In a widely viewed 2015 TED talk, Bill Gates warned of the risk of a global pandemic for which we were unprepared. Now that we’re actually in the midst of a global pandemic for which we are woefully unprepared, Gates has spoken out against the US government’s inadequate response, and his philanthropic foundation has pledged $250 million to help with the manufacture of promising vaccines for the novel coronavirus.
For his foresight and willingness to help combat the pandemic, Gates deserves admiration. Instead he faces suspicion, attacks and vilification. Why?
Two narratives from opposite ends of the political spectrum shed light on the peculiar reaction to Gates’s forward-thinking philanthropy.
Progressive Suspicions of the Wealthy
For some progressives, behind Gates’ philanthropy lurk unsavory ulterior motives—a desire for influence and power. Since the pandemic erupted, Gates has spoken out on CNN, The Daily Show, in the Washington Post, on Reddit, and in his own blog. Post-pandemic, some complain, this could give him undue influence as a thought leader.
But Gates has been pouring his wealth into vaccination campaigns in the third world, funding sanitation projects and clean water supplies in Africa and building factories to produce coronavirus vaccines—none of which is geared towards seizing political power. Unlike many others in the national spotlight, Gates has seriously engaged with the relevant scientific, technological and policy issues surrounding pandemics. What should matter for a thought leader is whether he (or she) puts forward ideas based on fact and sound arguments. How much, or how little, money such a leader has is irrelevant.
These attacks on Gates are rationalizations for an under-recognized form of prejudice.
The suspicion of Gates has the same source as the hate-fueled crusade to abolish billionaires, epitomized by Bernie Sanders’ comment: “I don’t think billionaires should exist.” The billionaire class, we’re told, are villains. If you made such a sweeping moral judgment about any other minority group, we would properly call it out as prejudice. But it’s just as irrational to view billionaires as a group, rather than individuals, and condemn them wholesale. That, too, is a form of prejudice: against the wealthy.
Such condemnations wilfully ignore the decisive factor of how Bill Gates obtained his wealth. In sharp contrast to, say, Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes—who literally lie, cheat, steal and murder their way to billions—Bill Gates earned his wealth. Over decades at the helm of Microsoft, he led the creation of blockbuster software products—Windows and Office—that tens of millions of individuals and corporations freely chose to purchase and use. To disregard how wealth is acquired, treating it as an obvious insignia of wrongdoing, is a travesty of moral thinking.
This anti-wealth prejudice is reinforced by prevailing moral ideas. Centuries of Christianity and the secularized version of its teachings have taught us that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” What disqualifies someone from heaven is not ill-gotten wealth: it’s simply wealth.
But Gates is also facing vilification due to another kind of prejudice.
Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracists have spun out assorted claims, including the ideas that Gates has engineered the pandemic and that he is pushing for Big Brother-like population tracking. Such claims have swept across Facebook, YouTube and the outlets favoured by conspiracy theorists. Some well-known Trump loyalists have promoted these conspiracist fantasies.
For example, Fox news host and Trump supporter Laura Ingraham recently shared the conspiracy theory that Gates wants to digitally track Americans with her 3.3 million Twitter followers. Likewise, longtime Trump fixer Roger Stone (who was sentenced to prison for felonies connected to Trump’s 2016 campaign) insinuated in a radio interview that Gates had a role in the creation of the virus and that he and “other globalists are using it for mandatory vaccinations and microchipping people so we know if they’ve been tested.”
The anti-Gates narrative that Ingraham and Stone are amplifying is the result of prioritising loyalty to a tribal leader (Trump) above a regard for facts. Is Gates right? How good are his arguments? Are any of his points true? None of that matters. What does matter is discrediting Gates because he has spoken out about what he regards as the US government’s shortcomings in its response to the pandemic. What better way to demonstrate group loyalty than by deflecting attention from Trump’s conduct and attacking a prominent critic?
Both kinds of attacks against Bill Gates are unjust. To recognize these injustices doesn’t mean you necessarily agree with all of his views or philanthropic ventures (I do not). But it does mean that you take seriously the idea of objectivity in evaluating people.
Both attacks represent intellectual pathogens that we must combat. Both types of prejudice are forms of collectivism. Instead, we should judge Gates—and everyone else—on his merits as an individual, based on the facts.
16 comments
I doubt Gates is now or has been particularly partisan, but I bet he knows how and when to use it.
He sure seems to have a lot of NGOs beholden to his various funds.
Perhaps he is engaged in reform from the inside , driven solely by a devotion to reason and science, or perhaps not.
Perhaps you are a secret agent of the Illumnati. Perhaps…
“Such condemnations wilfully ignore the decisive factor of how Bill Gates obtained his wealth. In sharp contrast to, say, Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes—who literally lie, cheat, steal and murder their way to billions—Bill Gates earned his wealth. Over decades at the helm of Microsoft, he led the creation of blockbuster software products—Windows and Office—that tens of millions of individuals and corporations freely chose to purchase and use. To disregard how wealth is acquired, treating it as an obvious insignia of wrongdoing, is a travesty of moral thinking.”
The author is profoundly ignorant of Gates + Microsoft history. Gates didn’t murder anyone, but he absolutely lied, cheated and stole. Microsoft customers were frequently/rarely NOT free to choose what product they purchased. If you wanted a computer, it HAD to have Windows on it, in many cases under threat of lawsuit.
