The other day I was thinking again of what I had written about the difficulty of judging people. I had asked : how do you judge rulers, given that the scope of their actions is so vast, that their effects are so complex, and can entail misery for some and benefit for others. Then I realized something, one of these things that are so obvious that you wonder how come you didn’t realize it a long time ago：there is an evil beauty about being part of the elite, something with a taint of the demoniac or the sadistic, in the sense that when you are of the ruling class, it is the others who bear the brunt of your actions. Of course you are also affected, but not that much. You are like the great ironclad battleships, it takes a lot of torpedoes to sink you. Actually, come to think of it, when you are of the ruling class, you can so easily do damage to others, even by the most innocent or well-meaning of your actions. Scott mc Fitzgerald also felt that, in the Great Gatsby, when he said of that rich couple (I think the girl’s name was Daisy) : “they were tiring people, Daisy and…, they messed up others’ lives, then they retreated into their money”.
Speaking of Scott McFitzgerald, I don’t know much about the subject, but I have a feeling that in his days, people had a powerful feeling that the rich were a race apart, an attractive and dangerous people. I’m thinking of “Gatsby”, and of “The adventures of Augie March” by Saul Bellow, and “the talented Mr Ripley” by Patricia Highsmith.
Nowadays, the truly rich are more discreet. Or rather, people spend much more time reading about pop stars, actors and sportsmen when they want to dream of glamour. That group is an odd species, most of them are from the middle class/ working class, and behave that way. Think of Victoria Beckham, who so actively behaved like a nouveau riche, even when she wasn’t yet there. By doing that, she actually emphasized so strongly her middle classness. So, pop stars, actors and sportsmen are ambiguous creatures, in that they can be awesomely rich yet they never try to behave like aristocrats, on the contrary they seem to work hard to retain something of the common touch. Those who try to do otherwise risk a fall from popular favour. Think, for example, of Nicole Kidman who by some trick of nature, or twist of character, always looks a pretty aloof person, and seems so very disliked because of that.
Up to probably around 1940, someone like Ms Kidman would probably have been idolised precisely because of that something glacial about her personality. People then were still addicted to the sexy unreachableness of aristocrats, their distant manners and exotic codes of behaviour, and the danger of trying to rub shoulders with them, when they could so easily play with you and leave you pregnant, heartbroken or humiliated.
Ours is an age of middle class comfort and fuzziness, nowadays the rich about whom we care and fantasize about must feel like people whom we believe that if we actually met them somewhere, say in a bar, we’d just strike a conversation with them and could even marry them, and our life would afterwards be a sort of enlarged version of being middle class, just having a bigger house and more jewelry but still somehow remaining within the same norms of behaviour.
However, the financial crisis is probably changing our view of the rich, in the sense that it has rudely woken us from our comfortable fantasies about actors and singers, and made us realize that all along, there was another class of rich people, the real rich people, the bankers and financiers who don’t do harmless movies, but do real business moves which have enormous impacts on our lives. All of a sudden, we are realizing, like our peasant ancestors did for thousands of years before us, that our lives are hostage to the fantasies and follies of the powerful. If your king wanted to invade the neighbouring kingdom, that meant your village would have to suffer the horrors of war. Many a thing had remained the same, but we were lulled into a feeling of comfort.
