Tracing the Alienation of the Rich and the Poor

The social dynamics of the billionaire’s partial enlightenment

Photo by cottonbro studio, on Pexels

“Barry’s Economics” is a YouTube channel run by a British stand-up comedian who went bankrupt and immersed himself in the abundant psychological and social scientific literature that shows how rich guys tend to be just the worst.

Instead of merely satirizing capitalism, Barry explains wealth’s measurable effect on the human brain. Science has corroborated virtually all the common-sense suspicions about how power corrupts.

For instance, there’s an experiment in which the participants play a rigged game of Monopoly, in which some of the players randomly receive double the money at the outset and get to roll the die twice. Throughout the game, those players are observed to strut and taunt the less fortunate players, acting as though they had earned their success, and by the end, when they report on how the game went, the fortunate players don’t speak about their unfair advantages, but credit their strategic thinking.

The psychological explanation for this descent into warped egoism is that the brain learns from its experience. The more success you have, the less you rely on others because you can boss them around, so you no longer need to empathize with anyone. Your brain loses its reliance on mirror neurons. By contrast, if you’re not a billionaire, you depend much more on society, so your brain learns it has to take other people’s perspectives into account.

Barry doesn’t say much about the replication crisis in these crises, which may call some of the experimental results into question, but the observed patterns are clear, and the explanations for them are plausible. As history has repeatedly confirmed, power corrupts, and it does so not because of anyone’s choice but because of how the brain works. Power corrupts at the neurological level.

As Henry Adams said in 1907, “The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.”

Barry uses this science to argue for socialist constraints on the accumulation of wealth, which is a reasonable extrapolation from this scientific knowledge.

But I’d like to emphasize another implication of this research, which is that precisely because of this predictable corruption, the wealthy few are partially enlightened.

Upper and lower-class alienation

Notice the overlap between the rich guy’s isolation and that of the monk, ascetic guru, Romantic artist, or other social outsider who’s considered the paragon of spiritual excellence. Think of Jesus, who is supposed to have enlightened himself by spending forty days (meaning just a long time) alone in the Judean wilderness, where he overcame “satanic” temptations.

If the above social scientific research is sound, the same lesson ought to apply to both rich and poor outsiders. Both learn that they don’t need society, so their brain’s ability to empathize ought to decline. The wealthy learn that because of the insincerity of the layers of sycophants, servants, or adoring fans that insulate them, they can depend only on themselves. The leaders exaggerate the extent to which they’re the sole causes of their success, so they concoct a solipsistic, narcissistic fantasy in which they’re all that matters.

Meanwhile, the guru, prophet, saint, or underclass artist meditates and discovers the importance of some metaphysical reality, something greater than himself or herself. Once again, morality may not matter because all our profane illusions come to nothing in the cosmic scheme.

True, poor outsiders who reject social conventions as they struggle to enlighten themselves by looking inward are known, on the contrary, to emphasize the need for morality as a precondition of spiritual maturity. Somehow, despite their alienation from unenlightened societal compromises and vices, the sage finds a theological or philosophical rationale for prosocial behaviour. I’ll return to that irony in a moment.

But notice there’s another important difference between these two kinds of social alienation. Again, if you’re a billionaire, what isolates you is your enormous success. You surround yourself with a private society, such as a gated community, in which you’re of central importance. Everything in your world revolves around you, from your groveling employees to your plethora of material possessions.

As for the ascetic outsider who renounces social obligations and eschews the material world, he or she can hardly be isolated in that respect. The guru, sage, or starving, countercultural artist has no employees, wealth, or luxuries. He or she is isolated in a wilderness, slum, or basement. This outsider is immersed in himself or herself, which may be this person’s only possession. The seeker chooses to renounce society or makes the best of marginalization, seeking spiritual insights rather than money or fame.

This is the crucial difference between these kinds of alienation: the wealthy outsider has a private world to play with, whereas the poor outsider owns nothing. Thus, the wealthy outsider toys with this playground, including the people within it, and because the greed for success is never satiated, the planet is this outsider’s oyster. Insofar as everyone has a price and can be bought, the billionaire outsider views all ordinary folks as potential underlings.

The management of outer and inner worlds

Here, we have a basis for the infamous corrupting influence of power on the wealthy outsider. It’s not just that this outsider’s brain no longer needs to adapt to the moral ties that bind society, or that he or she exaggerates the importance of domination. The powerful outsider builds up a physical empire that must be managed, so this outsider has the opportunity to play god. In fact, warlords, kings, emperors, and CEOs have all along been the only real gods and the models for the religious enshrinement of these dominators.

