How Greed Misleads the "Good Guys"

(Liberals & Leftists Alike)

Jag Bhalla

October 29th 2024

Does how the “good guys” live match their kind words? That’s the core question sociologist Musa al-Gharbi investigates in what deserves to be a discourse-shifting, delusion-decimating, new book. We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite is a rigorous, wide-ranging, self-image smashing analysis, but we’re going to focus mainly on just this aspect: “how liberals exploit social justice advocacy to make themselves feel good, but ultimately offer up little more than symbolic gestures.” Al-Gharbi finds that this fashionable social justice “wokeness does not seem to be associated with egalitarian behaviors in any meaningful sense.” He describes the contradictions of the “unique moral culture” behind this blatant behavioral dissonance, whereby superficially egalitarian language camouflages functionally conservative forces. Under a substance-free flag of solidarity there lurks a self-first feelings-focused ethos, that’s less honest and more devious than the right’s open devotion to self-serving hierarchy.  

The “we” of the book title refers to people al-Gharbi calls “symbolic capitalists” who mostly do mental rather than manual labor (it’s his jazzed-up jargon for white-collar vs. blue-collar). So, most of his (and my) readers are likely squarely in that symbolic capitalist camp. In al-Gharbi’s  stark and dark diagnosis, despite the loudly-proclaimed elegant egalitarian gloss our “lifestyles and our social positions are premised heavily on exploitation and exclusion.” We “regularly engage in behaviors that … reinforce and mystify inequalities, often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion.” Despite that glaring gulf, al-Gharbi isn’t so interested in issues of hypocrisy. He prefers to err on the side of being generous to his peers: “We really do want the poor to be uplifted. We want the oppressed to be liberated … [but we want] to achieve those goals without having to sacrifice anything personally or change anything about our own lives and aspirations.” The game is to somehow “mitigate inequalities while also preserving or enhancing our elite position.” Al-Gharbi casts these desires to be both “social climbers and egalitarians” as “sincere” but they are, of course incoherence incarnate — these are hierarchic practices hidden in highly misleading self-serving trappings.

Al-Gharbi uses an anthropological lens to make behavioral patterns explicit that are mostly tacit (they can be less visible to insiders; indeed, some can be utterly unaware of the results of their “sincere” efforts). There are many ways such unpalatable patterns can remain mostly submerged. Including that they are actively covered up, or evaded by diversion and obfuscation, or they go unnoticed due to good-hearted naiveté or uncritical acceptance of attractive rhetoric. Our own real moral loyalties and operative political priorities often aren’t well-defined or clear, even to ourselves, until they’re materially challenged (a line from one of George Orwell’s most famous essays illustrates this: “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties”). But the crux of al-Gharbi’s book is that when tested the conflicting sincerities he identifies typically get ranked such that “the pursuit of social justice seems subordinate to the pursuit of affluence and influence” (his “seems” here is too tentative, given 400-plus pages of supporting evidence). This sort of self-centered politics obstructs decency and justice (as I’ve argued here).

Deeply Deplorable Inegalitarian Ingratitude

For one particularly politically salient metric of the damage done under do-gooding ruses, consider income gains under that supremely slick symbolic capitalist President Obama. These tables show Berkeley researcher data on real gains in annual income per adult under Obama (left) and Reagan (right).

Obama presided over increases of 20.5% for the top 1%, 17.6% for the top 10%, but only 2.5% for the bottom 50%. But those percentage figures don’t do justice to the miscreant disparities. Respective dollar gains for each group were $270,000, $57,000, and $420. So, the bottom half got 1/137th of the top 10%’s loot and 1/640th of the top 1%’s plunder. Reagan delivered similar dollar gains for the well-off but more than double what Obama did for the lower 50% ($940 vs. $420). So symbolic capitalists secured hundreds of time greater gains than blue-collar workers. And to add insult to political injury, many of those “meriting” better lifestyles rub the psychological salt of contempt into the economic wounds. Al-Gharbi writes, “Even as we paint ourselves as egalitarian” our lifestyles are largely premised not only on exploitation and exclusion, but also on “condescension" (page 295). For instance, Obama’s line about bitter working-class voter’s clinging to “guns or bibles,” or Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables.”

