The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald noted more than a century ago that the very wealthy aren’t like the rest of us: “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different”.
Today, if anything, they are more different. And much, much wealthier. Altrata, a global consultancy, estimates that about 16 million people worldwide, roughly 0.2 percent of the population, have at least US$1 million in investable wealth. The combined riches of these “high net worth” individuals topped US$67 trillion last year—about 28 percent of the world’s total investable assets.
Within this privileged layer is a subset of billionaires: 3,500 people, 0.000043 percent of the population, who collectively hold more than US$13 trillion in investable assets. A dozen individuals sit at the apex of the wealth pyramid, with a combined wealth greater than that of the poorest 4 billion people.
Sociopaths
The ultra-wealthy live differently. This much we know from photos of their mansions and private jets, media coverage of their travels and escapades, and magazine advertisements aimed at them. Yet Fitzgerald was talking not about lifestyle but attitude—how these people think differently. Was he right? Are they different from the rest of us? In more recent times, social scientists have attempted to find out. Indeed, there is a burgeoning literature on the topic.
One group of studies, “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior”, appeared in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. The findings included that wealthier people were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies, lie in a negotiation and “cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize”. They even found that wealthier people were more likely to take lollies set aside for children. Upper-class people’s “more favorable attitudes toward greed” was one of the explanations for these character failings.
Other studies have made similar findings, such as narcissists becoming CEOs more quickly and psychopaths being over-represented in the upper echelons of the business world compared to the general population. So we might conclude that there is a greater tendency to selfish, anti-social behaviour—even sociopathic behaviour—among those most likely to accumulate personal wealth.
These tendencies find their most disturbing expressions not in lab studies, but in responses to the Earth’s proliferating crises and potential crises, such as the threat of civilisational collapse, an often discussed topic among scientists and a preoccupation of many among the world’s ultra-wealthy. Rather than thinking about the wellbeing of humanity and how we might collectively get through a crisis as a society—or putting their immense resources to work solving immediate problems such as climate change, world hunger and poverty—the ultra-wealthy often prioritise their own interests. Increasingly, people like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are acting out fantasies of interplanetary colonisation, transhumanism and Robinson Crusoe-style survivalism.
Indeed, survivalism is now a ubiquitous movement among the ultra-wealthy. Talking to the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos in 2017, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman reckoned that “50-plus percent” of billionaires in Silicon Valley, the tech centre of the US, had “apocalypse insurance”. By that, he meant escape plans to designer bunkers in disused intercontinental ballistic missile silos and private islands, often with private militias and staff, in the event of social disintegration. And Hoffman was talking well before the coronavirus pandemic added a whole new dimension to the wealthy’s hyper-individualist escapist tendencies.
One peculiar case involving the now-jailed former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried came to light in a Quartz article a couple of years ago. During legal proceedings, lawyers tabled an exchange between Bankman-Fried’s business-partner brother and an officer of their company’s “charity” wing about a scheme to buy the Pacific island state of Nauru. The plan was to construct a bunker on the acquired territory in preparation for “some event where 50%-99.99% of people die”, build a lab and develop “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement”. An aside noted: “probably there are other things it’s useful to do with a sovereign country, too”.
Capitalism and dehumanisation
How do we understand such callous, socially detached “me first and fuck the rest of you” attitudes? How are these sorts of people constantly elevated into positions overseeing our society? The answer is that the system we live in, capitalism, not only encourages and rewards sociopathic behaviour (up to a point) but requires people who run the economy to be ruthless. German-born revolutionary Karl Marx was among the first to recognise this after years of studying the inner workings of capitalism.
Writing in the preface to the first volume of Capital, his systematic attempt to outline the nature of the modern economy, he explained: “I do not by any means depict the capitalist [the business owner or boss] and the landowner in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests”.
Marx thought bosses were arseholes. But he knew that this fact couldn’t explain how the system worked. He went on to show that business owners have economic responsibilities that lead them to act in socially destructive ways, regardless of their individual characters. Capitalists privately own the things that are needed for society to survive: the farms, the offices and factories, the telecommunications infrastructure, the shipping and trucking fleets and so on. But to stay in business, and therefore retain ownership of these assets, their companies have to be financially profitable. That is, they must make more money than it costs to run them.
Capitalists are in the business of reinvesting their profits to expand the scale of production and, therefore, the size of their company. If they don’t, they risk being put out of business by rival companies. There is a ferocious competition between businesses for sales, resources and contracts—and to reduce costs and increase output. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”, Marx wrote of the capitalist imperative.
It is important to emphasise that this capitalist competition is life or death, hence Marx’s gesture to the biblical ten commandments. But “thou shalt make profits” is more than an abstract decree. Capitalists without profits are not simply unprofitable. If their business sinks, they can be saddled with debt and bankrupted, jettisoned from elite society, their children pushed out of private schools, their family, without means, forced to sell up and move to a different part of town.
