Dear peasants, here's why elites don't understand you
Ordinary folk suspect they are living in a different world to elites. That's because they are
The '60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.
Charles Murray
Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things.
Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files
Last week, I addressed the issue of why ordinary people are increasingly suspicious of elites. It seems only reasonable to follow up by explaining to ordinary people why elites seem so removed from them.
There are few one-dimensional heroes or villains
Those on the Left default to assuming the rich are sociopathic. It's not fair to say that those on the Right believe poor people are always lacking in character – after all, lots of impecunious individuals who aren't consumed with self-contempt lean to the Right. But there's undoubtedly a, shall we say, narrative on the Right that failure to succeed is most often a result of personal inadequacies rather than impersonal social forces.
I have stood on several different rungs of the socio-economic ladder during my half-century on the planet. As a result, I've long been sceptical of the cartoon caricatures of both left-wingers and right-wingers, as well as similarly unnuanced portraits of working, middle or upper class people.
There is usually a grain of truth in stereotypes, which is why they exist in the first place. But they are just one aspect of the truth, not the whole truth.
If you see two men punching on in a pub, you will rightly assume they are more likely to be construction workers than neurosurgeons. But that doesn't mean all working-class people are violent, drunken brutes with no impulse control.
If you're cornered by someone at a BBQ who bores you silly with the ups and downs of their recent kitchen reno, you can reasonably assume that person is middle class. But that doesn't mean all middle-class people are vapid, anti-intellectual materialists.
Alternatively, suppose you're cornered by someone at an event by someone who wants to provide detailed advice about gaming the superannuation system to minimise tax. In that case, that person is almost certainly upper-middle or upper class. (I'm guessing the plutocrat who managed to stuff half a billion into his modestly taxed super account is in great demand at society soirées.)
But that doesn't mean all or even most members of the elite are entirely self-interested. All the world's greatest philanthropists have been wealthy. Say what you like about Jeffrey Epstein's pal Bill Gates, but tens of millions of people are alive today who would not be if it wasn't for the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And there have always been, and continue to be, wealthy people who campaign for fairer societies. (Embarrassingly for all involved, leftist revolutionaries almost invariably come from undeniably posh backgrounds.)
My elite-adjacent existence
I grew up on what is usually described as "Sydney's leafy North Shore". (For the slow kids, the reference to foliage is a coy allusion to the fact that upper-middle/upper class Sydneysiders cluster in either the "leafy" North Shore or "beachy" Eastern Suburbs.)*
Deciding to pursue a career as a writer – a naïve desire to "do something creative" is common among those who've grown up without any serious money worries – led to downward social mobility. (So far, at least. But, hey, there's always the possibility of finding fame and fortune by penning the Great Australian Novel.)
However, in the course of my work, I've spent hundreds of hours interviewing elite individuals. I don't want to boast, but I've spent time with more than a few incredibly wealthy and/or powerful individuals over the last quarter of a century. Almost all of them were conscientious, hard-working and highly intelligent. Some were obnoxiously arrogant but far fewer than you would imagine. (It’s those still insecure about their place in the world who are most compelled to embiggen themselves by belittling others.) Granted, most feel they are very much entitled to a "comfortable lifestyle". But it would be simplistic to declare they are just out for themselves.
This brings me back to the question I frequently ponder in these (digital) pages – why are relations between elites and non-elites now so vexed in so many first-world nations?
Hate the game, not the player
In recent years, a new genre of non-fiction writing has emerged. I don't think it yet has a name, but it's a well-heeled form of misery porn that might be labelled, "Meritocracy isn't all beer and skittles for those at the top either, you know!" (Imagine mashing together Angela's Ashes and The Great Gatsby and you'll be in the ballpark.) Arguably, the most well-publicised recent example is Daniel Markovits' 2020 book, The Meritocracy Trap: Or, The Tyranny of Just Deserts.
Here is the relevant part of the blurb:
Meritocracy now ensnares even those who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich adults to work with crushing intensity, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return. All this is not the result of deviations or retreats from meritocracy but rather stems directly from meritocracy's successes.
I can hear non-elite readers muttering, "Cry me a river." So, let me briefly sketch out just how hyper-competitive life at the top is from a young age.
Back when it looked like China would surpass the US, there was a lot of discussion about tiger parenting. I’ll let you in on a little leafy North Shore secret – non-Asian members of the upper-middle class in Anglosphere nations also tiger parent.
Indeed, as Amy Chua was at pains to point out in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), those from any class, racial or religious background can tiger parent. As we will soon see, those from particular class, racial and religious backgrounds are disproportionately likely to tiger parent. Nonetheless, it's an option open to any parent willing to relentlessly drive their child, regardless of any resulting negative impacts on the parent-child bond.
Tiger parenting constantly reinforces the grim life lesson that the world is divided into winners and losers. It is shameful – both for the individual in question and their family – to fall into the latter category. In fact, it is so disgraceful that even your own parents won't love you if you fail to succeed, at first educationally and then in your career.
If you want to put things more charitably, you could say upper-middle-class parents demonstrate their love for their children by doing everything imaginable to ensure they maximise their potential. (Many accomplished people had at least one pushy parent and often two.)
