OUR SHAMELESS RICH

What the society loses when the wealthy lose a sense of noblesse oblige.

A week ago The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Economy has been getting an unprecedented boost through consumption amongst the rich. The top 10% now account for a whopping 50% of consumer spending. Thirty years ago the figure was 36%, still plenty high. While the poor and the middle class have had to tighten their belts due to inflation, the rich, buoyed by increases in the value of their stock portfolios and houses, are spending with abandon. “Between September 2023 and September 2024, the high earners increased their spending by 12%. Spending by working-class and middle-class households, meanwhile, dropped over the same period,” WSJ reported. “They’re going to Paris and loading up their suitcases with luxury bags and shoes and clothes,” said one economist at the Bank of America Institute.

The luxury fashion industry bears this picture out. While the brands like Gucci and YSL that have been buoyed by the mass consumer reported big drops in sales in 2024, revenues of brands like Hermes and Brunello Cucinelli, who cater to the rich, have grown. The last dip in the luxury sales growth was in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, when the rich pulled back in solidarity with the middle class. It was deemed uncouth to consume luxury when so many people were suffering. It seems that few rich think so today. The rich have lost all sense of shame and continue flaunting their wealth in the face of economic uncertainty for the vast majority of the people.

What has changed between then and now? For one, the makeup of the rich. That generation that cut down on spending in 2008, even if many of them made their money in the unbridled capitalism of the ‘80s, still retained a modicum of noblesse oblige, the sense of giving at least something back to the society that has enriched and empowered them. It is an ancient concept that called on the elite to recognize that where there is privilege, there is also duty.

The current crop of the rich seem to think that they have no duties to society whatsoever. Ours is the world of crypto bros, pop stars, and CEOs who behave like both. In Trump and Musk and the demagogues like Jordan Peterson who provide pseudo-intellectual fodder for their despicable behavior we see a renewed fascination with social Darwinism that was last rampant during the Gilded Age era. But even ruthless capitalists like Andrew Carnegie built libraries. No one asks Elon Musk about his charity track record. But if you are interested, here it is, courtesy of a NY Times investigation, and you won’t find any surprises there.

The second thing that has changed since 2008 is the shift in our cultural priorities and values. It is true that flaunting wealth is not a new phenomenon, but it has been turbocharged since 2010 by social media, which has unleashed the forces of collective latent narcissism. Meanwhile, much of pop music has moved in the same direction of wealth-flaunting, with social mobility as alibi for the most crass behavior. No one’s asking for Jay-Z and Beyonceé’s charity track record either.

In the past, at least in this Republic, there used to be powerful checks on the unbridled rich, in the form of religion and the government. These bastions of higher power were far from perfect and often worked slowly and ineffectively, but they were there. Today, the boorish and the shameless don’t fear god, and they certainly don’t fear the government; they are the government. Amidst all the political talk about Trump and Musk, the conversation about just how mannerless, tasteless, boorish, and awful they are as individuals does not get enough attention. Any other world leader from a first-world country would be ashamed of the kind of behavior Trump engages in. But we in America are taught since our birth that we live in the best country in the world, so why would we feel shame?

One of the keenest observers of the state of affairs I describe above was the American intellectual Christopher Lasch. He followed up his prophetic 1979 bestseller The Culture of Narcissism with a lesser known one from 1996 called The Revolt of the Elites. Over its 250 pages Lasch made the case for what he was seeing all around him, the elites abdicating all sense of duty to society. They wanted to reap all the rewards, and discard all obligations. “An aristocracy of talent – superficially an attractive ideal, which appears to distinguish democracies from other societies – turns out to be a contradiction in terms,” he wrote. “The talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues. Their snobbery lacks any acknowledgement of reciprocal obligations between the favored few and the multitude. Although they are full of ‘compassion’ for the poor, they cannot be said to subscribe to a theory of noblesse oblige, which would imply a willingness to make a direct and personal contribution to the public good.” Unlike the aristocracy who knew they were fortunate – the very word implies chance – and therefore acknowledged the misfortune of others, in meritocracy we don’t only think that those who are at the top deserve to be there, we also think that those who are at the bottom deserve to be there too.

In his book Lasch devoted a chapter to shame, or – namely – lack thereof. He attacks the at the time fashionable, and even more fashionable now, psychoanalytic notion of wholesale acceptance of shame. Wholesale, because between the healthy and necessary practices of say someone accepting their sexual orientation, our society has also taught people to discard the shame of wealth flaunting. “‘Acceptance’ becomes shameless, cynical surrender when it can no longer distinguish between nobility and pomposity, refinement of taste and social snobbery, modesty and prudery. Cynicism confuses delusions of grandeur, which call for moral and therapeutic correction, with grandeur itself,” he wrote.

The wave of wealth flaunting by the nouveau riche of the 1980s was eventually met with cultural resistance, from alternative music that swept away arena rock, to arthouse cinema that trumped banal Hollywood fare, to dance clubs like Limelight, where what mattered is how you looked and not how much money you had. In fashion, from top to bottom, a certain sobriety swept away the power-shouldered excesses of the previous decade. So far, there is scant evidence that a new wave of counterculture is brewing. To be sure, the shamelessness of the rich is not without some cultural criticism. In the past few years shows and films about shitty rich people, like “Succession,” “White Lotus,” and the “Triangle of Sadness” have proliferated. But these are largely consumed by the middle class with a mixture of envy and resignation. Needless to say, this does not amount to a counterculture. Perhaps it will come one day, but for now the only light at the end of the tunnel is for those who are traveling first class.