To avoid this fate, they must ruthlessly exploit their employees. Profits are maintained or increased by paying workers less than what they produce is worth and by intensifying the labour process by introducing machinery and imposing greater workplace discipline (that’s what most managers are for). So, from the start, regardless of whether they are a nice person in their private life, a boss or employer is economically pitted against their employees. To be a boss, they must be an exploiter. They must view workers not in their full humanity but as means to an end and, ultimately, as disposable if they don’t generate enough economic returns for the company.
Indeed, the capitalist is a workplace overlord, deciding who works, how they work (for how long and at what pace), what they produce, how they dress and what they get paid. They are trained to give orders and to treat employees as cogs in the corporate machine. At the extreme end, take as an example Telstra’s former chief operations officer, Greg Winn, who spoke candidly some years ago about how to be a boss, unaware that he was being recorded:
“We run an absolute dictatorship and that’s what’s going to ... deliver results. If you can’t get the people to go there and you try once and you try twice ... then you just shoot them and get them out of the way.”
But capitalism is about more than just treating workers like shit. Capitalist competition is characterised by the transfer of private costs and risks onto society as a whole. For example, companies generate pollution and waste that they are often not required to clean up (economists call this an “externality”). They sell socially destructive products, such as addictive substances or services, the consequences of which they are not required to take responsibility for. They restrict access to necessities such as food and shelter solely to keep prices higher. They produce things to fall apart (economists call this “planned obsolescence”), so that customers have to keep buying them. They create a society in which workers are indebted for most of their lives, and through which the risks of the immensely profitable financial system are loaded onto everyone outside it.
It’s all morally reprehensible. But viewed from a boardroom or an executive suite, such practices are considered “prudent”, “innovative” and necessary for a company to thrive against competitors. Once this way of operating is normalised and justified among capitalists, the results are both privately profitable and publicly catastrophic. So tobacco companies are still thriving decades after the link between cancer and smoking was established. Fossil fuel extraction continues decades after the link between climate change and carbon emissions was established. Wage theft and unpaid overtime are still rampant despite everyone saying that they are crimes. Hunger is still a feature of society despite there being more than enough food to feed everyone.
On and on it goes, not primarily because the people who run the world are arseholes, but because running capitalist society requires people to act like arseholes. The system puts profits before people and demands that its managers act accordingly or be booted from ruling circles.
Just business?
Now that we can see how the system itself is sociopathic, it’s easier to understand how people at the top become god-awful arseholes. While the general behaviour of individual capitalists is a function of their social position, human behaviours can’t neatly be siloed into “business” and “personal” spheres. Indeed, there is a link between how we regularly behave and how we view the world. If someone spends their waking hours as a petty workplace dictator, acting abhorrently but being rewarded and celebrated for it, their character will be affected: to dehumanise people as a matter of course, to treat them as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves, reduces one’s own humanity by degrees. That’s a burden for the capitalists to bear, even if most are oblivious to it.
Moreover, profits aren’t only accumulated within a business. The owners, unsurprisingly, also take a share for themselves. But money has a corrupting power on those who have lots of it. The rich live better and longer and grow accustomed to getting what they want not just in a workplace, but in society, simply by purchasing whatever it is they desire. So in 1844, Marx caustically remarked:
“The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my—the possessor’s—properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money ...
“I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?”
Capitalism doesn’t create just a separate business world of dehumanised relations; it creates a class of people who are generally less socially conscious, more indifferent, more callous, more selfish and less attuned to the needs of others. Sociopathic billionaires have internalised their roles as rulers of the capitalist economy—the dictator-manager, the self-interested firm—and become individual incarnations of its inhumanity.
Arguably, nothing highlights this fusion of business and personal spheres more than capitalist hostility to collectivist sensibilities and to impulses towards solidarity. This is particularly true when workers join trade unions. Capitalists simultaneously display a personal revulsion at the idea of the downtrodden exercising their own power and a managerial aversion to a less pliant workforce and the prospect of paying higher wages. So it should come as no surprise that the most anti-union figures in society are billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, whose personal fortunes have been built on rigid labour discipline in their companies.
Where, then, does this leave us? If it’s true that we can best understand the sociopathic tendencies of billionaires as expressions of a system that relegates human need to an afterthought of profit-making, then the options for changing the world become clearer. Attempts to reason with or humanise those at the top will go nowhere. Even if you could convince a billionaire to become a better person, they would just be replaced by someone else.
Further, attempts to reform capitalism will always be limited by the system’s own logic, which is rooted in its class structure—the reality that a tiny minority privately owns the economy while the majority have to sell themselves to make a living. We can legislate for less worse outcomes, but we can’t legislate away the class division between capitalists and workers, or the competition between capitalists that is the root of so much destruction.
To deal with the inhumanity of the system itself, the competitive capitalist class society needs to be replaced with a cooperative socialist society organised to fulfil all human needs and sustain all human life.
