The biggest threat we face? The rich

We've been trained never to criticise the rich and instead to celebrate their 'wealth creation'. New research suggests that in reality, they threaten our way of life most of all.

Are very rich people the biggest threat to our civilisation? I know political ideology suggests you should never criticise the rich but what if the evidence suggests that it is them who will bring about the fall of our way of life? What if you can show that our lives and our security are degraded much more by our own oligarchs than by any foreign power?

We have been trained to understand the wellbeing of our entire society as being driven by the accumulation of wealth on the part of 'wealth creators'. So what if I told you that actually the fall of the rich and powerful is better for most of us, not worse?

For example, everyone 'knows' that with the fall of the Rome, anarchy set in and the barbarians took over. Better a lifetime of tyranny than a day of anarchy and so on. Yet this is not really borne out by the facts. Actually, in the decades after the fall of Rome the evidence is pretty clear that this was a boom time for ordinary people.

Skeletal remain of ordinary people grew taller (a good proxy for a healthy, reliable diet) and older (suggesting reduced morbidity and conflict). There is very good evidence that the fall of Rome was great for the surrounding societies, that once Rome stopped extracting their wealth, the quality of their lives improved markedly.

And that is only one of a number of warnings about the threat of the rich which is available in history. In fact what if I told you that there is strong empirical evidence to suggest that the collapse of civilisations is almost always the fault of the very rich? That is the conclusion drawn by Dr Luke Kemp of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge in his book Goliath’s Curse.

He analyses 5,000 years of history and finds that, left to their own devices, humans are surprisingly egalitarian and much less violent than we are generally led to believe. For example, there is pretty good evidence that intertribal conflict in the first hundred thousand years of nomadic homo sapien existence was actually rare.

What sets off the collapse in large civilisations is the same thing that makes them large in the first place – wealth accumulation. He says there are three things we always see when large civilisations develop – a means of accumulating wealth, a means of protecting wealth, an a means of preventing others from generating their own wealth or avoiding your control.

Think of the former as being 'grain from agriculture, not meat from hunting' (you can't store meat as a form of wealth). Think of the latter as being enclosure, the control of land and the inability of people to escape the control of the powerful. In between is weapons technology.

And what do we see when civilisations collapse? The collapse is preceded by a rapid period of extreme and rising inequality. Kemp preempts the argument that this is what you'd expect a leftie to find by pointing out it is what anyone would find. It is a genuine phenomenon.

Now at this point I must admit that I've not read the book, just a number of reviews and articles on it. But there is so much logical reason to believe that extremely unequal societies are unstable. There is plenty evidence from our existing world – see The Spirit Level again.

If you think about it, inequality is both economically inefficient and socially divisive and both of those are bad for the stability of a society. Look at the US – if half of all consumer spending is accounted for by the top ten per cent most wealthy citizens, wealth is not touching many parts of the economy. It is unquestionable that for any given sum of money, you get more economic impact if it is spread among a larger number of people who spend it rather than a smaller number who hoard it.

Likewise, concentrated wealth leads to innovation, but it is almost always innovation designed to further concentrate wealth, not to improve lives. The entire US economy is now a sequence of monopolies using wealth to change the laws to further expand and entrench their monopoly. AI is just monopoly squared.

But also at a certain point people who have no equity in a society have no good reason to see that society endure. Revolutions are not that common, but un-policeable rises in crime, violence and disruption will quite quickly undermine a society as well.

If you believe in capitalism then you are supposed to believe in free and fair competition. It is not so much the combination of labour and capital in any form which is the justification for the benefits of capitalism, it is that there is always the choice to pick another product which is better or cheaper, disciplining producers to do better and be better.

Google is 100 per cent the opposite of that. It does not compete for your business, it competes to make sure no-one else can get your business. And then, with you trapped in an abusive relationship, it coerces you at will to make it more money at your expense.

“ Stopping this out-of-control wealth machine may be our only hope”

But it is not just the power of corporations and corporate monopolies and it is not just this process of enshitification of consumer experience, it is the personal ownership of wealth and what people can do with it.

The US is currently being purchased. The news in the US is being bought by Trump allies. The leverage Trump used to get rid of an editor he didn't like at CBS news magazine 60 Minutes was to threaten a merger deal which would combine Warner Bros and Paramount into a single entity owned by Larry Ellison, the US's second richest man and a major Trump ally. Similar threats to ABC affiliates was how they got Jimmy Kimmel (temporarily).

Then again, oligarchs own the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, CNBC, Fox News, X, Facebook and soon TikTok, they're all Trump aligned and they're all openly making their media outlets propaganda vehicles. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos publicly told everyone that commentary which was not pro-free market would not appear in the Washington Post.

Let's go back to hunter-gatherers for a second. How come they don't appear to be constantly at each other's throats, trying to kill all the other tribes? Well, for a start, they have no need. They are small, mobile communities. They move towards available resource and negotiate to not all seek to exploit the same space.

The face to face contact in smaller communities means they are embedded in empathetic relationships and that leads to egalitarianism. Those kinds of smaller communities do not celebrate disruptors and divisive people. It is not good for the totality.

That is humans in their 'natural state' (as far as there is one). Something has to turn us bad – which is greed. Another concept you need to get a hold of here is the 'dark triad'. It is increasingly becoming clear that most humans are peaceful, empathetic and collaborative, but that there is a minority which display different behaviours and attitudes.

One of them is narcissism (placing oneself ahead of others on every occasion). One of them is psychopathy (the ability and willingness to do bad things to others). Another is Machiavellianism (being willing to manipulate and trick others for your own ends). For a much smaller minority we get all three together, and that is the dark triad.

There is increasing evidence that people who display the dark triad are large-scale society's biggest problem. In smaller communities they are quickly found out, but in big anonymous societies they can thrive, precisely because of a willingness to manipulate and harm others in their own self interest.

And if you're willing to break the rules and hurt others for your own good, you're well placed to make money. A lot of money. And once you have it you're perfectly attuned to fucking others over to increase it. And then eventually you get into Ted Turner territory, the originator of the brilliant piece of explanation that, for the rich, “Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.”

Yet we're conditioned to believe that saying any of this is unseemly. Why? Because great wealth has run the most incredible propaganda campaign for itself over recent decades. We used to hate the Robber Barons so now they've learned they need to indoctrinate us into their church. We have worshiped the rich as policy and as culture.

And while we did it they have taken from us, and in so doing they have undermined the foundations on which their wealth was created – the rest of us. Wealth is not harmless, and there is very little evidence that its concentration actually good for the totality of us, yet there is evidence it is deeply harmful.

Last week I fretted a little about how to frame stories which hold people to account but do not create more hate. This is where we must get it right. Lazy name-calling of the rich doesn't help, and personalising this as just a couple of bad guys fails to get to the point of it.

What we must call out is the entire system of wealth, it's enabling legislation, its facilitators, the space between the tax loopholes where it grows, its capacity to buy politics and bend it to its own aims, its control of the means of communication. We have got to stop being cowed by the suggestion that this criticism is unseemly or unworthy.

It is not. Stopping this out-of-control wealth machine may be our only hope. Because things are not good right now and, as Dr Kemp points out, having created a global system of total reliance on money, this civilisational fall would not be good for any of us.

Our biggest national security threat may now be the rich. We should take that seriously.