Pharmakon IV: Secret Family Recipe

“Due to the repetitive observations made by most in their daily routines in a country with little socioeconomic mixing, there is poor visibility into how the lives of those in other classes transpire.”

Tales of haves and have nots are not unique to 21st century America. The classics of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac speak to the squalor of post-Napoleonic France, the works of Dickens and Austen to the classism of imperial England, and those of Dostoevsky to the serfdom of tsarist Russia. African, Asian, and South American poverty—even in the present-day—is of a severity that makes writing about American inequality feel frivolous. Inequality-induced socioeconomic stratification is also not constrained to backwards states. The phenomenon is universal; it is just a matter of degrees. Germany and the United Kingdom are still very classist. The richest 1% of Germans own 30% of the country’s wealth. 20 of the 55 Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom to date all attended the same private boarding school as adolescents. Ask any Canadian millennial living in a big city—all of which are in the midst of a housing affordability crisis with rents and property values having more than doubled in the last ten years—if they think hard work pays off. They will reply that among their peers, the ones whose lives have progressed with a semblance of normalcy are not necessarily the most hard-working or capable ones but, rather, those whose parents let them move back in rent-free, covered the lease on their apartment, bought them a condo, cut them a six-figure check for a down payment, or co-signed on their mortgage. Inequality is the default state of humanity just as brutality is the default state of nature, but it takes a peculiarly daft society to attribute it to meritocracy.

What does financial success come down to, really? Hard work is certainly an element, but there are few alarm clocks across the country that are not set to 6 am, contrary to the narrative of lazy, welfare queens concocted by President Ronald Reagan. That the rich may also work hard is unquestionable but, frankly, so does almost everyone else. The difference is that the rich put in their time in air-conditioned rooms, sit in padded chairs, take four vacations per year, and have the luxury of a decade to focus on their careers at the exclusion of everything and everyone else. Others toil on their feet, juggle unwanted obligations, and play whack-a-mole with an unending stream of adversity, as the sand in their hourglass runs out and their dreams recede forever beyond the horizon. It boils down to some having the luxury of a lifetime of freedom, heavily subsidized by parents that are financially doting and emotionally undemanding so that every exertion is triggered only by interest. Others have to divert their vivacity to helping their parents with their rent, mortgage, or retirement, scurrying from abusive bosses and belligerent landlords, helping younger siblings through college, tending to chronic medical conditions, battling precarious employment, and silencing the sense of futility that haunts them throughout their lives. It reduces to some being permanently propped up by a bottomless family estate, while others spend the majority of their lives treading water and gasping for air. Since most problems can be paid to disappear, money is effectively a lingua franca, with far-reaching consequences in all domains of life. What success, therefore, comes down to is a behind-the-scenes transfer of tens or hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. More than ability or ethic, money is the performance-enhancing drug in the game of life.

Due to the repetitive observations made by most in their daily routines in a country with little socioeconomic mixing, there is poor visibility into how the lives of those in other classes transpire. Consequently, the typical conception of a life trajectory held by most does not incorporate this financial undercurrent. Instead, it is the persistent narrative engrained in childhood of a linear path from education to work to marriage to property ownership to child-rearing. Pushing over one domino properly is supposed to set the next domino tumbling. In actuality, life is more like a Rube-Goldberg machine with nonsensical, winding, tortuous machinations required to get from A to B. But even considering the domino model for the sake of simplicity, for most, the dominos are placed too far apart to sustain a cascade.