1. Wealth Is a Birthright

Having money is normal. If you have fallen into poverty, it is not your fault — it is the result of capitalism’s caging of society. From a young age, I believed I would be wealthy. This was not blind self-confidence; it was an almost instinctive knowing. When I was seven, my father ran a hui (rotating savings club), and he often took me with him to collect dues. As a small child carrying a thick stack of cash, walking home, my heart was full of excitement. But every time my father would say quietly, “This money isn’t ours.” That sentence was a bucket of cold water, but it also planted a seed in my young mind — why did other people have money, while my family did not? In that era, my family lived around Zhonghua Road in Taipei. There was a guotie (potsticker) shop nearby; every morning the aroma of pan-crisped wrappers and the white steam from hot soy milk drifted out into the dawn light. I would stand outside the shop, watching the people inside leisurely eat their potstickers, drink soy milk, bite into dumplings, and I would wonder: what kind of people are those? If our whole family ate a single meal in there, it would probably wipe out a month of my father’s salary — how could anyone afford to eat there every day? Only later did I gradually understand: it wasn’t a question of whether you could afford a meal of potstickers. It was class. We were laborers; they were capitalists. From that moment, I quietly vowed to myself: I will have money one day. But where did the conviction “I will definitely have money” come from? Throughout my school years, no one ever taught us anything about wealth. Math class taught addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; social studies taught history and geography; only “money” — that subject — was never taught by anyone. This is not an accidental oversight. It is a deliberately designed institutional silence. To understand this, we have to go back more than two hundred years to the Industrial Revolution. In the late 18th century, steam engines began roaring across England, and factories sprang up like mushrooms after rain. Capitalists suddenly faced an unprecedented problem: who would operate these machines? They needed large quantities of obedient, punctual, instruction-following labor. So the modern school system

was born — not in Britain, but in Prussia, what later became Germany. Prussia was the first to establish compulsory public education, and its design goal was not to cultivate independently thinking citizens but to train qualified industrial workers. There were even writers at the time who studied “how to domesticate laborers,” seriously discussing whether workers should be kept locked inside the factories to improve efficiency rather than sent home. The capitalist’s view of the laborer was, from the very beginning, that of a “trainable production tool.” This system was rapidly copied around the world. Schools teach you to arrive on time, obey discipline, complete assigned tasks, pass standardized exams — exactly the qualities a qualified laborer needs. Schools do not teach you how to create wealth, understand capital, or build passive income. Because if everyone understood these things, no one would show up at the factory. Capitalists need you poor so that you will obediently keep working; the finance industry needs you ignorant so that you will hand them your blood- and-sweat money to “manage.” This is not a conspiracy theory; it is the structural oppression that the capitalist system has naturally produced through hundreds of years of operation. The capitalists may not have intended it consciously, but their subconscious and their interests drove the system to perpetuate itself. So for thousands of years, the fate of the laborer has barely changed. In the old days, the tenant farmer was dragged out of bed before dawn by his father and made to stand barefoot in a freezing paddy to learn how to plow — and his father would say, “If you don’t learn well, no landlord will hire you to till his field.” Today’s parents say: “If you don’t study hard, you won’t find a good job.” The wording changed; the essence did not — both are training the next generation of laborers. Even the elite who travel halfway around the world to study in the United States, who earn doctorates and join large corporations, are at their core still working for someone else. Returning students and non-returning students wear different clothes and do different work, but their identities are identical — they are all laborers. The reason this state of affairs has continued to this day comes down to one word: telling. Or more precisely, not having been told. Let me use a historical analogy. For long stretches of human history, women had no right to vote. This was not because women were innately undeserving of political rights, but because the entire society inculcated the idea that women were not allowed to vote. Everyone — including most women themselves — regarded this as natural and proper. Until one day, someone stood up and said: women should have the right to vote. That was the telling. After being told, women began to awaken, began to fight for it, and eventually obtained the vote. Today, if you say women cannot vote, that becomes the strange position. From “natural and proper deprivation” to “unthinkable absurdity,” the only thing separating the two states is a single act: being told. The story of African Americans is the same. For a long stretch of history, Black people had no right to vote. Had no one stood up to awaken their self-awareness, generation after generation would have “believed” they were not meant to vote, and would have accepted

the deprivation as if it were natural. This was not because Black Americans lacked the capacity to fight for their rights; it was because no one had ever told them: this right belongs to you by birth. Only once the act of telling occurred could the order even possibly change. The logic of wealth is exactly the same. Growing up, no one ever told you that “wealth is a birthright.” Everyone told you instead: study hard, work hard, find a good company, live a stable life. There is nothing wrong with that advice, but it omits the single most important thing — you were born with the right and the potential to be wealthy. This is not a technique to be learned, not a skill to be trained, but a birthright that needs to be awakened. Just as the right to vote is not “granted” but already belongs to every person, the right to wealth is the same. You do not need to first prove yourself “worthy” of money — you only need to know that you can have money from the start. One step further: capitalism, as a system, has already designed the road to wealth. It stands before every person, fair, just, and open. Every single person can reach out and take it. You do not need to invent anything or overturn anything; you only need to be told “this road was always yours,” and then walk it. The problem is that the entire school system, family system, and social system will not, on their own, tell you this. So what this book does is, ultimately, to take the act of telling — which society has forgotten to perform — pick it up, and personally place it in your hand. That is the first thing I want to do: tell you. You have a birthright of wealth. You have the right to live a life of abundance. You don’t have money not because you weren’t hardworking enough, not because you weren’t smart enough, but because no one ever told you that you could have money. You have been raised in a carefully designed cage that made you believe poverty is normal, that it is the result of your own inadequacy. The truth is exactly the opposite — poverty is the product of class injustice in society, and from this moment on, you have been told the truth. Awareness is the beginning of everything. Most personal-finance books on the market teach techniques — buy this way, sell that way, when to enter, when to exit — but not a single one of them dares to guarantee you will make money. Because at the root, they have aimed in the wrong direction. Wealth does not require technique, just as equality does not require technique. All you need is awareness — to know that this right is yours, and then to exercise it. That is what “birthright” means: it does not fall from the sky, but it has always belonged to you, waiting only for you to reach out and take it. From today, please remember these three sentences: having money is normal; poverty is not your fault; wealth is your birthright. ───────────────────────────────────────

Key Points

One, the school system was born after the Industrial Revolution. Its fundamental purpose was to train qualified laborers for capitalists, not to cultivate independently thinking, wealth-creating individuals. This 200-year-old system still silently shapes the destinies of most people today. Two, telling is the precondition of awakening. Just as women’s suffrage began with being told “you have this right,” the awakening to wealth begins with a simple cognition: you were born with the right and the potential to be wealthy. Poverty is not your fate; it is the product of structural injustice in society. Three, wealth is a birthright, not a technique. Most personal-finance books obsess over trading methods but never touch the most fundamental question — do you know that you have the right to be wealthy? Awareness is the starting point. From the moment you know, the change has already begun.

1. Wealth Is a Birthright