“Power is perceived as a reward for high stocks of merit rather than an outgrowth of a popular mandate.”
This quote comes from Sebastian Strangio’s Hun Sen’s Cambodia, in his description of the age-old power structure in Cambodia. A well-connected Cambodian billionaire may have become rich on the back of all sorts of ill-gotten gains, but he can then build a stupa to himself or contribute to the construction of a pagoda, in order to accumulate ‘merit’. By a circular logic, he can then claim that he is rich and famous as a reward for his contributions.
More than this, the tycoon is rich and famous for his acts of merit in previous lives. He is the beneficiary of his karma. Who are we to question why he is rich, if his karma has already pre-ordained his wealth and power?
This description of Buddhism sounds strangely similar to Max Weber’s famous analysis of Calvinism and Protestant Capitalism. In this theory of predestination, God pre-ordained that only a certain elite would go to heaven. One could recognize the elite by their success in society, either in wealth or in power. A capitalist might resort to all sorts of illegalities to become rich, but once rich, he could claim that he was one of the elite and would go to heaven. It was predestination, so you can’t question it.
American billionaires are treated like gods, without questions about how they may have obtained their billions. The rich tycoons appear daily on talking head TV shows with their pronouncements on morality, economics, and any other topic of their choosing. They are rich; therefore they are always right.
And at the top of this hierarchy, of course, is Donald Trump. Because he is rich and because he became President, he is regarded by many (especially Protestant Evangelicals) as “sent by God”, regardless of his many moral vicissitudes. They can easily believe that God would not allow him — God’s chosen one — to lose an election, regardless of what the facts tell us, so of course he must have won.
There is a flip side to this coin. If rich people are rich because of their karma or because of predestination, then poor people are poor for the same reasons. This idea translates to right-wing resistance to social programs. Those people deserve to be poor, or are predestined to be poor, so society has no obligation to help them. As Jesus himself said, “The poor ye have always with you.”
After the Pol Pot auto-genocide of 2 million Cambodians, many survivors attributed a lot of the problems to karma. What had Cambodia as a country done to deserve such calamity? Maybe we weren’t devout enough as Buddhists, in this generation or in previous generations. A result has been, strangely, a devout return to Buddhist blessings and rituals. The well-heeled perpetuate this view by contributing to pagodas in order to demonstrate their good karma. They can grab land with impunity from poor people and throw them into destitution and homelessness because, of course, the poor have bad karma and their poverty is a fixed given.
To make a long story short, in both Buddhist Cambodia and Protestant America, do whatever it takes to get rich — murder, rape, steal — but then claim that it was God’s will, or your karma, or Buddha, or whatever or whoever that justifies your wealth and power.