Some recent North African migrant has been on French welfare for five years, planted on the couch, grinding his Call of Duty kill/death ratio and his weed tolerance. The moment a Chinese store owner looks like he’s doing better, the riots start and suddenly he’s off the couch. TO GET A JOB? 
Don’t be ridiculous. He’s burning down the store. Destruction is easier than creation, and for a few hours, the personal risk is basically zero.

The evolutionary spreadsheet doesn’t care that he never consciously thought “relative mating value.” It just registers that the other guy has more resources, more status, and therefore more options, and that leveling the playing field requires only a lighter and a crowd.

In America it used to be that when you saw a new Mercedes you tried to figure out what the guy actually did. You asked how. Success left clues. Or you at least left the car alone, because the neighborhood still expected you not to act like an animal. High social trust, open markets, and a culture that treated visible wealth as evidence of competence rather than proof of theft made envy expensive. The default story was simple: the pie could get bigger, and getting a piece of it usually meant producing something someone else was willing to pay for.

That story is now optional. Declining trust, higher rates of single parenthood, the constant sermon that every market outcome is rigged extraction, and stretches of reduced enforcement have made the destructive option cheap again. Once the cost of smashing windows drops and the cultural permission slip shows up—“they only have it because they cheated”—a non-trivial number of people take the low-energy path. Why build when you can burn?

The United States is well down this road. Places that used to treat commercial success as a puzzle to solve now treat it as a provocation. Violence and looting aren’t mysterious weather events. They’re what status competition looks like when the institutions that once raised its price have been allowed to weaken.

And now the same impulse wants to dismantle the engines that made us unfathomably wealthy by the standards of 1900, when the richest man on Earth couldn’t board a plane and cross the country. They want to seize SpaceX from Elon Musk and nationalize it. A tantrum because he’s too rich, and because he’s using that wealth to do things they despise while actually advancing the species. Never mind that Neuralink is giving blind people sight and paralyzed people the ability to communicate again, or that he’s dropped the cost of reaching orbit by orders of magnitude. He’s outdoing us. So, like the North African torching the Chinese store owner’s life’s work, the plan is to steal the company.

Petty, lazy, and ungrateful that an African immigrant has made lives better across the planet while they play armchair socialist. How dare he do so much better than us?