Such patterns of top-first priorities aren’t new. Al-Gharbi cites research showing that civil rights progress improved the lot of upper-middle-class minorities, but it delivered “little to no measurable socioeconomic benefit to working-class and poor Blacks” (median Black household wealth today is 1/10th that of white counterparts). That racial justice slogan so beloved by symbolic capitalists would be truer if it said, “Talented Black Lives Matter.” And the most talented often don’t share the material interests of the less fortunate, for instance Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in The Message that the “few Black writers working at the journals and magazines I read seemed bent on putting as much distance between themselves and Black people as possible.”  This focus on the top is a subset of the general meritocratic norm that talented lives, of any background, matter far more in material resource terms than the supposedly less merit-worthy masses. This is surely a highly inegalitarian stance with deeply ingrained ingratitude in it (towards the workers, recently called essential during covid, who facilitate our comforts).  

These flagrant flaws in the fit of lofty language to tangible realities bring to mind a wise observation from Frédéric Bastiat in 1848: “When plunder becomes a way of life for … [an elite] they create for themselves … a moral code that glorifies it.” In Time’s Monster, historian Priya Satia calls this justifying phenomena elite “conscience management” (like the idea of the “civilizing mission” of the murderous British Empire). Great rewards await academics, writers, and artists who soothe elite consciences and protect the prevailing system’s real “moral” and material priorities. Perhaps the greatest for those slick sycophants offering therapeutic incoherence to justify the elite-serving norm that good can be done only if it also enriches the do-gooders. This is neoliberalism’s wicked and weaselly “win-win” formula, which masks how much more the powerful win than the weak—often hundreds of times more, as the income figures above show. In al-Gharbi’s words, “in virtually all cases ... symbolic capitalists achieve and maintain their position by producing information, ideas, art, [or] entertainment ... that their benefactors find to be useful, interesting, aesthetically pleasing, or otherwise satisfying — that is, not genuinely threatening” to the privileged (under the status quo system of the “acceptable” hierarchy of cognitive skill supremacy). Much of liberal and progressive elite culture has degenerated into a marketplace of rationalizations that’s “superficially radical yet functionally conservative” (page 286).

Preaching the Greed Above Need Norm

On an episode of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast called “The Passion of the Elites,” al-Gharbi sketches the initiation into this self-first elite ethos. First colleges select for “unusual cognitive profiles,” and time on campus tends to increase differences across the “diploma divide.” Overall college graduates are predisposed to “political preferences and modes of political engagement that are far out of step with most Americans.” Likewise for ethical inclinations, here’s a study finding that “higher education liberalizes moral concerns for most students,” the researchers note that “moral stratification of this sort could pose several risks to civil society.” Higher education inculcates not only the skills, but also the customs , tastes and taboos (and “professional deformations”) that are needed for careers in institutions largely dedicated to elaborate elite-preservation efforts. After college symbolic capitalists tend to congregate in cities where despite their self-preening “progressive” concerns, what al-Gharbi calls an open “racialized caste” system is in operation (under which people of certain backgrounds are treated as “disposable servants”). These glittering meritocratic metropolises are “progressive bastions … with well-oiled machines for casually exploiting and discarding the vulnerable … [where] largely Democratic-voting professionals … take advantage … even as they consciously lament inequality.”

A core feature of this elite cultural induction inculcates a rigid adherence to the doctrine that rationality itself equates to maximizing economic self-interest. Even if not directly preached by classes like economics, it’s in the air and is osmotically absorbed such that the greed is good and ration norm can be routinely asserted to be simply a feature of human nature itself by economists, policy makers, journalists, and many other professionals. But as political scientist Larry Bartels reports there’s much empirical evidence showing that purely financial “self-interest ordinarily does not have much effect upon the ordinary citizen’s sociopolitical attitudes.”  The most important factor in voters judgments is “their social & psychological attachments to groups."

