Razor wire fences, galvanized spikes and electrified perimeters: the barriers that entomb the ultra-rich in their walled settlements isolate them from perpetual violence and societal collapse.
I have had the opportunity to meet a surprisingly large number of ultra-high net worth individuals over the years – not through any particular personal desire, I hasten to add. A few of these people I’ve merely met in passing, typically at some event held by a cultural institution. However, I have come to know several others quite well, as either friends or as employers. (I am specifically speaking about four of the world’s 2,781 billionaires).
Regardless of whether they are ‘self made’ or ‘second gen’, the ultra-rich have unique psychological profiles amongst the general populace. In my experience, both categories of billionaire are dominated by interminable existential crises — although each displays nuance when it comes to confrontation. The ‘self made’ have a tendency towards aggressive megalomania, while ‘second gens’ demur in favour of nihilistic hedonism.
Regardless of whether they are ‘self made’ or ‘second gen’, the ultra-rich have unique psychological profiles amongst the general populace. In my experience, both categories of billionaire are dominated by interminable existential crises — although each displays nuance when it comes to confrontation. The ‘self made’ have a tendency towards aggressive megalomania, while ‘second gens’ demur in favour of nihilistic hedonism.
My main observation is that for individuals born into extreme wealth, it is almost impossible to grasp anything about material or social reality. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald describes rich people as “clumsy” — instinctively “retreating into their money” to avoid ever facing the outcomes of their actions. This is certainly true for second gens. To inherit a condition of unjustifiable wealth means to never experience cause and effect. All external pressures are alleviated by capital: there are no consequences to missing a deadline, to not finishing a project, to dropping out or giving up. It is terrifically difficult to fail, in any normal sense.
In a kind of a zen way, those born ultra-rich live perpetually in the moment. Since they understand very little about causality, they do not understand how events happen or things get made. They can be filled with mystical wonderment at the spontaneous generation of material reality. They can also be blind to social realities that sit outside their lived knowledge, which is terrifyingly narrow.
The great emotional contradiction of this class is that they are both traumatized and overindulged. Their parental relationships are rarely healthy, and are marked by childhood rejection, neglect and lack of support. At the same time, anyone employed to care for them was (understandably) financially motivated to lavish praise and be overprotective – often to the extent of smothering personal growth or self-criticality. This contradiction is literally the foundational marker of narcissists.
Second gens are not detail oriented, unless they become lost in the minutiae of infinite trivial distinctions. They generally lack the frameworks required to establish priorities and hierarchy, because they lack a foundational experience of ‘need’. This muddles everything, rendering all decisions equally important or unimportant, or big or small, or both. They spiral pretty easily. Unluckily, a life without real-world feedback quickly becomes directionless (the primary source of the existential crises). Luckily, the absence of consequences masks any and all shortcomings (hence the nihilistic hedonism).
For such people, a dream is reality. To engage in a discussion about some speculative future is to have already made it tangible. A description of a wondrous project is the outcome. There is rarely any drive to realize or act on these ideas – accelerating the drift into purposelessness. That said, sometimes a dream can be sustained for years, even decades, as a perpetual promise, a permanent coming-into-being. The second gen can plausibly inhabit a totally unrealizable fantasy.
In a kind of a zen way, those born ultra-rich live perpetually in the moment. Since they understand very little about causality, they do not understand how events happen or things get made. They can be filled with mystical wonderment at the spontaneous generation of material reality. They can also be blind to social realities that sit outside their lived knowledge, which is terrifyingly narrow.
The great emotional contradiction of this class is that they are both traumatized and overindulged. Their parental relationships are rarely healthy, and are marked by childhood rejection, neglect and lack of support. At the same time, anyone employed to care for them was (understandably) financially motivated to lavish praise and be overprotective – often to the extent of smothering personal growth or self-criticality. This contradiction is literally the foundational marker of narcissists.
