The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny or Revolution
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
At the age of 10 I was sent as a scholarship student to a boarding school
for the uber-rich in Massachusetts. I lived among the wealthiest Americans
for the next eight years. I listened to their prejudices and saw their
cloying sense of entitlement. They insisted they were privileged and wealthy
because they were smarter and more talented. They had a sneering disdain for
those ranked below them in material and social status, even the merely rich.
Most of the uber-rich lacked the capacity for empathy and compassion. They
formed elite cliques that hazed, bullied and taunted any nonconformist who
defied or did not fit into their self-adulatory universe.
It was impossible to build a friendship with most of the sons of the
uber-rich. Friendship for them was defined by whats in it for me? They
were surrounded from the moment they came out of the womb by people catering
to their desires and needs. They were incapable of reaching out to others in
distresswhatever petty whim or problem they had at the moment dominated
their universe and took precedence over the suffering of others, even those
within their own families. They knew only how to take. They could not give.
They were deformed and deeply unhappy people in the grip of an unquenchable
narcissism.
It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have
seized total political power. These pathologies inform Donald Trump, his
children, the Brett Kavanaughs, and the billionaires who run his
administration. The uber-rich cannot see the world from anyones perspective
but their own. People around them, including the women whom entitled men
prey upon, are objects designed to gratify momentary lusts or be
manipulated. The uber-rich are almost always amoral. Right. Wrong. Truth.
Lies. Justice. Injustice. These concepts are beyond them. Whatever benefits
or pleases them is good. What does not must be destroyed.
The pathology of the uber-rich is what permits Trump and his callow
son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to conspire with de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed
bin Salman, another product of unrestrained entitlement and nepotism, to
cover up the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whom I worked with in
the Middle East. The uber-rich spend their lives protected by their
inherited wealth, the power it wields and an army of enablers, including
other members of the fraternity of the uber-rich, along with their lawyers
and publicists. There are almost never any consequences for their failures,
abuses, mistreatment of others and crimes. This is why the Saudi crown
prince and Kushner have bonded. They are the homunculi the uber-rich
routinely spawn.
The rule of the uber-rich, for this reason, is terrifying. They know no
limits. They have never abided by the norms of society and never will. We
pay taxesthey dont. We work hard to get into an elite university or get a
jobthey dont. We have to pay for our failuresthey dont. We are
prosecuted for our crimesthey are not.
The uber-rich live in an artificial bubble, a land called Richistan, a place
of Frankenmansions and private jets, cut off from our reality. Wealth, I
saw, not only perpetuates itself but is used to monopolize the new
opportunities for wealth creation. Social mobility for the poor and the
working class is largely a myth. The uber-rich practice the ultimate form of
affirmative action, catapulting white, male mediocrities like Trump, Kushner
and George W. Bush into elite schools that groom the plutocracy for
positions of power. The uber-rich are never forced to grow up. They are
often infantilized for life, squalling for what they want and almost always
getting it. And this makes them very, very dangerous.
Political theorists, from Aristotle and Karl Marx to Sheldon Wolin, have
warned against the rule of the uber-rich. Once the uber-rich take over,
Aristotle writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution. They do not
know how to nurture or build. They know only how to feed their bottomless
greed. Its a funny thing about the uber-rich: No matter how many billions
they possess, they never have enough. They are the Hungry Ghosts of
Buddhism. They seek, through the accumulation of power, money and objects,
an unachievable happiness. This life of endless desire often ends badly,
with the uber-rich estranged from their spouses and children, bereft of
genuine friends. And when they are gone, as Charles Dickens wrote in A
Christmas Carol, most people are glad to be rid of them.
C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite, one of the finest studies of the
pathologies of the uber-rich, wrote:
They exploited national resources, waged economic wars among themselves,
entered into combinations, made private capital out of the public domain,
and used any and every method to achieve their ends. They made agreements
with railroads for rebates; they purchased newspapers and bought editors;
they killed off competing and independent businesses and employed lawyers of
skill and statesmen of repute to sustain their rights and secure their
privileges. There is something demonic about these lords of creation; it is
not merely rhetoric to call them robber barons.