Differences over such loyalties are a central fault line in contemporary politics, and resolving them will determine democracy’s fate, and concretely what justice means. As sociologist Richard Seymour writes in Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, charismatic right-wing leaders have “mounted a spectacular critique of political orthodoxy.” They’ve rebuffed the me-first “law of neoliberal politics” captured in the slogan that “It’s the economy, stupid.” In a chapter called “Not the Economy, Stupid” Seymour writes that “people rarely vote for their interests, construed as immediate concern for their wallets” alone. In outcomes like Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, voters factored in other loyalties (which it would offend them to “sell out” for mere monetary gain). Seymour writes that orthodox selfish-normed pundits have been flummoxed by elections in India, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Italy, France, Chile, Columbia and Argentina. But this political pathology isn't limited to liberals, as Maya Goodfellow writes in a Guardian interview with Seymour "The left has also been derailed by the idea that self-interest exhaustively explains how people behave." He advocates a politics of love, noting that "the things we do love often don’t give us any material benefit whatever." Another way of expressing this impulse is that we need a "politics of grace" to supersede the reigning politics of greed (that's evident among liberals and leftists alike).

The “Mercenary Morality” of Many Who Feel They’re the "Good Guys"

Despite copious evidence that predominately selfish political norms are far from universal, much of our professional and political class presumes precisely the opposite and pursues their self-first supposedly rational politics. Hence the seas of ink spilled on “irrational” voters acting against their economic interests. Symbolic capitalists seem puzzled by people who have loyalties that can outweigh cash incentives. What could be called the “mercenary morality” of many symbolic capitalists seems loyal to little beyond selfish gain (hence their fickle fidelity can be bought). This can easily seem very unsavory, untrustworthy, and indeed immoral, to those who live by higher loyalties. As conservative political analyst Oren Cass has argued our business elites aren’t constrained enough by their loyalties to prevent them from weakening or injuring our commonwealth. On the contrary, many profit prodigiously by precisely such harms to the public good. Cass notes that “If satisfying the Chinese Communist Party offers the highest rate of profit, American business leaders have shown they will eagerly do just that.” Here we have a conservative rightly advocating the “principle that market incentives cannot be trusted.”

To be clear, by greed here I mean excessive self-interest that’s harmful to the public good (and often to the real longer-term interests of the greedy themselves). Those struggling to meet the basic needs of a decent life might rightly seek economic gains. But as many classic political thinkers have noted, that same impulse in those in the upper parts of the resource hierarchy can run counter to decency and justice. For instance, Plato held that avarice was a signature trait of tyrants and it was typically opposed to his notion of justice. Many of his right-wing fans today seem to have forgotten that his ideal rulers weren’t allowed private gains, they had to be single-mindedly devoted to the common good. He predicted that wealth-worshipping values in the leaders of a democracy would inevitably beget tyranny (defined as a regime run for the benefit of the rulers above the ruled). The very same fears haunted America’s founders, for example, Federalist 75 feared that an “avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state.” And Federalist 57 declared that every political constitution seeks leaders with the “most virtue to pursue the common good.” But we mostly now live in a political culture of “learned selfishness” that pervades elites in “late democracy,” as Damir Marusic, one of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast hosts usefully puts it. Connecting those dots is crucial since elite greed is a forceful factor driving our democracy’s fragility (many who haven’t prospered in recent decades feel there’s been mistreated by an unfair slicing of the pie).