Gates didn’t create SARS-COVID-2019 nor is his vaccine going to contain microchips. But Gates and Microsoft have profited from and continue to profit from stripping people’s privacy from them via every available means. Microsoft is totally “pushing for Big Brother-like population tracking.”
Journo’s overall point survives these problems. The last three paragraphs are dead on.
> Microsoft customers were frequently/rarely NOT free to choose what product they purchased.
They were free to not purchase a computer, a computer made valuable by Gates. Tracing the virus is a method of lowering the chance of sickness. You have no alternative. And, after the virus is managable, Congress could force the destruction of the tracing records. You evade Gates’ 2015 warning AGAINST the virus. Why did conservatives ignore his warning?! Are conservatives seeking Brother-like population tracking?” What about the privacy destroyed by Trumps tariffs? Trump is merely one more big govt politician.
Warning us about a pandemic? He funded the lab that released the virus and now wants to sell the vaccine! Dead kids in a Africa and India, he should be held for mass murder!
I love the old story about Bill Gates going into a bar full of economists and being welcomed by them because his arrival vastly increases the average income and wealth of the group! Of course, his presence also vastly increases the inequality of the group. But inequality is not a problem there or elsewhere. Insufficiency is a problem, though much less than it used to be worldwide. Many critics of billionaires still subscribe to the Zero Sum Game view of economics, preaching nobody can gain anything except at someone else’s expense. That dismal outlook lies at the heart of jealousy of rich people in general and billionaires in particular. And it is not limited to the Left. Rest assured that some Right wing critics are also partly motivated by jealousy.
The problems with Gates’ form of capitalism were never Zero Sum but zero alternative — his entire career was hallmarked not by innovation but by his exclusion of competition in spaces where his products dwelt, by legal hook and crook. Gates didn’t win; everybody else lost.
Randy Crawford, so that’s why Apple went out of business and I’m typing this on a PC? Oh wait! They didn’t, unless their huge premises a few miles north of me here in Cork, Ireland is a mirage. Likewise the Macbook I’m actually typing this on.
Like most Silicon Valley moguls, Gates did indeed try to wall in a few gardens, but with little lasting success. Microsoft was once predicted to become the General Motors of software. Unfortunately for them, that prediction came true.
«Some well-known Trump loyalists have promoted these conspiracist fantasies» – Please, don’t be biased. It’s not because I prefer Trump. Accept as an axiom that the concentration of idiots is approximately the same throughout the entire political spectrum. And if you look at Hollywood, then it is quite possible that there are a lot more of them on the left, actors rarely have intelligence, they are mostly like jukeboxes. One coin, and they play a patron’s selected song.
You can’t accept as an axiom someone’s judgement, isn’t that why you criticize Hollywood? Actors and Hollywood are not politicians, they do not have political power. Which is his point about Bill Gates.
The author’s attempt to cast the billionaire class as an oppressed minority is lazy. I don’t want to deny that there are irrational billionaire haters out there, those who believe that “all billionaires are villains,” and I agree with the author that all such generalizations are stupid and ugly. However, there is an enormous difference between Sanders’ saying “I don’t think billionaires should exist,” and the animus that racists direct at disfavored ethnic groups. Billionaires exist in part because of the rules we have set in society….rules on taxation, rules on inheritance, rules on intellectual (and other) property, anti-trust rules, including the decision not to interfere with the way network externalities tend to drive all or most consumers to purchase certain products from one, essentially randomly chosen, vendor. The list is endless. Surely Sanders is saying that these rules should be amended in such a way that it becomes much, much harder for a small number of individuals to accumulate such extraordinary levels of personal wealth. He’s not proposing to send them to extermination camps, or deport them “back to where they came from”.
I would guess (he works at something called the Ayn Rand Institute) that the author favors something like the current set of rules we have chosen for society, or maybe prefers making them even more laissez faire. That’s fine too…but he should make his arguments based on whatever rational basis he chooses to construct to support such views, not pretending that arguments for a less unequal society can only be based on the basest of motives.
Just a quick point on the Bible verse you quoted. God has no problem with wealth nor does wealth prevent your entry into heaven. The purpose of that passage is to illustrate that the pursuit of wealth to become wealth and to place money above all other things makes money your god and prevents you from knowing and serving the one true God. If your wealth is in the way of your relationship with God, then it’s a problem and could lead to you not knowing God or accepting Jesus and this not entering heaven (for Jesus is literally the only way). This is called out on many passages in the Bible about putting things of the world, like money, ahead of God, thus making them idols. God made many people in the Bible wealthy and allowed their wealth as long as it did not become their god.
Amen! Leftist jealousy and Rightist tribalism counter-support each other and drive us apart. A pox on both their houses!
Of all my social media browsing (I’ve never unfriended anyone over politics, and have a diverse political spread of friends), I’d say that, rounded to the nearest percentage point, 100% of the attacks I’ve seen on Gates for the vaccine hoopla are from the right. I sometimes have my own gripes about progressives, but I think the first half of Journo’s piece about progressive attacks on Gates says more about Journo’s ideological needs than it does about the state of the body politic. The idea in the second half, that the attacks result more from tribal allegiance than from attention to facts, is certainly true — not big news, maybe, but something worth reminding ourselves of.
Great article Elan. I would add that, with regards to the conspiracy theories of the right, they are, as you say, a product of tribal loyalty. It’s a product of Identity-protective reasoning by which these people formulate and utter their arguments. I describe this phenomenon in a recent article (only if you’re interested): https://merionwest.com/2020/05/19/the-limits-of-political-reasoning/
Thanks again for shining light on this issue.