Let's get some sicknasty physics going on all up in here.

and then later when he SNEAKS INTO A CORNER TO FUCKING… facetime yoda… like “ok so we have these millions of identical human men who were apparently suspiciously ordered for us by someone???” and yodas fucking response is just “when countless sapient lemons life gives you…….. send those lemons into intergalactic battle you must”

so i guess theres some equality

And on the flip-side

A movie where a mostly average dude accidentally stumbles across a valuable magical artifact, which is a key piece of contention in a war between the forces of good and evil. The forces of evil attack his home, and the confused man is nearly killed, but is rescued from certain death by a mysterious, beautiful young woman.

The young woman takes him to a secret hideout, where her father, a wise old wizard, has been secreting away key weapons and artifacts so that the forces of darkness cannot destroy them. The young woman proceeds to get into an argument with her father. Legends tell of a champion of the light, who is destined to rise up and use the tools that they have been hiding to defeat the darkness. The young woman has been training with most of these tools for all of her life, and now, as they have obtained the last artifact, she feels it is imperative that they act. The darkness will come for them. They cannot simply wait for that to happen.

But the wise old wizard rebukes her. She is arrogant to think that she is the legendary champion. Destiny often works in more subtle ways, and destiny has brought to them another option: the random dude she just rescued.

Disgusted, the daughter storms off. The random dude moves to go after her, but the old wizard stops him. His daughter is headstrong, and she is passionate. She wishes to fight, but she must learn patience, and appreciation for other paths in life. The old wizard has had more time to appreciate the paths of fate. The random dude has much potential - though of course, he doubts it and refutes it, baffled but unable to leave for fear of being tracked down by the forces of darkness again.

The next day, the old wizard announces that it is time to begin his training.

The random dude goes through precisely one day of gruelling magical/physical tutelage, and then books it to where the daughter is still brooding by a waterfall. Last night he saw this chick suplex a motorcycle and summon up a wall of fire with her bare hands. Dude is not an idiot. He is not going to match the skills of someone who has spent a lifetime training at this stuff, no matter how sexist her father is. He makes a suggestion - he’ll distract the old man with training montages, while the daughter takes all the mystical artifacts and goes to defeat the forces of darkness. It’s the perfect plan! Even if the forces of darkness are still after them, and they come here, then he and the old wizard can serve as a red herring. Meanwhile, the daughter can do whatever she thinks she needs to do to defeat them!

For about five minutes the daughter waffles, because maybe that is arrogant, to think that she is a legendary hero. She’s been living her whole life with the Wizard of Undermining Women’s Contributions, after all.

But the random really is a good dude, so rather than deciding he must have a Destiny, or explaining that her father is probably just trying to protect her, or asking him to help learn instead, he clasps her shoulder and looks her in the eye and is just like:

“You flip-kicked a truck. Normal people can’t do that. So I’m thinking you deserve the benefit of the doubt.”

The daughter concedes his point. After all, she saw him struggling to carry those two buckets up the hidden mountain, and her dad’s not even making him try to do it with his mind yet.

They go through with the plan. The daughter steals all the artifacts/weapons and then has another ‘fight’ with her father, which prompts him to seal all the locks on the already-empty treasure room. Announcing her intention to go sulk, she then takes the mystical items of destiny and fucks off on an epic quest to defeat the forces of darkness.

Occasionally we cut back to the random dude still training with the old wizard. This is the comic relief portion of the film, featuring various hijinks as the dude tries to keep the wizard from discovering that all the mystical artifacts are gone and that his daughter isn’t still just hanging out by the waterfall or in her room or something. Occasionally the wizard wants to find her to help with the training or because ‘nothing motivates a man like a beautiful woman’, and the dude just has to keep dodging it.

Meanwhile the daughter gets the action hero plotline, recruiting new allies and engaging in dangerous, pitted battles across various harrowing landscapes. She bonds with a love interest and wrestles with the temptation to join the forces of darkness, but ultimately finds her great internal reason to fight, beyond the burning desire to prove herself or meet impossible standards. 

Of course, for the dramatic climax the forces of darkness attack the hidden sanctuary where her father and dude are. The daughter and her allies rush to defend the place, as the old wizard tells random dude to take his daughter and flee, while he holds off the forces of darkness. Random dude finally explains, however, that the old wizard’s daughter has been gone this entire time. And rather than dying in a spectacular last-stand, the old wizard is stumped as his newest pupil helps hold off the attacking forces long enough for the fully-equipped and supplied champions of light, led by the daughter, to arrive and defeat the armies of darkness before the sacred sanctuary is overtaken and destroyed.

