Gaius Publius — The Global Rich Are a Tribe with Their Own Folkways, Values & Mythology. Those Values Are "Pathological."

The sociology of the tribe.

[HARTMANN] The Swiss bank UBS says that four one-thousandth of one percent, 0.004% of the world's adult population, controls $30 trillion. The GDP of the United States is $15 trillion. This is about 13% of the entire planet's total wealth. ...How do we deal with this in this age of globalization, when we have American corporations with hundreds of billions of dollars offshore, you've got American billionaires with trillions of dollars offshore? ... 

[ESKOW] It's not a simple problem. But one of the things we do first of all is we recognize the scope of the problem and we don't let people scare us away from talking about it, saying "It's class warfare" or "It's demonizing the wealthy" or whatever. ...
200,000 people isn't a lot. 200,000 people is a large tribe of a small town, first of all. Secondly, if you just break out the number of those people that are in Europe or the United States, you've got ... 10,000? United States maybe 4 or 5,000? ... these are the social circles. ... 

This goes back to why I think that our political and economic system is a study in anthropology and sociology, as well as economics and political science. This is a little community, Thom. These people know each other.

These people have shared values and those values are inculcated into the Tim Geithners and the Barack Obamas and the Bill Clintons — and everybody else, or most people, who move up the political ladder do so by hobnobbing with these people. And there is a very distinct tribal kind of culture that develops, with its own folkways, its own values, its own mythology. And until we understand that and then extrapolate that out to the global scene, we're not going to be able to address it.

The fundamental problem is that they interpret as virtuous what ordinary people view as pathological. '"Ordinary people" are "normal" by definition. So the tribe sees itself as occupying the "supernormal" tail of the distributional curve rather than "subnormal". The tribe lives in a different world cognitively and affectively in addition to materially, similar to ruling elites historically. As the Vietnamese proverb goes, "The dungheap remains the same, only the flies change."

Down with Tyranny!
The Global Rich Are a Tribe with Their Own Folkways, Values & Mythology. Those Values Are "Pathological."

Gaius Publius