Rather than eating the rich, let’s enlist them in community mental health.

26 Jun Rather than eating the rich, let’s enlist them in community mental health.

On the postbox outside the grocery store in my hometown of Telluride, Colorado, a weathered sticker reads “Eat the Rich.” It’s a quiet provocation that captures a louder cultural mood—one that questions the moral and psychological costs of extreme wealth in an age of widening inequality and social fracture.

At first glance, a visitor might dismiss the sticker as ironic. Telluride is one of the wealthiest enclaves in the United States, a place synonymous with luxury, exclusivity, and second and third homes. But there is no irony here. Towns like Telluride offer a clear lens into the psychological and social consequences of economic extremes; they are microcosms of our broader communal life.

In ultra-wealthy communities and communities across the country, inequality is not an abstraction measured by charts and ratios. It is a daily reality that shapes relationships, identity, and belonging. In places like Manhattan, Palm Beach, the Hamptons, and Beverly Hills, workers rise before dawn to commute long distances in hazardous conditions because they cannot afford to live where they serve. Longtime residents are quietly priced out of neighborhoods they helped build. Even among the affluent, anxiety, isolation, and a diffuse sense of not quite belonging serve as emotional and relational cancers beneath the curated surfaces of abundance.

As a licensed marriage and family therapist who works at the intersection of wealth and mental health, I see how both affluence and scarcity distort human relationships. Money—whether in painful absence or dizzying excess—amplifies existing emotional fault lines within families, between social groups, and across entire communities. It can intensify shame and entitlement in equal measure. It can turn neighbors into rivals and shared spaces into contested territory.

But the way out of this dynamic will not be found in slogans, shaming, or retreat into our ideological corners. In my clinical work, the most durable repair comes from a principle in family systems theory called “joinder”: the disciplined practice of entering a system—be it a family, an organization, or a town—with enough curiosity, empathy, and accountability to earn the right to influence it.

Joinder resists the seductive ease of standing outside a system and casting hostile judgments. Instead, it asks us to step in—to sit at the table with people we distrust or even resent, and to stay long enough to understand how the system keeps reproducing the very outcomes we claim to oppose. It is not about excusing harm. It is about positioning ourselves strategically and relationally so that we can change the pattern rather than merely condemn it.

Applied to wealth inequality, joinder offers a different invitation than “Eat the Rich.” It asks us to move beyond the binary of “haves” and “have‑nots” toward a more unsettling recognition: all of us, by action or omission, participate in and are shaped by the systems we inhabit. From this vantage point, the central question is not “Whom do we blame?” but “How do we build a community in which all of us, including the wealthy, are answerable to one another?”

This shift is not merely economic; it is fundamentally relational. It requires acknowledging the psychological burdens that accompany both privilege and precarity. The wealthy are not exempt from depression, addiction, or fractured families; the poor are not uniquely angry or aggrieved. Mental health and emotional well‑being are not zero‑sum commodities to be hoarded by one class at the expense of another. They are shared assets that rise or fall with the integrity of the systems we build together.

Local communities, particularly those defined by stark disparities, can become laboratories for a different approach. Instead of weaponizing resentment, we can create structured forums where business owners, service workers, longtime residents, and second‑homeowners sit together in facilitated conversations. The goal is not polite civility for its own sake. It is to ventilate fear, anger, and grief in a context that insists on mutual responsibility and respect. When done well, these settings can lead to very concrete outcomes: employer-funded mental health clinics, housing trusts underwritten by local wealth, scholarships, and childcare programs designed not as charity but as commitments to the long-term health of the community itself.

In this model, the rich are not asked to disappear or to apologize for their success. They are asked to show up differently—to recognize that extraordinary privilege carries with it a corresponding obligation to invest in the emotional infrastructure of the places they call home. The return on that investment is not merely reputational. It is the chance to live in communities that are less brittle, less divided, and less haunted by simmering resentment.

The alternative is the path we are already on: escalating hostility, coarse generalizations, and an apolitical culture that rewards outrage over problem‑solving. “Eat the Rich” makes for a striking sticker and a cathartic meme. But as policy and as psychology, it is a dead end. Cannibalizing one another—figuratively or literally—does not build housing, fund counseling services, or repair the frayed bonds between classes.

The small sticker on a Telluride postbox can be read as a threat. I prefer to treat it as a warning—and a prompt. It asks whether we will continue to indulge in slogans that harden our divisions, or whether we will accept the harder work of engagement: more honesty about how our systems function, more humility about our own complicity, and more humanity in how we design responses that protect the vulnerable while inviting the powerful into genuine accountability.

In that light, the true value of wealth is not in what it can display or even in what it can destroy, but in what it can heal. Communities that harness their financial capital to build psychological resilience and social trust will be the ones that endure. The rest of us will be left trading stickers while the systems around us quietly come apart.

Paul L. Hokemeyer, J.D., Ph.D., is a licensed marriage and family therapist who holds a Clinical Fellow designation from the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. He is the author of “Fragile Power: Why Having Everything Is Never Enough” (Hazelden, 2019) and a graduate of the Global Leaders in Healthcare program at Harvard Medical School.