Aesthetic Politics and Elite Self-Fulfilment

Contrary to their meticulously cultivated self-image, symbolic capitalists tend to be highly conformist, and slavishly status obsessed. They rarely risk doing anything that might derail their greed-feeding gravy train. As al-Gharbi writes they strenuously pursue and hew to whatever “the high status, high prestige thing” is as preached by the social-climber sermons of elite media and culture. He describes social dynamics whereby symbolic capitalists compete to be early adopters of the hottest new prestige thing. Then they “often try to pressure others [to follow suit] and villainize others who don't,” to burnish their holier-than-thou superior status. Maintaining these sorts of highly competitive status and resource hierarchies is central to the mission of prestige outlets like the New York Times. Their operative priorities are revealed in the relative attention afforded to material justice versus lifestyle must-haves. It shouldn’t take much anthropological acumen to see that elite self-fulfillment is the main concern, and that social justice matters only to the degree that it is consistent with the raison d'être of enjoying elite experiences (the NYT seems like a luxury lifestyle brand with a small news operation on the side).     

Tellingly, al-Gharbi quotes NYT columnist Ezra Klein on the “danger … that politics becomes an aesthetic rather than a program … where the symbols of progressivism are often preferred to the sacrifices and risks those ideals demand.” That aesthetic-centering view illustrates an important shift that philosopher Charles Taylor has tracked. He has described a tendency "to dissolve the distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic." And in one influential stream of secular culture the “aesthetic [has been] … placed outside of and above the moral." For those immersed in this stream “nothing outside subjective goods can be allowed to trump self-realization." Klein is clearly in this self-realization stream, but on our era’s greatest challenge to the human flourishing that social justice fans claim to care about, he fails the precise political and moral test he himself outlines as quoted above. On the climate crisis Klein explicitly rejects any “sacrifices” in elite consumption. I scare-quote that word since it is in my opinion it is reprehensible rhetoric to cast curbs on elite luxuries in the same terms used for the truer sacrifices incurred to enable Klein’s comfortable liberties. He disrespects the sacrifices of lives, limbs, and psychological trauma made by those who fought wars for our freedoms and high standard of living. Yet, to protect symbolic capitalist comforts, Klein rejects that scientists have long declared curbs in elite consumption to be essential to avoid harming the planet’s most vulnerable people who are least to blame for carbon pollution (here is info on the need to curb consumption from IPCC, WIL, and UNEP). This refusal to responsibly inform readers of the scientific consensus on consumption constraints illustrates how the New York Times often acts like liberalism’s Pravda (all the ideologically palatable news that's fit to print, and even that is a side order to the main course of elegant elite greeds, material and aesthetic).  

Klein is fully aware of the distribution of burdens involved in the me-first trade-offs he advocates. He writes of the “vast suffering” that will be visited on others, because we “will have looted the future of billions of people to power a present we preferred.” But he argues that only climate action that is beneficial (or “thrilling”) for his privileged readers is politically realistic. In this Klein epitomizes the moral and political discrepancies that al-Gharbi documents (which elsewhere I’ve called “recreational righteousness”). Klein uses his substantial power as a norm-preacher at liberalism’s most prestigious media outlet to evangelize a greed-above-need approach as the only realistic option (again, as noted above non-elites typically have higher loyalties that drive their politics). Imagine where we could have been if Klein had chosen instead to encourage his readers to do what is clearly the right thing to advance the cause of equal human dignity and concern for the poor. If he had advocated that his followers make rapid personal changes in their elite consumption choices as scientists have deemed essential. Under the competitive prestige dynamic al-Gharbi describes, the most ardent of Klein’s followers would likely taken action and pressured others to follow suit (these sorts of social pressures at work in elites have been crucial to prior epoch-making moral revolutions, as described here). The carbon savings could have been enormous, each 1% cut in personal carbon from Americans in the global top 1% is akin to nixing 17 coal plant units. That same “1% cut by the 1%” is equivalent to taking almost 8 million cars off the road (achieving that cut can be as easy as taking one less premium long haul return flight). Klein is far from the only case of this specific sort of luxury lifestyle-protecting liberal incoherence, for instance, see “Liberalism’s Failure by Fun” (which critiques philosopher Alexander Lefevbre’s influential book Liberalism as a Way of Life in the context of climate crisis). The effective priorities are clear: we’d love to save the rainforest etc., but not if that means fewer YOLO jaunts.

