As personal incomes and government revenues suffer from the ongoing economic malaise, the rich are increasingly discredited and even hated. As Dalrymple points out in a piece for the Library of Law and Liberty (h/t Mary Catelli), they are unique in this regard:
There is one group that is not protected from hate-speech: the rich. Of the rich it is permissible, and in some circles de rigueur, to speak disparagingly or hatefully…
The best-known remark of the current President of France, François Hollande, was that he did not like the rich. Would he have said that he did not like Jews, Arabs, the poor, postmen, drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, or any other group the defining characteristic of whose membership is not itself criminal? He wouldn’t even have dared, politically, to say that he didn’t like tramps, drug addicts or alcoholics.
Very good article.
I’ve mentioned my views on the ‘zero sum game’ – I think it has a lot to do with what I call the Bononbo fallacy.
In the book The Spirit Level – which I’ve only dipped into, I seem to recall that, for whatever reason, it drew on research on Chimpanzees and Bonobo monkeys and concluded (more as a semi ‘humorous’ aside, I think) that fortunately humans are more probably like Bonobo monkeys i.e, evolved to have lots and lots of sex.
I think it was also in the Spirit Level, something about a teenage boy saying ‘girls aren’t interested if you don’t have the latest stuff’; trainers and smart phones (full of porn) etc, I presume.
But alas the Bonobo fallacy is the product of a perverse wishful thinking – it derives from the notion that sexual selection (or activity more like) in Bonobo’s is a radical inversion of the norm. I.e. sex, rather than being at the root of envy, jealousies, (and vanity, narcissism in humans) all the brutal violence (the zero sum game) that Dalrymple has often commented on so powerfully, and is attested to day in and day out in the media, is actually the primary soothing, grooming, appeasing means of social therapy, as it were.
J.K Row
On which note I couldn’t resist this… I expect a Rage Of Virginia Woolf type treatment of J.K Rowling’s latest book anytime soon.
I actually no very little about her, I’ve never read Harry Potter. I’ve only just today read a few pages of her Causal Vacancy.. or whatever it’s called.
Very early on she sets up a scene of grotesque ‘middle class’ (petit bourgeois?) hypocrisy that takes place on Church Row, no prizes for guessing the connotation.
If I’m not wrong, what little I do know of her, before she was famous she had a baby to her ‘lover’, a relationship that I presume went sour. My prejudice tells me that – whilst I don’t think of Rowling as having been overly promiscuous – this lover was probably the latest of several such liaisons, more or less i.e. she subscribed to what Dalrymple refers to as the ‘false prospectus’ more than she did traditional courtship and surprise, surprise she ‘falls’ pregnant, he turns out to be quite worthless as a parent – and the f**king state didn’t step in adequately to ameliorate the consequences of her folly.
But at least she’s been a good rich person by funding the labour party on this basis.