Wealth has dehumanised the super-rich, and there's nothing they can do about it

[Newsjock]

Source: The Independent
By Jacques Peretti

So what are the super-rich: are they bastards? Are they, as Hemingway put it, just like us, but with "more money”? Are they going to save us? Destroy us? Are they corporate psychopaths who've channelled their murderous impulses into making money, not serial killing? Or are they lonely and needing love, but trapped in a gilded cage of Bentleys and Lear Jets?

No, none of the above. I spent 6 months with them for a show I made for the BBC, called The Super-Rich and Us. I travelled to various castles and penthouses all over the world.

... So what did I learn from spending so much time with the super-wealthy? They're fast becoming a breed apart. And this isn't a lazy use of the term "breed apart" - it's both biologically and psychologically accurate. It's their self-willed destiny.

The super-rich believe that they're Masters Of The Universe, and the facts seem to bear them out. They hold power in that quiet understated way Sun Tzu defined as “the one who doesn't speak in a room. He's the one who holds all the cards”.

This gives them something they can't help: an intolerance for weakness. Even the most self-avowed Bill Gatesian liberal and philanthropic billionaire, paying for libraries and vaccine programs in Africa, can't quite comprehend why everyone on earth isn't as determined to be as successful as they are. If they're not - goddamn it, I'm going to show them how.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/what-i-learnt-about-inequality-after-spending-time-with-some-of-the-richest-people-in-the-world-10016438.html

[Trillo]

1. They rigged the game

From the article,

... the fallacy of moral improvement that comes with money has been used to justify inequality. The rich sincerely believe it, and they want us to sincerely believe it too, and guess what? We do. If we don't achieve the unachievable, we've failed. It's a rigged game.

[Electric Monk]

2. Paul Piff has been doing some interesting research at UC Berkely...

Last edited Mon Feb 2, 2015, 04:07 AM - Edit history (1)

http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean?language=en

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsense_06-21/

http://planetsave.com/2013/12/23/a-rigged-game-of-monopoly-reveals-how-feeling-wealthy-changes-our-behavior-ted-video/

Using money games (in which some were given more money than others), jars of candy (reserved for sick children), and even hidden camera experiments with real automobile traffic (which cars were more likely to obey the law — stop at a cross walk — for a pedestrian), results of all of these showed a general tendency for wealth and hierarchical status to increase one’s sense of entitlement (and are “more likely to prioritize self-interest over the interests of others”) …while simultaneously decreasing one’s empathy and concern for others.

What’s more, as this hierarchical inequality increases, the impact on individuals and societies — in terms of health, education, social trust, community, incarceration, etc — is profound…general social inequality has a way of spreading and increasing in tandem with the increase in economic inequality.

[jwirr]

4. I think we need to define this a mental illness and bring back the institutions.

[hedda_foil]

3. For me, this was the takeaway.

If you visit this Elysium, as I did, you'll realise that inequality is not about money, but an idea of wealth-engineered eugenics. In their minds, they are not only richer than the rest of us, but also “better”.

And the word “better” is important, because the fallacy of moral improvement that comes with money has been used to justify inequality. The rich sincerely believe it, and they want us to sincerely believe it too, and guess what? We do. If we don't achieve the unachievable, we've failed. It's a rigged game.

Eugenics.

[2naSalit]

6. Zactly!!! n/t

[ND-Dem]

10. thats certainly been my experience; even the nicest of rich people believe they're better and

deserve all they have and are singularly blind to any advantages given to them

they look at life like a contest they deservedly won. the best are ready to be kind to their inferiors so long as their superiority in doing so is acknowledged; the worst would walk over a dying man without a thought, or kill him if there was a buck in it

[MohRokTah]

5. Anybody who has not watched Elysium should.

The pop culture references in this piece are spot on.

[tclambert]

7. If a billionaire's taxes doubled, it wouldn't affect his standard of living.

If he made an extra hundred million this year, it wouldn't affect his standard of living. At a certain point, they can indulge their most expensive fantasies and yet barely scratch the wealth they have built up. All the wealth beyond that is just some kind of game-playing. They don't need it, they don't do any good with it, and it doesn't even make their personal lives any more enjoyable. It is pointless excess. Yet I have the feeling many of them don't "grok" this.

The article explains a little bit of why. They physically separate themselves from everyone else. They only go places with limited access, traveling by private jet, helicopter, or limousine, never, never walking out among the common people. Their travel secretaries/security teams arrange it so you will never meet these people. They live on the same planet, in the same countries, even in the same cities as us, yet they live apart, as if on a separate wavelength common people can't see or hear. And who do they interact with socially? More people like themselves, or servants who fawn over them and cater to their feelings of superiority.

[benz380]

16. Rich people make and/or influence the tax laws, so nothing can be done. n/t

[moondust]

8. Sickos.

And the system that allowed them to accumulate so much while millions or billions of other people go hungry and homeless is also sick IMO.

[hunter]

9. They ought to be taxed out of existence, for their own good...

... but mostly for the good of the rest of us.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

11. "Class" by Paul Fussell

mentions their isolation. It is a hilarious book written in 1983 and is still pretty much accurate.


He talks about how the people at the very extreme ends of the class spectrum are invisible. He calls them the "Top Out-of-Sights" and the "Bottom Out-of-Sights". His class structure starts with "Top Out-of-Sights, Upper, and Upper Middle."