Patently Immoral

I’d argue that the position of most of our liberal or progressive elite on climate issues is clearly a dire dereliction of moral duty and decency. As Genevieve Guenther, author of The Language of Climate Politics, has said, anyone who, like  Klein, puts gains in living standards for already-well-resourced elites above protecting the planet’s most vulnerable people effectively connives in “the most horrific injustice … that the global north has ever perpetrated” (38 minutes in here, justification for her startling claim can be found here). Too many liberals and progressives (and, sadly, even some rich-nation socialists) put their own comforts above the survival needs of others who are far less fortunate. Current climate politics in rich nations largely abandons the global majority in a what effectively amounts to a form of “global climate apartheid.” Anyone truly seeking to maximize human flourishing must face the utterly ugly resource disparities that today burden the global majority across the “global color line,” and work to correct them. Only 16% of humans live in rich nations, and our deliberations must “exclude any defense of the patently immoral” (to use a potent line from Coates’s The Message).

Since the size of those dreadful resource disparities is rarely discussed, here are a couple of key facts to focus on. Citizens of majority-Black nations have an average income per capita that’s only 1/7th that of majority-White nations, and Africa’s median income is only 1/12th of the Global North’s. That’s an indication of how much less Black lives matter in tangible resource terms today. And there is precious little hope that these enormous material and moral injustices will be addressed in a decent and timely manner. The UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty has said that under current methods it will take “200 years to eradicate poverty under a $5 a day line.” That’s 8 generations to get the largely non-white global poor to only 1/8th of current US poverty levels ($40 per day). That should shock all those smug optimists who have applauded progress on global poverty, but even more alarming is the fact that to catch up to what we call poverty in rich nations will take 60 generations or ~1,600 years (details here). To use another potent phrase from Coates this state of affairs is “patently immoral.”

The basic test of rightly being “the good guys” comes down to what fine-sounding words about equal human dignity really mean in terms of how they shape concrete resource allocations. Do nicer lives for us outweigh the dire survival needs of the poor? At present many hundreds of times more resources are devoted to the former than the latter (details here). While we use our disproportionate share of global resources to pursue ever more elaborate self-fulfillment, “148.1 million children under 5 years of age were too short for their age.” More than 1 in 5 children are so stunted by malnutrition that they can’t fulfil the height that’s normal for healthy kids. Returning to the opening question, too many liberal or progressive social justice fans use nice words to flatter themselves while being unwilling to incur even trifling costs to act on their pretty ideals. Judged by their actions, by their operative priorities, by their real revealed belief, greed easily beats justice. Al-Gharbi’s book may be a shocking revelation to many in the delusional do-gooding elite, but it is less likely to surprise the less privileged. They know to judge the powerful by what they do, not what they say (fancy phrases can easily be "a disguise for more immorality," as Christine Emba, the other Wisdom of Crowds podcast host, forcefully put it).

Historian Sam Moyn detects and decries an “evasive spirit” evident in recent liberal thinking (in Liberalism Against Itself he wrote that “warning in perpetuity that the alternatives to liberalism are worse has proved to be no more than a rationalization for avoiding thinking about how to save liberalism”). I argue that a similar evasive spirit is behind the failure to address the right role, and necessary limits, of greed in liberal politics. Liberals must be clearer about when their “moral interests” in the flourishing of others outrank their personal material interests. Advancing material justice will mean toppling or taming the current liberal norm that allows greed to supersede need. A profound shift in the liberal moral and political imagination is needed. Those in the liberal greedocracy who want to be seen as decent people must wise up to their current colossal cultural contradictions and quickly switch to acting much less selfishly, personally and politically.

(This article has been updated to include comments from a Guardian interview with Richard Seymour)

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