Afterwards, the old wizard is shocked at first. But then he nods sagely to himself. Of course, the random dude was the hero after all - if he had not stayed, then surely the sanctuary would have been lost. His actions led the old wizard’s daughter to victory, and surely now that they have been reunited, the random dude will take his rightful place as a champion of the light. And also probably marry the wizard’s daughter, and produce a suitable male heir…

Everyone basically just tunes him out as the random dude and the daughter fistbump, and the dude sags in relief when the daughter explains that he can go home now and then drops like a sack full of gold into his arms to try and compensate him for all the trouble.

I’m talking about the multi-millionaire/billionaire CEOs, politicians, and media moguls. This isn’t about your uncle who’s a surgeon and saves people’s lives. Please don’t misinterpret that. They’re not nearly on the same scale of “wealthy”.

Americans think that the country’s wealth looks like this:

Above is is a rather famous graph that shows where Americans think the money is. Americans think that the distribution of income in America looks like these pretty colors. The very richest people, the top 20% (all the fancy millionaires and Bill Gates and, like…. the richest rich Hollywood celebrities???) are the yellow bar, and Americans assigned them a little more than half the money in the country. Next comes the orange, the Really Rich Folks. Americans think that the Rich Folks (whom we picture as the brilliant cardiac surgeons and brilliant bankers and eccentric uncles with mansions - the Rich Folks you can realistically dream of being), have a good chunk of the wealth in the country; maybe 20%. And they believe the upper middle class (red) has almost as much wealth as the Rich Folks (Those in the red are the ‘rich’ people that we know personally, after all, so that sounds sensible.) The working class and poor folks (dark blue - the bottom 20%) even holds some of the country’s wealth as well. You can see the rationale. There are lots of working class and poor people in the USA, so all of their money put together must add up to something. 

What if you ask Americans to sketch out the ideal income distribution?

If you ask the Americans where they think the money should be, they say it should be distributed the way it is in the graph above. Look at that nice, fair-looking distribution. This isn’t particularly revolutionary. It wasn’t a poll of leftist Tumblr children. This is a fairly good, balanced study presented by Harvard. The polled Americans say that in an ideal world, there should be more money in the class with the upper-middle-class folks (red) than they think there currently is; there should be more wealth resting with the hardworking folks, the happily-white-collar people, the normal-rich ones. America thinks it’s only fair that we have more wealth resting with those folks, and a little bit less wealth with Mark Zuckerberg (yellow). America believes firmly that the orange (brilliant cardiac surgeons, famous musicians) are okay where they are - that they have a fair amount of the wealth and their portion can stay the same. In their ideal world, Americans also expanded the ordinary middle class (light blue). These normal Americans generally think that this class, which almost all Americans believe that they belong to, should have more wealth. And the working class (people who can’t afford vacations or new cars, and everyone poorer than that) should have more general wealth than they do. That’s only fair, Americans say, as they arrange this ideal distribution of wealth. This would be a satisfactory balance of money.

Here’s the actual distribution of wealth in the United States:

Yeah… yeah.

Here’s all the graphs together:

Yeah. The wealth of the nation disproportionately belongs to the top 20% of rich people. The rest of the middle and lower classes are crushed into less than 20% of the rest of the wealth, savaging each other for crumbs.

So, no, nobody cares about your Rich Uncle Joe. Nobody is particularly thirsting to put Rich Uncle Joe ‘first against the wall when the revolution comes’ if that’s what people are afraid of.

Rich Uncle Joe the surgeon probably makes about $300,000 per year if he’s a decent general surgeon at an ordinary American hospital. Rich Uncle Joe’s decent, hardworking, saves-lives-every-day income is the orange-ish line in the graph below. (These are deeply shitty colors, by the way.) Rich Uncle Joe is definitely richer than a poor person, but his six-figure income isn’t influencing the nation.

Because the runaway red line in this graph is the 1%.

This graph is also showing you time. In 1979, when incomes were more equal, Rich Uncle Joe would have been Handsomely Rich, a man who commanded respect and moderate wealth, a man able to hold up his head in the company of the truly wealthy people in the nation. He might even perceive himself as being in the same social class as the Rich. He might build himself a fine mansion, golf with political influencers, hire a personal secretary, and invite the rich folks over for dinner (fondue, natch, in a wood-panelled den with a Persian rug) and count himself as an equal.

