23 October 2024. Billionaires | Literature

Billionaires are traumatised indulged narcissists. That’s a problem for everyone else. // Han Kang’s Nobel Prize is about giving voice to the voiceless. [#610]

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1: Billionaires are traumatised indulged narcissists. That’s a problem for everyone else.

Jack Self has got to know a very small number of the world’s billionaires—four, he tells you early on in his piece in MacGuffin Magazine, which is about one in 700 of world’s estimated 2,781 billionaires.

All the same, it’s enough of a sub-sample for him to reflect on what he’s learned from this, even if not’s exactly qualitative research.

He splits them into two types—self-made and next—but says that the two types have a lot in common:

In my experience, both categories of billionaire are dominated by interminable existential crises — although each displays nuance when it comes to confrontation. The ‘self made’ have a tendency towards aggressive megalomania, while ‘second gens’ demur in favour of nihilistic hedonism.

For those born into extreme wealth, he says, it is almost impossible for them to grasp anything of “material or social reality.” Nothing ever touches the sides. As in The Great Gatsby, their money means that they never have to experience the consequences of their actions.

To inherit a condition of unjustifiable wealth means to never experience cause and effect. All external pressures are alleviated by capital: there are no consequences to missing a deadline, to not finishing a project, to dropping out or giving up. It is terrifically difficult to fail, in any normal sense.

(The private jet. Photo: Andrew E. Cohen/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The result of this lack of consequence, this lack of cause and effect, is that they live forever in the moment, which makes them sound like a very rich version of those neuroscience subjects that has had parts of their brain removed as a result of an incident and has no sense of the future.

This is amplified by the fact that they have no sense of ‘need’—because money takes care of everything:

This muddles everything, rendering all decisions equally important or unimportant, or big or small, or both. They spiral pretty easily. Unluckily, a life without real-world feedback quickly becomes directionless (the primary source of the existential crises). Luckily, the absence of consequences masks any and all shortcomings (hence the nihilistic hedonism).
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Absurd amounts of money usually also mean parental absence, with the result that emotionally the next-gen billionaire is both traumatised and over-indulged.

Their parental relationships are rarely healthy, and are marked by childhood rejection, neglect and lack of support. At the same time, anyone employed to care for them was (understandably) financially motivated to lavish praise and be overprotective... This contradiction is literally the foundational marker of narcissists.

The same sense of blur extends to the rest of their lives. They can’t go on “holiday”, even though they spend almost of their lives in expensive hotels or in valeted apartments that might as well be expensive hotels.

Since they do only symbolic work (if they work at all), there are rarely any tasks that cannot be deferred (sometimes indefinitely). In other words, you can’t take a break from a fake job.

They have a lot of homes, the ultra rich, not so much homes as a property portfolio, nowhere you really call ‘home’, just another destination that you can spend time in. And when they travel between them, they never come into contact with anyone. They travel in tinted limousines to airports where they climb aboard an Embraer or a Cessna Citation, ushered through any customs and security protocols in private. This mobility is one of the reasons that politicians tell us that the ultra rich are impossible to tax, but this is almost certainly not true:

It is true that they are a global and agile class [but] their sources of wealth are deeply rooted in place: national stock markets, land and property, the sedentary populations of humans that purchase their products or services (which are in turn made at specific locations). The ultra-rich are probably the easiest people in the world to tax. They can leave. But they can’t take their assets with them. If you are an electrician or a cook or a lawyer you can migrate and take your entire means of income with you.

Self suggests in his piece that the ultra wealthy have a metaphorical wall around them, “which is erected on a foundation of paranoia, distrust and fear.”

These walls are not just metaphorical.

the innumerable petty mechanisms of isolation and control (from security to social convention). The bodyguards. The cameras. The layers and layers of locked doors. The assumption, by workers, that the ultra-rich must always be left alone, never bothered... The barriers that embrace the very loaded can also be actual walls: razor wire fences; galvanized spikes; electrified perimeters; soaring planes of solid brickwork, blockwork and concrete. This is a class obsessed with voluntary immurement.

In a purple passage that’s hard to lift a quote from, he riffs for a while on the phenomenon of the gated community of the ultra-rich, where he has from time to time been hosted. Silence is everywhere. Privacy and distance is always respected. [T]ime is drawn out as thin as the air.”

The reason he is interested in the psychology—even the psychosis—of the billionaire class is that the end of “modernity” is approaching. He describes this in two contradictory ways which are both true:

Modernity is a project founded on patriarchal domination, on linear time, infinite extraction and unstoppable accumulation... The dividends of modernity were social, civic and material. It brought prosperity (for some), but this was purchased at the expense of many peoples’ whole lives, and, of course, our collective futures.

The reason that this matters now is that the end of modernity is also its most dangerous moment:

those in power will do anything they can to preserve an increasingly fragile status quo. It is especially worrying when the ultra-rich are so divorced from reality, so cocooned and entombed in their wealth that they barely perceive the violence they commit against the world as such. From the perspective of the impoverished, this class of people combine the decadence of Versailles with the brutality of war criminals.

