Do Bad People Have It Coming?

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nope, not in this lifetime, because the devil rewards his own while they are alive.

I believe that karma is constipated at the moment, but soon its bowels will unclog and unleash a full load on all who deserve it most. There won't be an umbrella big enough to shield away from it.

Sure. Any moment now, right? And I bet Jesus will be back too.

If the people get fed up with the status quo and revolt taking matters and justice into their own hands, that still counts.

The elite in the Communist Party, including administrators and higher army and government officials, became known as the nomenklatura. In 1933, at the height of the famine during which kulaks were eating grass, tree bark and each other, luxury trains were taking its members on holidays to health spas in the south. One official document notes a single month's tally in just one of their restaurant cars: 200 kg butter; 150 kg Swiss Cheese; 500 kg sausages; 500 kg chicken; 550 kg of different kinds of meat; 300 kg fish (plus 350 kg canned fish and 100 kg herring); 100 kg caviar; 300 kg sugar; 160 kg chocolate and sweets; 100 boxes of fruit; 60,000 cigarettes. One member wrote: "The nomenklatura is on another planet. It's Mars. It's not simply a matter of good cars or apartments. It's the continuous satisfaction of your own whims, the way an army of boot-lickers allows you to work painlessly for hours. All the little apparatchiks are ready to do everything for you. Your every wish is fulfilled. You can go to the theater on a whim, you can fly to Japan from your hunting lodge. It's a life in which everything flows easily "You are like a king: just point your finger and it is done." By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the nomenklatura and their families numbered around three million, about 1.5 per cent of the population. This, observes historian Professor Richard Pipes, is "approximately the same proportion of nobles under tsarism in the eighteenth century. And the favors it enjoyed resembled those of the magnates of that age."

What had gone wrong? Communism was supposed to bring about a "kingdom of equality". It wasn't that the Soviet Union had been merely unlucky in having Lenin and Stalin lead it, or that their class-ridden tyranny was somehow peculiar to their cultural character: hierarchies and horrors emerged also in Cambodia and China. In fact, the error the Communists made can be traced back to the arguments of Plato. More than two thousand years before the revolution, the Ancient Greek who'd first dreamed the Communist dream had been corrected by his student, Aristotle, who'd pointed out it wasn't actually wealth or private ownership that created the human yearning to get ahead. That yearning was a part of our nature: "it is not possession but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized".

The parable of the Communists reveals the impossibility of ridding human existence of the game. The drive to get ahead will always assert itself. It's in us. It's who we are. The first decades of the Soviet Union find the status game in all its details: its irrepressibility; its capacity to raise violence; the grandiosity it inspires in winning players and leaders; the inevitability of elites; the flaw that makes people believe they're always deserving of more status; the use of humiliation as the ultimate weapon; the horror of the cousins and their genius for tyranny; the ideological war games that rage across neural territories; our vulnerability to believing almost any dream of reality if our status depends on it; the capacity for that dream to pervert our perception of reality; the danger of active belief; esoteric language; zealous leaders who cast visions of heavenly status in future promised lands and target enemies to its rising; the anger and enthusiasm they inspire; the cycle of gossip, outrage, consensus and harsh punishment; the paranoia that can afflict leaders and the terrors it brings; the grim magic of toxic morality and its conjuring trick of making evil seem virtuous; the necessity of games to generate status if they're to endure; the world-changing power of the status goldrush.

The story idealists sometimes tell of humanity says we're natural seekers of equality. This isn't true. Utopians talk of injustice whilst building new hierarchies and placing themselves at the top. We all do this. It's in our nature. The urge for rank is ineradicable. It's the secret goal of our lives, to win status for ourselves and our game - and gain as much of it over you and you and you as we can. It's how we make meaning. It's how we make identity. It's the worst of us, it's the best of us and it's the inescapable truth of us: for humans, equality will always be the impossible dream.

If the people get fed up with the status quo and revolt taking matters and justice into their own hands, that still counts.