Andrea Chin Sang
Professor Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli
CORE 200-11
21 February 2017
INEQUALITY: THE PRICE OF GREED
In Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Queen of Versailles, wealthy time-share mogul David Siegel and his wife Jackie Siegel attempt to build the largest home in America. Referred to as “Versailles”, the Siegel family sets out to build their own 90,000 square feet Orlando, Florida based version of the French palace. While describing the family’s extravagant aspirations at the beginning of the documentary, David additionally explains that he built his wealth in a rags-to-riches story- kind any other hard-working American dreams of achieving. From owning an orange grove as a young man to building the largest time-share company in the world, David claims: “What I have today is what I worked hard for” (Lauren Greenfield, 2012). While attempting to paint an image of himself as a former average working-class man, David avoids confronting his own privileges. The fact that he owned land, had the opportunities presented to him to build upon that property, and had the education and means to create a thriving business are economic and social advantages a majority of the world’s poor do not have access to. Whether he has the legal right to his land and wealth ultimately does not matter as the important question remains: does he have a superior right over the majority of the world to possess these privileges? It is through this dog-eat-dog, capitalist world view by which inequality and politics of greed are inherent to almost every social, political, and economic system in the world today.
Joseph Stiglitz’s book The Great Divide similarly questions how the privileged elite of society “have come to perceive their privileged positions essentially as a natural right” (Stiglitz, 2015). Stiglitz reasons that inequality is not driven purely by the economy but by the terms society has agreed upon—the most problematic being this concern with one’s right to privilege and a continued system of greed politics (2015). In Queen of Versailles, David Siegel continuously puts the people around him at risk in an effort to save his economic interests, even vowing to die before he could ever give up the Westgate company. As a result of his greed, David continuously chases money as the fate of his company occupies more of his time than his family. As a monument to his success, David and his wife Jackie decide to build the largest house in America “because [they] can” (2012). Their notions of pride, and ultimately their greed, visibly consume the family with the progression of the film whilst estranging the already fragmented family. David’s possession (and obsession) over his economy and politics far outweighs the support offered from Jackie and his children clearly depicted in his visible and verbal rejection of them when they approach him throughout the documentary. The further division of the Siegel family is the ultimate price of their greed.
This notion of “working hard” justifying excessive wealth is constantly challenged throughout the documentary. David himself says that he is a "victim of [his] own success", being unhappy in his own home and struggling to find more and more money to fund his capitalist ventures (2012). His wife, Jackie Siegel, is an engineer graduate and successful model with humble beginnings herself. However, throughout the documentary, she spends excessively to try and build happiness out of her own extravagant consumerism. Jackie creates her own reality outside of the family’s financial hardships (primarily due to David willingly keeping her out of their financial situation) through consumerism in order to keep her own dream of living in the largest house in America alive. Buying and spending, fueling the never-ending wants consumerism opens within the American public, fuels Jackie's own desire for property; for ownership over one aspect of her life if she cannot control her children, marriage, or finances. Yhe Siegel family continues to justify their greed and overzealous consumerism, ultimately leading to their downfall and further estrangement between family members.
As Peter Singer advocates in The Life You Can Save, “having a right to do something doesn’t settle the question of what you should do”, though for David Siegel having the means to act settles the moral dilemma of whether he should continue to build business properties and ‘Versailles’ (2009, p. 27). Singer argues that choosing to act on privileges, such as wealth and property ownership, are deemed by society as a choice left to the moral principals of the individual. However, this concept of moral relativism has perpetuated growing inequality socially, culturally and economically. Moral relativism is a dangerous ideology in that it threatens the concept of a commonwealth or a collective good. To claim that the rich have individual rights to wealth because of effort invested suggests that the hard-working poor are at fault for their financial hardships. People from within the Siegel's own private circle provide a look into the reality of most hard-working households. In the documentary, the idea of the 'working man's burden' is directly contested through the presentation of family nanny Virginia Nebab.
Virginia is an immigrant, a mother separated from her children, and a labor worker with a moderate income. Though she works around the clock for the Siegel family, she lives to work without accumulating any wealth of her own. For Virginia, working at a demanding job in a foreign does not provide an escape from poverty as she must continually send money back to support her family and relinquish her own goals of social mobility. Like Jackie, Virginia covets land she owns and also dreams of owning a house in the Philippines to provide her family stability and means for upward social mobility. Virginia’s heartbreaking story is reminiscent of young first generation worker Emmie Nastor from Jerry Kaplan’s Humans Need Not Apply, as Emmie is also an immigrant worker working in intense labor conditions while providing for his family. In Emmie’s story, “despite the appalling working conditions, lack of respect, and dearth of prospects for advancement, Emmie remains grateful for the job and the paycheck” because the political greed of the American capitalist system allows Emmie to work without increasing his own income and wealth (Kaplan, 2015, p. 125). Both Emmie and Virginia work-hard, yet they do not own property or have access to basic human rights like respect and protective worker laws due to Michael Yate’s conclusion in “Measuring Global Inequality”, that “the world is structured economically and politically in an extremely unequal way” where the wealthy elite have moral leeway and the working poor have no access to resources or means of economic and social mobility (Yates, 2016).
So what does the Queen of Versailles tell us about American greed and inequality? It clearly illustrates the social disadvantages of greed driving the interests of the world’s wealthy elite, which in turn directly influences political and economic inequality in most countries around the world. In America, most people are driven by self-interest, pride, and greed, not considering the effects capitalist culture and promotion of moral relativism has on the intrinsic inequality imbedded in the foundation of the country. While the wealthy elite like David Siegel continues acting upon the privilege of circumstance without consideration of others, showing “a deplorable lack of empathy” towards the working poor (2009, p. 27). Social institutions and the impoverished majority suffer in consequence. In order to combat the ever-increasing inequality in the world, the rich need to be called out for their individualistic, capitalist-driven interests and held accountable for perpetuating global poverty. In turn, the working-class must rally together and continue to call for social, economic, and political change while speaking out for social change.
Bibliography
Greenfield, L., Renfrew, D., Nebab, V., Magnolia Pictures (Firm), Evergreen Pictures (Firm), &
Mongrel Media. (2012). The queen of Versailles. Toronto, ON: Mongrel Media.
Kaplan, J. (2015). Humans need not apply: a guide to wealth and work in the age of artificial
intelligence. N.p.: Yale University Press.
Singer, P. (2009). The life you can save: acting now to end world poverty. New York, NY:
Random House.
Stiglitz, J. E. (2015). The great divide: unequal societies and what we can do about them. New
York, NY: W.W. Norton Company, Inc.
Yates, M. D. (2016, November 1). Measuring global inequality. Monthly Review.
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