Corporate capitalism, which has destroyed our democracy, has given unchecked
power to the uber-rich. And once we understand the pathologies of these
oligarchic elites, it is easy to chart our future. The state apparatus the
uber-rich controls now exclusively serves their interests. They are deaf to
the cries of the dispossessed. They empower those institutions that keep us
oppressedthe security and surveillance systems of domestic control,
militarized police, Homeland Security and the militaryand gut or degrade
those institutions or programs that blunt social, economic and political
inequality, among them public education, health care, welfare, Social
Security, an equitable tax system, food stamps, public transportation and
infrastructure, and the courts. The uber-rich extract greater and greater
sums of money from those they steadily impoverish. And when citizens object
or resist, they crush or kill them.
The uber-rich care inordinately about their image. They are obsessed with
looking at themselves. They are the center of their own universe. They go to
great lengths and expense to create fictional personas replete with
nonexistent virtues and attributes. This is why the uber-rich carry out acts
of well-publicized philanthropy. Philanthropy allows the uber-rich to engage
in moral fragmentation. They ignore the moral squalor of their lives, often
defined by the kind of degeneracy and debauchery the uber-rich insist is the
curse of the poor, to present themselves through small acts of charity as
caring and beneficent. Those who puncture this image, as Khashoggi did with
Salman, are especially despised. And this is why Trump, like all the
uber-rich, sees a critical press as the enemy. It is why Trumps and
Kushners eagerness to conspire to help cover up Khashoggis murder is
ominous. Trumps incitements to his supporters, who see in him the
omnipotence they lack and yearn to achieve, to carry out acts of violence
against his critics are only a few steps removed from the crown princes
thugs dismembering Khashoggi with a bone saw. And if you think Trump is
joking when he suggests the press should be dealt with violently you
understand nothing about the uber-rich. He will do what he can get away
with, even murder. He, like most of the uber-rich, is devoid of a
conscience.
The more enlightened uber-rich, the East Hamptons and Upper East Side
uber-rich, a realm in which Ivanka and Jared once cavorted, look at the
president as gauche and vulgar. But this distinction is one of style, not
substance. Donald Trump may be an embarrassment to the well-heeled Harvard
and Princeton graduates at Goldman Sachs, but he serves the uber-rich as
assiduously as Barack Obama and the Democratic Party do. This is why the
Obamas, like the Clintons, have been inducted into the pantheon of the
uber-rich. It is why Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump were close friends.
They come from the same caste.
There is no force within ruling institutions that will halt the pillage by
the uber-rich of the nation and the ecosystem. The uber-rich have nothing to
fear from the corporate-controlled media, the elected officials they
bankroll or the judicial system they have seized. The universities are
pathetic corporation appendages. They silence or banish intellectual critics
who upset major donors by challenging the reigning ideology of
neoliberalism, which was formulated by the uber-rich to restore class power.
The uber-rich have destroyed popular movements, including labor unions,
along with democratic mechanisms for reform that once allowed working people
to pit power against power. The world is now their playground.
In The Postmodern Condition the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard painted
a picture of the future neoliberal order as one in which the temporary
contract supplants permanent institutions in the professional, emotional,
sexual, cultural, family and international domains, as well as in political
affairs. This temporal relationship to people, things, institutions and the
natural world ensures collective self-annihilation. Nothing for the
uber-rich has an intrinsic value. Human beings, social institutions and the
natural world are commodities to exploit for personal gain until exhaustion
or collapse. The common good, like the consent of the governed, is a dead
concept. This temporal relationship embodies the fundamental pathology of
the uber-rich.
The uber-rich, as Karl Polanyi wrote, celebrate the worst kind of
freedomthe freedom to exploit ones fellows, or the freedom to make
inordinate gains without commensurable service to the community, the freedom
to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit, or the
freedom to profit from public calamities secretly engineered for private
advantage. At the same time, as Polanyi noted, the uber-rich make war on
the freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom
of association, freedom to choose ones own job.
The dark pathologies of the uber-rich, lionized by mass culture and mass
media, have become our own. We have ingested their poison. We have been
taught by the uber-rich to celebrate the bad freedoms and denigrate the good
ones. Look at any Trump rally. Watch any reality television show. Examine
the state of our planet. We will repudiate these pathologies and organize to
force the uber-rich from power or they will transform us into what they
already consider us to bethe help.
Chris Hedges
