According to a report that Oxfam recently released for Davos, if things keep going the way that they are going, one per cent of the people on this planet will own as much as the remaining 99 per cent by the year 2016.

If you’re the kind who worries that something went horribly off-kilter in the past couple of hundred years, and that something may be our unhinged modern form of capitalism, here’s your confirmation. It really is that bad.

The reception that the superrich have given this report is diverting. According to a number of articles published in the Guardian of the UK, reactions range from concern on how to redress the situation to panic-fuelled “survival” strategies for the coming Armageddon during which “eat the rich” will become more than a political expression of disgust with the status quo.

The question on everyone’s mind is: Yeah, but do the rich taste like chicken? And what sauce is best served with multibillionaire? If you are looking to shop early, there is a meat catalogue called Forbes that regularly produces lists of the world’s finest specimens for your degustation. There is even some African stock, if you’re one of those fussy types who believe in consuming local produce.

While it is only right and good to target the one per cent as a focal point for the discussion on inequality, they are only the cutting edge of everything that is wrong with how we’ve organised our global and local societies.

Much more frightening is what we don’t talk about nearly as often – that which we 99 per cent are being encouraged to aspire to. This growth and prosperity business is probably going to kill us all long before we can redistribute the one-percenters’ ill-gotten loot.

We’ve all been brought up not only wanting to achieve a certain minimum level of individual wealth but believing that it can happen. You know, the old “if you just work hard enough” sleight-of-hand? That one. So we run on our little hamster wheels and worse yet, aim to consume as a marker of achievement.

Those one-per cent? No matter how rich they are they can still only eat so much endangered beluga caviar in one sitting, however grossly inappropriate and wasteful that sitting might be.

It’s the rest of us wanting to taste beluga caviar that’s the problem.

Case in point: The Economist ran an excellent Christmas article on China’s growing appetite for pork, “Empire of the pig,” that gives me nightmares every time I re-read it. To sum up, when they generally stopped starving and started making some disposable income, Chinese citizens began to indulge their meat-tooth. So much pork is being produced and consumed now that it’s threatening their environment and forcing China to investigate which countries it can coerce into giving up land for pig-feed farming.

And that’s just one story out of millions. If it’s not Chinese roast pork it is the cellphones we insist on replacing every year, or oil palm and soy plantations, or our appetite for disposable plastic bags clogging up the ocean that’s going to do us in.

Any one of these have a back story that supports the misery of a group of workers so that a few can grow rich out of it and the many can enjoy some dubious benefits. The most immediate trouble these one-percenters give us is pipe dreams and the willingness to imagine infinite wealth.

The difficulty is that if we decide to put the current economic system on trial, we’re going to have to collectively accept some responsibility for its redress – yes, including us 99-ers.

Taxing the rich, or finding a means to break their thrones and cast them down is all well and good. And then what? We still won’t be able to afford ourselves unless we do away with the entire premise of perpetual growth and embrace a vision of our future that is communitarian in nature.

Yes, it is good news that we’re talking about inequality. It has been a while since Marxism fell out of favour and it is nice to see it come back into fashion in a way. We still haven’t evolved a better, more comprehensive and widely understood philosophy for a possible modern mass utopia so we have to make do with 19th century thinking.

There’s an intellectual gap and challenge for our times. Eat the rich will only get us so far, as there’s only a few hundred one-percenters at best and I don’t think we can miraculously stretch that across the hungry billions. We need more.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]