Self’s psychological profile of the inner and outer worlds of the billionaire came at a time as I was reading the plethora of American billionaires—from Elon Musk on down—who are busy bankrolling Donald Trump’s campaign even though they have mostly made a fortune from Bidenomics.

In the Financial Times yesterday Edward Luce said this was down to psychology:

When you are as rich as Croesus, paranoia about losing it all takes hold. Your sense of reality changes.

The ultra rich don’t like markets very much—not competitive markets, anyway—and many of them don’t like democracy. But reading Jack Self’s piece I realised that it went deeper than that, to a profound disconnection from anything that mattered. It’s another reminder of Cory Doctorow’s observation that “every billionaire is a policy failure.”

H/T The Browser

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2: Giving voice to the voiceless

The South Korean writer and academic Yung in Choe has a piece in Yale Review celebrating the Nobel Prize in Literature won this month by her compatriot Han Kang.

(Han Kang. Illustration by Niklas Elmehed. © Nobel Prize Outreach)

Her Nobel Prize was announced the day after Hangeul Day, which marks the invention of the South Korean alphabet. She is the first South Korean writer to win the Literature Prize, and the second South Korean to win a Nobel. The former president Kim Dae-jung, was awarded the Peace Prize in 2000:

[I]t is significant that South Korea’s two laureates... have both led careers shaped by the long fight for democratization. For decades, conservatives have denied or dismissed the Gwangju Uprising, the atrocity in which the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan killed hundreds of pro-democracy protesters, and wounded or maimed thousands more. Because of Han’s Nobel win, more of the world will know that it not only happened, but also that it continues to matter.

(Memorial Hall in the May 18th National Cemetery in Gwangju. Photo: Schlarpi, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Yung explains that the Gwangju Massacre is central to Human Acts, which she regards as Han Kang’s “magnum opus”. The uprising against Chun started on 18 May, 1980, and went on for weeks, meeting savage repression. Yung explains that the novel has helped to explain the silence of her mother—who is around the same age as Han Kung—about the 1980s:

She does not refuse to talk about it per se, but over the years I have gathered that discussing it causes her pain, so I prefer waiting for her to volunteer information rather than asking her for it. Once, we were wandering the campus of her alma mater in Seoul when she looked up at a building and remarked that her classmates set themselves on fire and jumped off the roof as a form of protest. And then, I fill the gaps in my knowledge with books.

In the novel, an editor named Eun-sook is hit repeatedly in the face by a detective while is interrogating her about the translation of a banned book. From Deborah Smith’s English translation of Human Acts:

“She was struck so hard, over and over in the exact same spot, that the capillaries laced over her right cheekbone burst, the blood trickling out through her torn skin.”

In the novel, another activist is brutalised in such a way that she continues to bleed for two years, and is permanently unable to have children.

As Yung writes:

[W]hile I did not grow up in that climate of violence, I did grow up in its aftermath. I took to heart Han’s belief, which she expressed in The New York Times, that “the last line of defense by which human beings can remain human is the complete and true perception of another’s suffering.”

One of the features of the novel is that it gives voice to the women who were involved in the uprising. Many students took part in it, and the work of attending to the dead bodies was mostly done by high school girls, who did not receive thanks or acknowledgement:

Giving names to the nameless and, likewise, voices to the voiceless is something Han does consistently.

In another novel, Greek Lessons, the protagonist has literally lost the ability to talk. In another, The Vegetarian, the central character’s decision to give up meat is as incomprehensible to herself as it is to everyone else. Han’s most recent novel, We Do Not Part, due to be published in English in January, is about the Jeju Uprising of 1948–1949, in which the government killed “tens of thousands of citizens in the name of anticommunism.”

[Han] acts as a conduit for the memories of generations that suffered state violence, passing them on to generations that inherited these traumas but not necessarily the long-suppressed facts beneath them... Human Acts forced me to reckon with my inheritance, this formless and weighty thing, to recognize at what cost South Korea’s democracy was won. The novel is not a promise to heal all wounds but an invitation to mourn them together.

(Han Kang. Illustration by Niklas Elmehed. © Nobel Prize Outreach)

Not much of her work is available in English, although the recognition by the Nobel Literature committee will probably change that. The Nobel Prize “biobibliography” said of her work that

Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead .

Han Kang is the daughter of a distinguished South Korean novelist, Han Seung-won, and she reportedly declined his suggestion of a “celebratory banquet’ to mark the Nobel Prize because of the wars raging in Ukraine and Palestine:

In a relentless year of state violence and hostile attempts to silence resistance against it, this is whom the Swedish Academy chose to honor: a writer whose work in both life and literature has been to recover some dignity from the ruins of trauma. As Han writes in Human Acts:

After you died I could not hold a funeral,

And so my life became a funeral.

It seems that the Nobel Literature Committee had an eye to what it was doing.

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j2t#610

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