The rich need the rest of us, not just economically as a source of surplus labor, but as a mirror to reflect their vanity and as a source of validation.

Not every member of the ruling class requires fame and publicity (though some certainly do my-hero ) but I now believe they still require our existence to at the very least position themselves favorably compared to where we stand. Or crawl. Or lay.

Much of this is economic, of course. Having a labor surplus and the consequent “churn” keeps the working class precarious and struggling to survive, but there’s a personal validation element to it, I believe.

I have some distant relations that are wealthy. I’m talking landlords with holdings up and down the state and beyond. They don’t require fame (but I doubt they’d say no to it) but they do want poors like me around, often asking for me by name, for invitations to wine tastings, pompous restaurants, manorside dinner parties, and other ways to flex their wealth on people that don’t get to experience that every day.

They won’t give you money. Never. They will give you advice and keep insisting that if you don’t like bland cold runny (but very expensive) food that it’s because you have an undeveloped or unrefined palate. The crudest of such rich relatives actually told me, quote, “you can’t appreciate (bland cold runny but every expensive food) because you’ve been eating shit all your life.” Same attitude about wine. I have to agree with the collective consensus of wine snobs regarding the subtle accents of what year and what soil and what kind of wood the cask surely came from, or I’m an ignorant barbarian.

They want me to be an ignorant barbarian. They need that.

It isn’t enough to be rich. Someone else has to be poor, and they have to see that difference to assure themselves of their secular Calvinist “elect” status, over and over again.

I think if most rich people lost access to poor people entirely, even if they were in no physical danger, it’d make them feel poor after a while and give them emotional distress.