From "Class", page 30:

"When I think of a really rich man, says a Boston blue-collar, "I think of one of those estates where you can't see the house from the road." Hence the name of the top class, which could just as well be called "the class in hiding." Their houses are never seen from the street or road. They like to hide away deep in the hills or way off on Greek or Caribbean islands (which they tend to own), safe. and for the moment, from envy and its ultimate attendants, confiscatory taxation and finally expropriation. It was the Great Depression, Vance Packard speculates, that badly frightened the very rich, teaching them to be "discreet, almost reticent, in exhibiting their wealth." From the 1930s dates the flight of money from such exhibitionistic venues as the mansions of upper Fifth Avenue to hideaways in Virginia, upper New York State, Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey.


"The situation now is very different from the one satirized by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class. In his day the rich delighted to exhibit themselves conspicuously, with costly retainers and attendants much in evidence. Now they hide, not merely from envy and revenge but from expose' journalism, much advanced in cunning and ferocity since Veblen's time, and from an even worse threat, virtually unknown to Veblen, foundation mendicancy, with its hordes of beggars in three-piece suits constantly badgering the well-to-do. Showing off used to be the main satisfaction of being very rich in America. Now the rich must skulk and hide. It's a pity.


"...Just as the tops are hidden away on their islands or behind the peek-a-boo walls of their distant estates, the bottoms are equally invisible, when not put away in institutions or claustrated in monasteries, lamaseries, or communes, then hiding from creditors, deceived bail-bondsmen, and gulled merchants intent on repossessing cars and furniture."

[starroute]

21. One year my husband and I delivered phone books

We were short on cash and it seemed like an easy way to bring in a little extra for a week's work. We were assigned one of the hilliest, most out of the way corners of our county. And though there were a certain number of ordinary suburban homes along the road, there were an amazing number of extraordinary long driveways going over a rise and around a curve to some mansion or other. Places we would never have known were there if we weren't required to bring the phone books to their doorsteps.

And those are just the ordinary rich. I'm sure that where the really rich hang out, even phone book deliveries can't get through.

[ND-Dem]

12. "wealth-engineered eugenics"

Whether they're in their private jets, helicopters, or penthouse suites, they occupy a space that mere mortals like us can only squint at from street level. Their separation makes it easier for them to accept the inequality of which they're a part - and puts them literally out of reach.

In this biosphere, they eat better food, go to better schools, wear better clothes, take better medicine, and thus breed a cleaner, richer tribe. They even breathe cleaner air. Several billionaires have their own mobile air supplies, which are pumped into whatever home they've decided to stay at. If you have a property in Shanghai, for example, being super-wealthy allows you to avoid having the same smog-filled lungs as the rest of the city’s 14m inhabitants.

If you visit this Elysium, as I did, you'll realise that inequality is not about money, but an idea of wealth-engineered eugenics.

[Hekate]

13. John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, George Soros....

That kind of broad brush condemnation is not entirely useful.

[Spider Jerusalem]

14. Joe Kennedy the fascist sympathiser is probably a better point of comparison

considering that it was his money, not his sons'.

[Jamastiene]

15. The super-rich, themselves, have dehumanized

the super-rich. They don't have to act the way they do and expect the rest of us to be thankful to scrounge for the crumbs they accidentally drop. Period.

[Brigid]

17. This is why one of my favorite true stories will never happen again.

http://glessnerhouse.blogspot.com/2012/05/upcoming-nato-summit-recalls-protest.html?m=1

Chicago, Thanksgiving Day 1884. Assorted Bohemians; socialists; anarchists; and disgruntled underpaid and overworrked wage slaves marched and down Prairie Avenue, chanting, singing and playing the "Marseilles," and ringing the doorbells of the mansions of such luminaries as Marshall Fields and George Pullman. The wanted to show their "thanks" in a befitting manner, they said.

How do we do that now? Those demonstrators literally knew where their targets lived. We don't. Well, we do have an idea -- but we can't get at them.

[deutsey]

18. I haven't spent time around the so-called "super-rich"

But thanks to a part-time job I have, I have mingled among the "close-to-super-rich."

They were a lot like the description here, but I always detect a deep sense of anxiety underlying their fancy clothes and coiffed hair. While I'd like to have a fraction of the kind of wealth these people have for financial security, I always leave these events convinced I have no desire to be like (or even around) these people.

[raouldukelives]

19. And those that serve them lie to themselves and sell us all out for money and a pat on the head.

I've watched people who I had spoke with and had formed ideas about in my mind that they were a genuinely good person. I have watched those same people swiftly morph into someone else when they are in company of the wealthy. Hapless head nodding & boot licking, not because they agree with them, like them or respect them. Only because they hope they might somehow find favor with them and bless them with money.
Principles & ideals only mean something when you stick to them, not just speak of them.

[AZ Progressive]

20. Americans are self centered enough to not care about the poor and homeless and black people....

How can you expect the rich to be any different to the 99% ?

[Tuesday Afternoon]

22. I think De-Humans seek out money. Thanks for this post. I was thinking about this yesterday.

Which came first, the sociopath or the money?

They have no guilt/conscience/morals to stop them from acquiring it and they need something to validate their narcissism.

I don't know but, they seem to go hand in hand.

[Initech]

23. The super rich did not make their money through the same means as the rest of us.

They lied, cheated, stole, and monopolized to get their fortunes, which is why they can't relate to us.