By 2007, the super-rich had separated themselves utterly from Rich Uncle Joe. Their money makes more money than Rich Uncle Joe makes. Rich Uncle Joe might impress a starry-eyed tumblr teen who really needs the $50 that his wife slips into their birthday card (“I have rich people in my family and ACTUALLY they’re lovely!”) but he has been left behind.  Like OP says: Uncle Joe is not located on the same scale. His wealth is a fraction, which the oligarchs don’t stoop to notice. Also note: 2007, where this graph leaves off, was ten years ago. When The Economist published a graph of American wealth inequality in 2017, they had to break it into pieces to look good in the magazine, because they couldn’t show the 1% on the same graph as everyone else and have it look meaningful. Even with Rich Uncle Joe working his little butt off during all the hours God sends him, he can’t raise the average wage of the 99% until you can see it on a nicely formatted graph. He’s in the top 20-40% of wealthy people in the USA but he is closer to us than to them.

And, given that general surgeons work themselves to death and have mounting levels of educational debt, Rich Uncle Joe’s best hope for his earthly reward is to have all of his debts (including his mortgage) paid off and his retirement savings secured before he loses his hands, meaning that he will have to work 60+ hour weeks at antisocial times in order to be able to stop working when he’s 65, with enough money to cover the remaining 20 years of his life, including the expensive eldercare that he and his wife will require. Since one or the other is statistically increasingly likely to come down with a debilitating illness as they age - cancer or dementia or a stroke, and so on - and the costs of healthcare and eldercare are skyrocketing, Uncle Joe will always feel like he has to hustle to ensure comfort and survival in his winter years. Rich Uncle Joe is ‘rich,’ so he’ll want a private room if he has to go into a nursing home for the end of his life; the average cost of an ordinary private room in the USA in 2016 was $253 per day, so if he wants him and his wife to die in comfort, he will think of this increasingly as he gets older; a fact he is never able to forget or set aside, because he works in healthcare and knows what happens… 

And those are the people that Americans assume are comfortable and happy and positively rolling in their well-earned wealth…

Because here’s the thing: Americans, we all think we’re middle class! We think we’re doing okay, and if we work really hard, we’ll probably get rich. Maybe if we win the lottery or publish that fantasy novel, we’ll be super-rich. So we, Americans, we don’t ask too much of the rich. We make things nice for the rich, because we imagine that one day, we will be one of them. AMERICANS DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE RICH ARE. Americans picture ourselves being “rich” and we picture ourselves shopping at the expensive store, going out to eat, living in The Nicest House On the Main Street of Lobster Neck, Massachusetts and going on one (1) vacation to Italy. We say, “Oh, let’s not make things TOO hard for the rich, because that’s what I’m going to be someday.” 

STOP THIS. THAT FANTASY LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT IT IS THE TINIEST SLICE OF THE HUMBLEST PIE. THE RICH HAVE THE WHOLE BIG PIE, LEAVING THE REST OF US A SCATTERING OF CRUMBS TO FIGHT OVER, AND THAT FANTASY LIFE IS SIMPLY A SLIGHTLY LARGER CRUMB. You are picturing yourself rich, but you are picturing simply an ant on the table, holding up that large crumb, going “ooh, this piece of crust has a tiny dot of cherry filling stuck to it! I’m rich!” and somewhere someone in the distance has an ACTUAL CHERRY and everyone’s like “WOW YEAH one day I’ll win the lottery and get the BIG CHERRY TOO!” but, you know, we aren’t exactly dividing up the pie. The Republican guy who votes to make things nicer for rich people, and votes to make things worse for poor people, genuinely thinks that he’s a middle-class guy with an enviously high standard of living, who is absolutely going to be rich someday. He’s good and moral, he thinks, and he is going to get the big crumb like Uncle Joe.  His whole world is crumbs, in which looms that beautiful mental picture of the slightly bigger crumb. He can’t conceive of the pie. He cannot picture what pie looks like. He thinks pie is what happens when you get, like, three whole cherries together. So he votes, thinking he is supporting the possibility of cherries for Normal Guys Like Him. 

Stop picturing Uncle Joe when you picture “the rich.” The rich we’re talking about wouldn’t even give Uncle Joe a seat at a dinner party.