Second gens are not detail oriented, unless they become lost in the minutiae of infinite trivial distinctions. They generally lack the frameworks required to establish priorities and hierarchy, because they lack a foundational experience of ‘need’. This muddles everything, rendering all decisions equally important or unimportant, or big or small, or both. They spiral pretty easily. Unluckily, a life without real-world feedback quickly becomes directionless (the primary source of the existential crises). Luckily, the absence of consequences masks any and all shortcomings (hence the nihilistic hedonism).
For such people, a dream is reality. To engage in a discussion about some speculative future is to have already made it tangible. A description of a wondrous project is the outcome. There is rarely any drive to realize or act on these ideas – accelerating the drift into purposelessness. That said, sometimes a dream can be sustained for years, even decades, as a perpetual promise, a permanent coming-into-being. The second gen can plausibly inhabit a totally unrealizable fantasy.
3. Bhojraj, Portrait of Prince Muhammad Buland Akhtar at Prayer, c. 1700 –1750. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
In a literal sense, second gens live apart from the world – trapped within a global network of suffocating, rarified ‘luxury’. It is impossible for such people to go on holiday: since they do only symbolic work (if they work at all), there are rarely any tasks that cannot be deferred (sometimes indefinitely). In other words, you can’t take a break from a fake job. Try to imagine what it feels like to stay in a hotel when the purpose is neither business nor leisure. Now try to imagine that your home was as sumptuous and well-provided as the hotel. They become indistinguishable typologies or modes of life. In fact, the homes of second gens very frequently resemble hotels: they are staffed like super yachts; decorated with generic ‘fine’ taste (but lacking in personality or charm); and within every room is that same sickly odour (a sweet and musky ‘luxurious’ perfume).
When they travel, the ultra-rich do so through private means. The car takes them to the aerodrome, where the plane takes them to another aerodrome, where a car takes them to the destination (with perhaps a helicopter inserted somewhere). Every journey is bookended by identical Mercedes Vito Tourers (gloss black, tinted windows). Every flight is within the cosy confines of a Cessna Citation (or a King Air or Embraer). The amenities (even the menus) are identical in Marrakech, Monaco and the Maldives; in Como, St. Kitts, Zermatt and Oman. The ultra-rich never wait in line at a carousel or a customs table or a passport control. There are no accidental encounters. No unwelcome, unapproved or unsanitary humans enter their sight – no souls that could espouse a foreign view. The ultra-rich do not see anything they do not want to see. More accurately: these people simply do not see.
Of course, their property portfolios are vast. They have so many homes that no place is home; what passes for home is more like a private chain of hotels (indeed this is the historical origin of the typology). These are citizens of nowhere. Politicians describe the ultra-rich as infinitely mobile, and claim that is why we can’t tax them. It is true that they are a global and agile class. Although it should be noted that their sources of wealth are deeply rooted in place: national stock markets, land and property, the sedentary populations of humans that purchase their products or services (which are in turn made at specific locations). The ultra-rich are probably the easiest people in the world to tax. They can leave. But they can’t take their assets with them. If you are an electrician or a cook or a lawyer you can migrate and take your entire means of income with you.
That the unjustifiably wealthy are unfit for rule is self-evident; I would sooner wish our political and corporate leaders were chosen by random ballot than I would be led by a second gen entrepreneurial visionary.
I am describing a metaphorical wall that circumscribes obscene wealth, cutting the rich off from their own humanity. It is load-bearing, integral to their psyches and thus immovable. It is erected upon a foundation of paranoia, distrust and fear. The ultra-rich suspect that everyone wants only one thing from them…
Although this wall is primarily psychological in nature, it nonetheless assumes many physical forms: the innumerable petty mechanisms of isolation and control (from security to social convention). The bodyguards. The cameras. The layers and layers of locked doors. The assumption, by workers, that the ultra-rich must always be left alone, never bothered. The hushed, polite respect for money. This atmosphere saturates the extremely wealthy; no one will ever curse them, interrupt them, or ask them any question not directly related to providing a service.
