Special Treatment

I write this in a period when the country and the world is in transition. The late renowned journalist John Pilger created a documentary film called ‘The New Rulers Of The World’, about 20 years ago. My students and I studied it together in Globalisation courses. As the title of his documentary film suggests, he theorises that the old feudal societal system of the Middle Ages, which had been softening into what we called Democracy, was now being broken down into a new elitism, dominated by increasingly conscienceless and violently money hungry individuals.

Social inequality was entrenched, notions of social justice and equity were broken down, and brutal demarcations of power and powerlessness were now becoming the new norm. Underclasses were now being created to be exploited, and human worth was no longer seen as intrinsic, but was now comparatively assessed. Some humans were deemed more valuable than others.

People started talking openly about privilege and entitlement, and being humbled and feeling grateful for the same, about ten years ago. Noticeably, those blessed with most of these endowments, including inherited property and recently created offshore bank accounts, were the most quiet about them, and the most egalitarian in their politics, the most publicly cultivated in their tastes, and the most philanthropic in their assiduous virtue signalling.

Amidst this new socio economic calibration rose a repellant and very recogniseable category of people: those adjacent to powerbrokers, those who opportunistically court and fawn on the old feudal aristocrats and the new money makers. Parasites, fattening themselves via contacts and connections and whatever crumbs they could collect from the tables of their big name buddies. The rent-a-crowdsters, the seat fillers. Those attracted by terms like ‘high end’ and ‘high worth’ and ‘high value’.

By their name dropping you will know them: because, coming from relatively unmonied backgrounds, they thirst and hunger to create the impression of what they imagine privilege to look like. Brand names are brazenly displayed, bling is prominent, they are desperate to be seen in the society pages. Their resumes and CVs are short on substance, and in many cases concocted or faked. Because they cannot bear feeling inadequate, they openly say that formal qualifications do not amount to very much. The name of the institution of education is just a brand stamp to them. They assume everyone really feels the way they do. That no one truly has real inherent worth, and life is just a hall of mirrors.

Scammers and teledrama queens. Victim mentality giving way like sink holes under their facial reconstruction procedures.

This is the ‘Fake It Till You Make It’ brigade. They would not know what to do without their little band of followers, who are required to regularly bolster their fragile self image. They boast about knowing important people, who do favours for them. Like puffer fish, amplifying their actual size, in a hostile world.

But ironically, as the world is changing, such antics are becoming increasingly ridiculous. People who take short cuts are now being seen not as cool or clever but lazy and greedy, and when they boast about disrespecting the systems and being above the laws of the land, their gross sense of narcissistic exceptionalism shows not the superiority they imagine, but reeks of actual inferiority.

Their jobs are sinecures, gained through personally knowing so and so, and coming from such and such a family, and so whatever profession required sincere effort or actual exertion was too much work for them. So they never knew the transformative experience of having a true vocation, or of working towards anything other than self enrichment. They are colossally little, in the end, and their legacy is a reverberating reel of repetitive selfies.

These kinds of people are super fatted in every sense. They mimic and they mime. They are like the smooth surface sheen on the top of a cyst. All the inflammation is pooled up and toxic inside. And when their masks fall, at points of tension or micro aggression, you see how atrophied they have become. No accountability and a delusional sense of immunity has eroded their empathy. Like acid, it has eaten away their residual humanity. They are disconnected from the hoi polloi, and they prefer it that way.

These are the people who boast of using contacts and connections to get certified vaccine certificates during the Covid pandemic, so they had the certificate to show without having had to take the vaccine. No protection needed, they thought, because they felt themselves to be extra special, and superhuman - and immune to the normal ailments that affected lesser people.

Death, the great leveller, is something they like to defy. It makes them feel outrageous, larger than life, to live while others die, to travel in comfort while others cannot, to jump queues while others faint from exhaustion. They see themselves as born exceptional: and if only everyone could recognise that, the world would match the ideal realm in their heads. All the grievances they carry come from this sense of the failure of others to recognise their superiority.

Their ideal realm is a world with plush red carpets rolled out, people ushering them through iterated archways with smooth surfaces and embossed augmentations. They worship notions of exceptionalism. It’s their religion. It’s Stone Age principles, wrapped in high end gloss. Remember that, when you see their big lippy mouths open in those carnivalesque smiles in the glossy magazines.

The norms they live by - ‘if no one can prove it, I did no wrong, you’d have to be stupid or naive not to work the system, people who play by the rules are fools’ - have become an ecosystem. Only very toxic plants thrive in it. Venus flytraps, and the like.

They divide the world into winners and losers, and everything is commodified: every relationship is transactional, to them. Enmeshed in a world of surfaces, simultaneously stagnant and superficial. If it was not for their pathological need to be admired, they would be invisible, if not quite immortal.