Of course, the penniless outsider has no such playground, no empire to run, no army of employees or cornucopia of distractions. Thus, whereas the wealthy outsider copes with his detachment from society by playing god in the real world, the poor outsider copes with the same detachment by sublimating the alienation and building empires from ideas or tinkering with her perspective.

Again, the wealthy outsider has a physical, outer world to toy with because she owns a corporation, various mansions, yachts, and so forth, yet the poor outsider has only an inner world to play with because she’s renounced the outer world or is too sensitive to excel in brutal struggles for dominance.

The wealthy outsider masters the godlike task of dominating an outer world, whereas the poor one adopts the neoshamanic role of mastering an inner life, inventing philosophies, theologies, and fictions to replace the mundane social tasks of managing a family or a conventional occupation.

This is why the wealthy outsider is, at best, incompletely enlightened. He or she shares with the rationally enlightened philosopher a cynical view of the noble lies that hold the kludge of mass society together, including the lies of morality (such as the conceit that people have special God-given rights).

Yet this powerful outsider gets sidetracked in managing a material empire. This dominator has abundant hands-on knowledge of what it feels like to live as a god, as he or she relishes the luxuries and exploits and humiliates the underlings. But the dominator will lack insights into the meaning and noble purpose of godlike power. This leader will lack creative insights into meta questions because those are discovered on an inward journey, not an outward one.

Only the poor outsider who has nothing left to lose is forced to devote himself or herself to the creative task of building an image of the world to counter the foundational absurdities and horrors. So the guru, prophet, saint, or artist invents an abstract ideology, as in a philosophy, theology, or fictional world, to occupy this outsider’s attention, standing in for a more mundane, conventional role in society.

If poor outsiders tend to be moral despite their dismissal of profane social compromises and normalized hypocrisy, they likely learn it from the aesthetics of their inward, creative, more fully neoshamanic pursuit. In crafting an ideology or artistic realm, the lower-class outsider learns to appreciate artistic excellence, so all complex constructs, including all organisms, would have obvious merit in those aesthetic terms.

No such marginalized reconstruction of morality awaits the wealthy dominator who has no patience or free time to waste on purely inward (and thus commercially dubious) creativity.

The partial meeting of antisocial minds

At any rate, it’s ironic that in revolting against mass society, the upper and lower classes meet in a kind of alienation that partially enlightens even the psychopaths who tend to own the bulk of the society that they despise. The lower-class outsiders are forced to retreat to inner worlds because they, too, detest mainstream life, but they lack the resources to physically dominate their real environment.

Indirectly, the poor outsider’s handiwork may come to dominate, as his or her creed or artwork may grow from a cult to a religion, but this is rare, and it typically happens after the outsider perishes in obscurity, when an opportunist latches onto the oeuvre and twists it into a more useful ideology for enslaving minds and excusing upper-class vices.

Most poor creative outsiders stay poor, and regardless of the artistic merits of their sublimated works, their output serves mainly a therapeutic function. The output dignifies this lowly outsider’s life even when no one else is aware of it, because this is all that this outsider has.

Yet full enlightenment in the premodern sense is only a stage of personal growth. You lose your egoism when you turn inward because that extreme isolation forces you to confront your existential condition, whereupon you meditate on meta questions about your ultimate role in reality.

The powerful outsider has no such incentive for inner explorations since he or she is preoccupied with a galaxy of real-world tasks — the management of an actual empire, as in a kingdom or corporation — and would be inclined to belittle the inner, creative life as a pitiful compensation for poverty.

So the powerful dominator is enlightened enough to scoff at middle-class myths and conceits, but not enlightened enough to escape the trap of empowerment. The wealthy few tend to have rich outer worlds and vacuous inner ones. Sure, this dominator avoids filling her head with mass fantasies, but unlike the poor outsider, the wealthy individual doesn’t replace the crass conventions with worthier fictions or ideas.

Further reading

• The Ancient Cold War Against The Alienated Superrich
• The Wealthy Cabal Has Always Despised the Poor Masses
• How Superstars and Losers both Know Life’s Strangeness
• The Capitalist Tyranny of Extraversion
• “Why Politicians Keep Getting It So Wrong,” on YouTube
• “We Treat Billionaires Like Oracles — Here’s Why That’s Wrong,” on YouTube

Check out my music on YouTube

[embed]