiet desperation, and passionate need for righteousness and real justice. He understands the world — that you can’t buy integrity, or awareness, or courage — and that simply throwing money at a system designed to exploit it will never set it right. So he uses his wealth in the only way that can make a difference: directly, tactically, personally. He puts himself in the line of fire, standing between the people of Gotham and the predatory minority who manipulate them.
He knows how the game works — because he was born into it. He knows their psychology, their motives, their reach. And so he fights not from the system, but within it, using his resources to undermine it where it hurts most.
Those of us who truly care have invested some of our preciously limited time in this life to discern what is authentic, real, and true about our realm — and to step into an uncommon empathy that exists only beyond the tricks and traps of ideology, politics, psychological manipulation, and manufactured reality. It can be a bleak picture, but it can also serve us in greater ways, because we reclaim our inherent wisdom. We walk in a knowing that transcends pleasantries, hopes, wishes, and the endless slogans — “donate today to save ___,” “there’s no Planet B,” and other trivialities that will never, in truth, solve anything. They only play into the very schemes they claim to oppose, enriching the same psychopathic class they claim to resist. It necessarily requires an elevated, matured perspective — one dissociated from the mainstream noise. It’s not an easy path, even for the most seasoned natural philosopher or conscious activist.
To be sure, those programmed with poverty consciousness will hate the likes of Batman; they’ll judge him, label him, and dismiss his heroism, sacrifice, and uncommon morality for all the expected reasons — his privilege, his persona, his wealth. But he knows that too. And still, he defends the city and its people.
Why? Because flawed, human, and self-aware, Batman represents something most institutions and “philanthropists” do not: the willingness to confront the monster from within its own lair.
Solvitur ambulando