Priyamvada Gopal writes:
Last week, Tory MP Esther McVey, Iain Duncan
Smith's deputy, insisted it was "right" that half a million Britons be
dependent on food banks in "tough times". Around the same time,
the motor racing heiress Tamara Ecclestone totted up a champagne bill of £30,000 in one
evening.
A rich teenager in Texas has just got away with probation for
drunkenly running over and killing four people because his lawyers argued
successfully that he suffered from "affluenza", which rendered him
unable to handle a car responsibly.
What we've been realising for some
time now is that, for all the team sport rhetoric, only two sides are really at
play in Britain and beyond: Team Super-Rich and Team Everyone Else.
The rich are not merely different: they've become
a cult which drafts us as members. We are invited to deceive ourselves into
believing we are playing for the same stakes while worshipping the same ideals,
a process labelled "aspiration".
Reaching its zenith at this time of
year, our participation in cult rituals – buy, consume, accumulate beyond need
– helps mute our criticism and diffuse anger at systemic exploitation.
That's
why we buy into the notion that a £20 Zara necklace worn by the Duchess of Cambridge on a designer
gown costing thousands of pounds is evidence that she is like us. We hear that
the monarch begrudges police officers who guard her family and her palaces a
handful of cashew nuts and interpret it as eccentricity rather than an apt
metaphor for the Dickensian meanness of spirit that underlies the selective
concentration of wealth.
The adulation of royalty is not a harmless
anachronism; it is calculated totem worship that only entrenches the bizarre
notion that some people are rich simply because they are more deserving but
somehow they are still just like us.
Cults rely on spectacles of opulence intended to
stoke an obsessive veneration for riches. The Rich Kids of Instagram
who showed us what the "unapologetically uber-rich" can do because
they have "more money than you" will find further fame in a novel and
a reality show.
Beyond the sumptuous lifestyle spreads in glossies or the
gift-strewn shop windows at Harrods and Selfridges, and Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop website, shows like Downton Abbey
keep us in thrall to the idea of moolah, mansions and autocratic power. They
help us forget that wealthy British landowners, including the Queen, get
millions of pounds in farming subsidies while the rest of us take back to the
modest homes, which we probably don't own, lower salaries and slashed pensions.
Transfixed by courtroom dramas involving people who can spend a small family's
living income on flower arrangements, we don't ask why inherited wealth is
rewarded by more revenue but tough manual labour or care work by low wages.
Cue the predictable charge of "class
envy" or what Boris Johnson dismisses as "bashing or moaning or preaching or bitching". Issued by its
high priests, this brand of condemnation is integral to the cult of the rich.
We must repeat the mantra that the greed of a few means prosperity for all.
Those who stick to writ and offer humble thanks to the acquisitive are
contradictorily assured by mansion-dwellers that money does not buy happiness
and that electric blankets can replace central heating.
Enter "austerity
chic" wherein celebrity footballers are hailed for the odd Poundland
foray, millionaire property pundits teach us how to "make do" with
handmade home projects and celebrity chefs demonstrate how to "save"
on ingredients – after we've purchased their money-spinning books, of course.
Cultish thinking means that the stupendously rich
who throw small slivers of their fortunes at charity, or merely grace lavish
fundraisers – like Prince William's Winter Whites gala for the homeless at his taxpayer-funded
Kensington Palace home – with their presence, become instant saints.
The poor
and the less well-off, subject to austerity and exploitation, their
"excesses" constantly policed and criminalised, are turned into
objects of patronage, grateful canvasses against which the generosity of wealth
can be stirringly displayed.
The cult of the rich propounds the idea that vast
economic inequalities are both natural and just: the winner who takes most is,
like any cult hero, just more intelligent and deserving, even when inherited
affluence gives them a head start.
We are mildly baffled rather than galvanised into
righteous indignation when told that the rich are being persecuted – bullied
for taxes and lynched for bonuses. The demonising of the poor is the flip side
of the cult of the rich or, as a friend puts it, together they comprise the yin
and yang of maintaining a dismal status quo.
It is time to change it through
reality checks, not reality shows.
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