If you're the child of a tax lawyer and economics professor, you're likely to be born with a high IQ. However, a high IQ is a necessary but insufficient condition for joining the elite. If you want to get a "good degree" at a top-tier university, you must work hard from a young age. Even if you are intellectually gifted.
But that's the deal members of the elite sign, or are arguably signed up for by their parents – work hard from early childhood onwards in return for the status, wealth, romantic opportunities and (ideally) job satisfaction that comes with being one of the world's winners.
An emerging race of Übermensch?
In less feminist times, an upper-middle-class man would frequently marry a less affluent and less intelligent – or at least less educated – woman. This had the salutary effect of redistributing both wealth and intelligence. But assortative mating means male doctors no longer marry their office receptionist or a nurse; they now marry a female doctor.
So, to summarise:
· Elite individuals almost always have higher IQs than non-elite individuals. They also usually have high-IQ parents and siblings and typically go to selective schools where they grow up surrounded by other ambitious high-IQ individuals
· Elite individuals are usually far more terrified of failure, or even mediocrity, than non-elite individuals. They may end their lives if they encounter a career setback, have a business fail, or suffer reputational damage. (There’s a reason it was stockbrokers rather than sous chefs jumping out of windows after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.)
· Elite individuals understand that openly acknowledging they are smarter or even just more conscientious than non-elite individuals is socially verboten. As Charles Murray and others have noted, this has resulted in contemporary elites failing to preach what they practice. Elite individuals typically devote enormous resources to their children's education and expect those children to defer gratification, exhibit iron self-discipline, and generally "behave professionally" from a young age. Yet when was the last time you heard a member of the elite, Amy Chua excepted, suggesting non-elites adopt a less permissive parenting style? One-time foster kid Rob 'luxury beliefs' Henderson – whose memoir I again implore you to buy – has also noted Anglosphere elites keep two sets of books. They privately lead lives of self-sacrificing industriousness, sobriety and continence while reliably advocating untrammelled social liberalism in public.
All of the above would be bad enough in terms of having an honest conversation about the radically different value systems, lifestyles and career trajectories of elite and non-elite individuals. But I fear the chasm between elites and non-elites is even more profound than commonly recognised.
Indeed, I fear Anglosphere elites might be morphing into an entirely new race.
A thought experiment
At this juncture, I'll ask you to picture some students at a top-tier university. Or perhaps those applying for grad positions at prestigious law or professional services firms.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Chances are you assumed most of the uni students/job applicants were the offspring of elite individuals. I'm guessing you also thought the genders were equally represented or that women were slightly over-represented. Especially if you're one yourself, you probably also assumed that children of migrants would be over-represented.
So far, so unremarkable. But now remember what ethnicity you assumed those individuals were. If you're on the Left, it will sting to acknowledge this, but you almost certainly made some (justified) assumptions about various ethnic groups being over-represented or under-represented.
Did you, for instance, default to assuming that those of Asian, Indian and Jewish descent would be over-represented?
Did you perhaps assume that Caucasians would be neither over-represented nor under-represented?
If you've supplied the politically correct answers so far, here's the final hurdle to clear: did you think for a single second that any of the students/candidates had a First Nations background?
Class-based vs race-based assortative mating
Humans have always engaged in genetic assortative mating (i.e. marrying within the tribe). Genetic assortive mating remains widespread in much of the world but has become less common in the increasingly multi-ethnic Anglosphere.
The dealbreaker metric for selecting a life partner for contemporary Anglosphere elites is now not race or religion but rather class. For instance, I'd imagine most lawyers would nowadays be open to marrying another lawyer of a different race or religion. But the thought of marrying a data entry clerk would never cross their mind, regardless of the clerk's race or religion.
I don't know if a courageous academic somewhere has already researched this, but the trend in recent decades appears to be that people are increasingly marrying outside their race and religion but within their class.
This is anecdata, but it's not difficult to find such pairings. Consider the aforementioned Amy Chua and her husband – fellow Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld. Or Mark Zuckerberg, the son of a psychiatrist and dentist, who met his wife Priscilla Chan while they were both at Harvard and she was in the process of becoming a pediatrician. (Chan is the child of first-generation, ethnically Chinese Vietnamese refugees.) Or Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. While Wendy Deng wasn't in Rupert Murdoch's economic league when they met, she had already demonstrated a ferocious drive that Murdoch would have recognised and respected. (By that point, Deng had already entered and quickly exited one convenient marriage and earned an MBA from Yale.) Deng's ruthless determination to better her station in life was likely at least partly inculcated by her engineer parents.
If present trends continue, in a generation or two, elite individuals will typically be part-Jewish, part-Asian, part-Indian and part-Caucasian. On the other hand, they will be unlikely to have forebears who were, for instance, African-American, Hispanic or Indigenous.
I'm not sure what the result of that will be. But I've got a bad feeling it won't do anything to improve relations between elites and non-elites.
*When in Australia, Kerry Packer split much of his time between residences in the Eastern Suburbs and on the Northern Beaches (a salt-speckled, slightly bohemian outpost of the broader and staider North Shore). I’ll leave it others to identify a possible correlation between that fact and James Packer’s much-publicised mental health challenges.