The barriers that embrace the very loaded can also be actual walls: razor wire fences; galvanized spikes; electrified perimeters; soaring planes of solid brickwork, blockwork and concrete. This is a class obsessed with voluntary immurement. Such physical walls might be explicit (surrounding an urban villa) or discreet (surrounding a rural villa). They might encircle a single property; or they might bundle together a coterie of plutocrats into a gated community.
I am forced to admit that, over the years, I have also been hosted within several gated communities belonging to the ultra-rich: located at the centres of cities like LA and Dubai, and flung far beyond the fringes of places like Marfa or Palm Springs. The desert settlement has always interested me the most – more than the leafy private streets of London or the humid compounds of Southeast Asia.
Within desert gated communities, the first thing you notice is the silence. It is an almost physical presence, almost funereal. Privacy and distance are everywhere respected. Hidden amongst the palm groves, squat, blind houses withdraw into their deep and cool interiors (clad with the marble of mausolea). From beyond the perimeter walls, such oases resemble date orchards or coconut plantations. From within, great oceans of cambered asphalt divide up discrete residences; the streets are so wide that even mature trees cannot cast shadows across them.
At sunrise, half the world is frigid and half of it is on fire; these unmediated extremes lack any gradation, like the surface of Mercury. By afternoon, the heat waves roll in from distant salt seas or dunes. As they break across the canopy, the air disperses into an oppressive oven-hot downward draft. Gates within the outer wall are indicated by a little cluster of cameras, metalwork and a glass box containing a life-size toy policeman.
In desert gated communities, time is drawn out as thin as the air. The world attains a kind of placid stasis. If we are to believe Borges, as empires rise they generate maps that become coextensive with their territories. And as empires collapse, these maps burn, until the only scraps that remain are in the desert; a confetti archipelago of defunct ideologies, strewn amongst the sand and rocks.
We are living through a period of societal collapse. This isn’t a factual statement, but an emotional one. It feels like we are approaching the end of a specific social contract. Modernity is a project founded on patriarchal domination, on linear time, infinite extraction and unstoppable accumulation. In its five centuries, it has evolved into such an unnatural paradigm that it now only survives through extreme and perpetual violence; perpetrated indifferently against both humans and non-humans alike.
The dividends of modernity were social, civic and material. It brought prosperity (for some), but this was purchased at the expense of many peoples’ whole lives, and, of course, our collective futures. It proffered ‘universal’ rights, backed by the legislative and juridical instruments required to temper the worst of humanity’s instincts. But if modernity’s ‘rights’ are indeed universal, there is no need to think they are bound up in the modern project. The end of this paradigm does not mean ideas like inclusivity, equity or justice will evaporate. What it does mean is the end of the assumption that the advancement of such rights is irreversible. We increasingly understand that even the most basic freedoms are highly contested, contingent on social relations.
When they travel, the ultra-rich do so through private means. The car takes them to the aerodrome, where the plane takes them to another aerodrome, where a car takes them to the destination (with perhaps a helicopter inserted somewhere). Every journey is bookended by identical Mercedes Vito Tourers (gloss black, tinted windows). Every flight is within the cosy confines of a Cessna Citation (or a King Air or Embraer). The amenities (even the menus) are identical in Marrakech, Monaco and the Maldives; in Como, St. Kitts, Zermatt and Oman. The ultra-rich never wait in line at a carousel or a customs table or a passport control. There are no accidental encounters. No unwelcome, unapproved or unsanitary humans enter their sight – no souls that could espouse a foreign view. The ultra-rich do not see anything they do not want to see. More accurately: these people simply do not see.
