Neuroses of the Rich

A serious lag exists between the avowed political concerns of our time and the kinds of studies that are being done in universities and other places of solemn thought. For many decades, beginning at least with the Thirties, the official concern of the country was with the poor. In consequence, they have been much studied. Their education, ethnic composition, marital and sexual tendencies, psychiatric afflictions, unemployment and shortage of income have all been subjects of exhaustive academic attention. They still are, and therein lies the lag.

For the official concern of the Government, we all know, has now changed. President Nixon has made it perfectly clear, to use his words, that those who have asked what they could do for themselves and have (continued on page 163)Neuroses of the Rich(continued from page 129) found a profitable answer are now the proper object of public concern--along with those whose ancestors asked and answered for them and, additionally, it now appears, quite a few who simply helped themselves. Yet the academic preoccupation remains unchanged. The poor are still being studied. The Ford Foundation is financing practically no work on the rich. It is this situation that the present essay is designed, in some small part, to correct.

I've been studying the problems of the rich under exceptionally favorable circumstances in the village of Gstaad in Switzerland. Partly, this is the result of an accident; I started going there to write some 18 years ago, and the rich moved in on me. Of necessity, though, my observation has been somewhat at second hand. A scholar who is working on Watts, Bedford-Stuyvesant or the Appalachian Plateau can get out with his people. If you are a serious writer, that is impossible with the rich. It is the nature of the wealthy existence that it involves the most elaborate possible waste of time. (Wasting time is also commonplace in university circles and, indeed, some of my academic colleagues have raised it to the level of a scholarly rite.) However, hearing of my interest, a couple of exceedingly handsome women--one the wife of a motion-picture producer, the other of an Italian automobile magnate--volunteered to help. Both were in a position to waste a great deal of time.

The last great tract on the problems of the rich, The Theory of the Leisure Class, was written by Thorstein Veblen just before the turn of the century. (A new edition, for which I have written an introduction, has recently been brought out by Houghton Mifflin. It is a marvelous book, for which this parenthetical aside should be considered a commercial.) Much, we have discovered, has changed since then. In 1899, wealth, by itself, was a source of distinction. It was necessary only that people knew one had it. Accordingly, Veblen wrote of the ways by which the wealthy advertised their wealth--of the methodology of conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure. Mansions, carriages, clothes and social festivity were the most suitably conspicuous forms of consumption. If carried beyond a certain point of excess, all involved a satisfactory manifestation of waste. Leisure, in a world where nearly everyone had to work to survive, was sufficiently conspicuous in itself. But the point could be driven home by clothing--corsets, hoop skirts, high silk hats--that was palpably inconsistent with any form of toil.

The modern problem of the rich is simple: Wealth is no longer exceptional and therefore no longer a source of distinction. Yet the rich still yearn for distinction. The problem is exacerbated by their strong tribal tendencies. They flock and hunt together, and if everyone around is loaded, money and conspicuous expenditure do even less for an individual. (In addition to the usual inducements--the seasons, tradition and the tax authorities--whim appears to play a role in the migratory tendencies of the rich. My researchers told me that on a certain day last winter, Gstaad suddenly became unfashionable and the rich all went to Rio for the carnival. An aging fellow traveler of the rich, who was without funds but who could not afford to be separated from the mob, took himself, according to legend, to the neighboring town of Buhle and had a trusted ally mail prearranged postcards home from Brazil.) In any case, last winter a man who lost $100,000 at backgammon in one evening got almost no notoriety from his outlay and very few invitations as a result. In an even sadder case, a woman who combines great wealth with repellent appearance and advanced nymphomania paid $300,000 for a lover--the technique is to deposit the money in the local bank and to ensure reliability and durability by limiting the amount that can be withdrawn in any month--and got no mileage from it at all, only the lover. One of my assistants, the wife of the motorcar man, says she was once propositioned by a 20-year-old Italian who wanted only an automobile. She offered to put him in touch with the wife of a good used-car dealer.

There is a further problem with the classical forms of conspicuous consumption: They are often positively inconsistent with the quest for distinction. Thus, extra weight and a boozy appearance, once an index of rank, are now damaging for a woman and no longer do much even for an Englishman of noble birth. The average proletarian, after having dined with the rich, would stop on the way home for a hamburger. Similarly, houses without people to manage them reduce the owners to work, which is an undistinguished thing. Broadly speaking, no one in the United States or Europe ever serves anyone else except as a matter of stark necessity. Additionally, houses that are merely expensive are said to lack taste--because they usually do. Something can be done to neutralize the latter charge by hiring a decorator. A local aspirant gets some mileage from having the only house decorated by Valerian Rybar for a reputed hundred grand. But with most other decorators, there is the problem that one must live with the result. Sometimes, although not often, even the rich are sensitive.

Finally, although it is tough to work, idleness no longer has any affirmative value. On the contrary, it has come to be believed that an idle man is unimportant. If a woman is sufficiently beautiful and has a good figure, she can survive idleness, for it is taken for granted that she has ways of occupying at least part of her time. But this role also now invites criticism.

So a person must be both rich and distinguished, and distinction is something that money will so longer buy. To be rich and commonplace is to live on the edge of despair. There are tribal dinners, cocktail parties, gay informal luncheons, receptions for visiting movie producers, stars or directors, and the undistinguished remain at home. They essay festivities on their own, but except for a few characters of deficient wit who are known to be getting by on their wits, no one shows up.

Meanwhile, an effort to cultivate an aspect of importance encounters grave natural handicaps. The local sample of the rich includes a number of individuals whose families, former husbands or business firms consider it highly advantageous that they live at the greatest possible distance. That is to say that they lack intelligence, charm, emotional stability or any other known attainment, including the ability to read without undue movement of the lips. And quite generally, the merely rich lack the ability to command the favorable attention they crave, and the ability to do so disintegrates further with age. One of my researchers says firmly that the average rich man has only one chance to excel these days: "He's got to be a real clown." To fend off age, a fair number even resort to a local clinic where they are injected with cells, said to be superior to their own, that are supposed to keep them young and virile. However, my other researcher is bearish, or certainly not bullish, about this: "The most it's ever done for any man I've known is to give him a sore ass." In addition to the cells, the two drugstores in Gstaad cater to a major concentration of customers for fraudulent pills to prevent aging.

From the foregoing, it will seem that the affluent are now not nearly as happy as Veblen's conspicuous but uncomplicated rich. The past year, however, may have altered things a bit. Some of the rich, oddly enough, have had their neuroses subsumed by old-fashioned worry about money. In Gstaad, a distinction is made between the rich and "the only two-house rich." The latter, who may also be refugees from alimony or the IRS, spend pretty much all of the money they get. For many, income comes in dollars. The several devaluations, adding up to around 30 percent, although they seem not to have weakened anyone's faith in the Republicans as staunch defenders of the dollar, had a marked effect on people's personal economy. Quite a few of the afflicted stopped me in the village to ask my views on the monetary situation; and twice couples have crept into our apartment to inquire. One man, with a look of woe I haven't seen since our troops overran Dachau, said he might have to go to work. He had never tried it.

I endeavored to help by telling my patients, if they were Americans, that they should count on the dollar's going to zero or perhaps a trifle below. As I developed this thesis, I could see a different look--that of anxiety--spreading over the leisure-ravaged faces. I knew I had rescued fellow humans from the deeper anxieties of the rich and returned them to the simple, old-fashioned, manageable worries about money that everyone else has.