Of course, their property portfolios are vast. They have so many homes that no place is home; what passes for home is more like a private chain of hotels (indeed this is the historical origin of the typology). These are citizens of nowhere. Politicians describe the ultra-rich as infinitely mobile, and claim that is why we can’t tax them. It is true that they are a global and agile class. Although it should be noted that their sources of wealth are deeply rooted in place: national stock markets, land and property, the sedentary populations of humans that purchase their products or services (which are in turn made at specific locations). The ultra-rich are probably the easiest people in the world to tax. They can leave. But they can’t take their assets with them. If you are an electrician or a cook or a lawyer you can migrate and take your entire means of income with you.
That the unjustifiably wealthy are unfit for rule is self-evident; I would sooner wish our political and corporate leaders were chosen by random ballot than I would be led by a second gen entrepreneurial visionary.
I am describing a metaphorical wall that circumscribes obscene wealth, cutting the rich off from their own humanity. It is load-bearing, integral to their psyches and thus immovable. It is erected upon a foundation of paranoia, distrust and fear. The ultra-rich suspect that everyone wants only one thing from them…
Although this wall is primarily psychological in nature, it nonetheless assumes many physical forms: the innumerable petty mechanisms of isolation and control (from security to social convention). The bodyguards. The cameras. The layers and layers of locked doors. The assumption, by workers, that the ultra-rich must always be left alone, never bothered. The hushed, polite respect for money. This atmosphere saturates the extremely wealthy; no one will ever curse them, interrupt them, or ask them any question not directly related to providing a service.
The barriers that embrace the very loaded can also be actual walls: razor wire fences; galvanized spikes; electrified perimeters; soaring planes of solid brickwork, blockwork and concrete. This is a class obsessed with voluntary immurement. Such physical walls might be explicit (surrounding an urban villa) or discreet (surrounding a rural villa). They might encircle a single property; or they might bundle together a coterie of plutocrats into a gated community.
I am forced to admit that, over the years, I have also been hosted within several gated communities belonging to the ultra-rich: located at the centres of cities like LA and Dubai, and flung far beyond the fringes of places like Marfa or Palm Springs. The desert settlement has always interested me the most – more than the leafy private streets of London or the humid compounds of Southeast Asia.
Within desert gated communities, the first thing you notice is the silence. It is an almost physical presence, almost funereal. Privacy and distance are everywhere respected. Hidden amongst the palm groves, squat, blind houses withdraw into their deep and cool interiors (clad with the marble of mausolea). From beyond the perimeter walls, such oases resemble date orchards or coconut plantations. From within, great oceans of cambered asphalt divide up discrete residences; the streets are so wide that even mature trees cannot cast shadows across them.
At sunrise, half the world is frigid and half of it is on fire; these unmediated extremes lack any gradation, like the surface of Mercury. By afternoon, the heat waves roll in from distant salt seas or dunes. As they break across the canopy, the air disperses into an oppressive oven-hot downward draft. Gates within the outer wall are indicated by a little cluster of cameras, metalwork and a glass box containing a life-size toy policeman.
In desert gated communities, time is drawn out as thin as the air. The world attains a kind of placid stasis. If we are to believe Borges, as empires rise they generate maps that become coextensive with their territories. And as empires collapse, these maps burn, until the only scraps that remain are in the desert; a confetti archipelago of defunct ideologies, strewn amongst the sand and rocks.
We are living through a period of societal collapse. This isn’t a factual statement, but an emotional one. It feels like we are approaching the end of a specific social contract. Modernity is a project founded on patriarchal domination, on linear time, infinite extraction and unstoppable accumulation. In its five centuries, it has evolved into such an unnatural paradigm that it now only survives through extreme and perpetual violence; perpetrated indifferently against both humans and non-humans alike.
The dividends of modernity were social, civic and material. It brought prosperity (for some), but this was purchased at the expense of many peoples’ whole lives, and, of course, our collective futures. It proffered ‘universal’ rights, backed by the legislative and juridical instruments required to temper the worst of humanity’s instincts. But if modernity’s ‘rights’ are indeed universal, there is no need to think they are bound up in the modern project. The end of this paradigm does not mean ideas like inclusivity, equity or justice will evaporate. What it does mean is the end of the assumption that the advancement of such rights is irreversible. We increasingly understand that even the most basic freedoms are highly contested, contingent on social relations.
3. Bhojraj, Portrait of Prince Muhammad Buland Akhtar at Prayer, c. 1700 –1750. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
7. Philip Henry Delamotte, Alhambra and Court of Lions, Crystal Palace, Sydenham, c. 1859. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
We are living through the most dangerous phase of modernity, when those in power will do anything they can to preserve an increasingly fragile status quo. It is especially worrying when the ultra-rich are so divorced from reality, so cocooned and entombed in their wealth that they barely perceive the violence they commit against the world as such. From the perspective of the impoverished, this class of people combine the decadence of Versailles with the brutality of war criminals.
What does collapse look like? How long will it take? What will come next? The answers to these questions are unknowable. In spite of my pessimism, I remain hopeful. When the mediaeval epoch transitioned into modernity (via the Renaissance), Europe did not become a more or less violent place. The nature of that violence changed, from localized feuds between warlords to large scale battles between proto-national armies. Perhaps as modernity gives way to the next paradigm (we are already in a new Renaissance), there will not be more or less violence than under late capitalism. This might mean that the visions we have today of extreme desperation associated with a post-1.5C future are not inevitable. We might not see the scale of mass starvation, terrorism, resource wars or uncontrolled climate migration largely assumed to accompany the collapse of national power structures, and the rise of non-state actors. On the other hand, although the climate crisis is not an existential threat to our species, it may well be that only the descendants of second gen entrepreneurial visionaries (and their staff) inherit the Earth. That is truly depressing.
It is strange to imagine a global network of walled settlements, each aggressively cut off from its particular location, yet united by the rules-based order of international capitalism (and each occupied by people whose minds are walled off from humanity). I know that to resist entropy in the manner they do, such gated communities must import colossal amounts of goods, services, resources and energy. As fragile ecosystems, gated communities should be the first to collapse in an era of climate crisis. Yet their timeless immutability is so convincing (I am so reassured by their quiet confidence) that I imagine they are closed systems; eternal lighthouses of late capitalist ontology. I imagine that after global society implodes, the gated communities will remain; their implacable residents unchanged, unmoved and unconcerned by the upheavals taking place all around them.
What does collapse look like? How long will it take? What will come next? The answers to these questions are unknowable. In spite of my pessimism, I remain hopeful. When the mediaeval epoch transitioned into modernity (via the Renaissance), Europe did not become a more or less violent place. The nature of that violence changed, from localized feuds between warlords to large scale battles between proto-national armies. Perhaps as modernity gives way to the next paradigm (we are already in a new Renaissance), there will not be more or less violence than under late capitalism. This might mean that the visions we have today of extreme desperation associated with a post-1.5C future are not inevitable. We might not see the scale of mass starvation, terrorism, resource wars or uncontrolled climate migration largely assumed to accompany the collapse of national power structures, and the rise of non-state actors. On the other hand, although the climate crisis is not an existential threat to our species, it may well be that only the descendants of second gen entrepreneurial visionaries (and their staff) inherit the Earth. That is truly depressing.
It is strange to imagine a global network of walled settlements, each aggressively cut off from its particular location, yet united by the rules-based order of international capitalism (and each occupied by people whose minds are walled off from humanity). I know that to resist entropy in the manner they do, such gated communities must import colossal amounts of goods, services, resources and energy. As fragile ecosystems, gated communities should be the first to collapse in an era of climate crisis. Yet their timeless immutability is so convincing (I am so reassured by their quiet confidence) that I imagine they are closed systems; eternal lighthouses of late capitalist ontology. I imagine that after global society implodes, the gated communities will remain; their implacable residents unchanged, unmoved and unconcerned by the upheavals taking place all around them.
