Is It Me or Is It Getting Hot in Here?
In this chapter I am going to be writing about rich people. This is tricky, since ‘rich people’ is a very vague term and open to all sorts of abuse and misunderstanding. It is easy, for example, to create false dichotomies or to be guilty of hypocrisy. After all, I had the time to write this book, which means I, too, am rich. If you bought this book new in a bookshop, the chances are fairly good that you are also rich. Even if you stole it by downloading it in PDF format, it’s possible that you are very, very rich. (In 2019, Julius Malema, a man worth millions, had no problem mounting Twitter to ask for a pirated version of Pieter-Louis Myburgh’s Gangster State.) Which is why, for the sake of clarity, I think a short taxonomy of this species we call ‘the rich’ – Decadentis Opulentis Opulens – is in order, so that you and I can both be very clear on what I’m talking about.
There have been many subspecies of Opulens, that ancient amphibian that first dragged itself up out of the swamp and onto dry satin thousands of years ago. Many have gone extinct, killed off by natural predators like in-breeding, syphilis or failing to pay off the right warlord. Some simply had it coming. Opulens Guillotinus, for example, was a hyper-predatory subspecies which existed in Europe until the 18th century, rashly constructing enormous burrows out of gold and marble right out in the open with gates that were easily scalable by French peasants. In 2008, Opulens Lehmanensis, a small but jubilantly psychopathic subspecies that lived in skyscrapers on Wall Street, was on the verge of extinction until it was artificially inseminated with a vast bailout from American taxpayers, the unholy union spawning yet another subspecies, Opulens Vampiricus Zombii.
Today, however, the Opulens species can generally be divided into five main subspecies, presented here from most to least rich.
Opulens Abstractus. By far the richest of the species, they’ve evolved to avoid the fate of Guillotinus by existing at no physical address, their domicile represented only by a post-box in the Cayman Islands. After all, it’s difficult to remove a head you can’t find. Indeed, Abstractus are so rich that they have almost dematerialised, their physical human bodies being only a fractional part of a gigantic entity which exists only in derivatives, collateralised debt obligations, stock options and litigation.
Opulens Transparens. The invisible rich exist in the material world, but in places very few people have seen or even know about, and leave no trace of their activities, mainly because they own all the newspapers. If you’re personally invited by Opulens Transparens to its estate, island or alpine bunker for the weekend, and are told to enter via the front door, you are either extremely rich yourself or are about to get fired. If you’re personally invited by the assistant of the secretary of Opulens Transparens, and are told to report to the tradesman’s entrance with your passport and a large plastic sheet, you need to change your name and move to Nepal at once.
Opulens Fugens. Not wealthy enough to dematerialise or decamp to an island, this subspecies – the furtive rich – lives hidden in plain sight. Having seen Guillotinus stripped of its assets, beheaded, and, much more upsettingly, made to pay tax and get a job, Fugens has evolved to be less expansive than its truncated ancestor, preferring densely wooded habitats surrounded by high walls and electrified fences, and avoiding contact with anyone except other Fugens, which it marries to preserve its wealth and recessive chin.
In South Africa, some Fugens have left the forest in favour of grassy savannah called ‘golf estates’, but the less said about these wretched places the better. Golf estates are, after all, an immense failure of imagination upon which the very rich reveal their unique psychology: they could afford to build the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or Venice, but instead choose to recreate, on a vast scale, the dullest suburban garden imaginable – a huge lawn surrounded by shrubs – across which they wander endlessly talking about handicaps.
Opulens Humilitas Bogus. Also known as Fauxhemians, Humilitas Bogus has refused to learn the lessons of Guillotinus and has not developed a fear of the less rich, insisting instead that it is a friend to the
proletariat, blessed with empathetic or possibly psychic powers that allow it to feel a deep connection to all humans, which it demonstrates by slumming it in the sorts of yoga studios that have 10-year-old cars parked outside. It also has a highly developed environmental conscience, preferring to take only one airconditioned tent to AfrikaBurn.
Opulens Precarius .Thefinal,and largest, subspecies is that of the Opulens Precarius, the contingently rich. These are people who have a regular income, a reliable supply of relatively healthy food, shelter that they own or rent, and opportunities for education and travel. In other words, they are wealthier than the vast majority of humans and therefore technically rich. But they are also never more than three paychecks or two major medical crises away from catastrophe. Inevitably, for such a large and wideranging subspecies, Precarius seems to include a number of variations. Precarius Illusio, for example, puts on a display of wealth that is based entirely on debt. Precarius Inheritus is a shabby-genteel creature, endlessly hibernating in a dim and musty burrow that was left to it by its parents that it can’t afford to maintain but also can’t afford to sell. Precarius Condescens, or very petty bourgeoisie, enjoys sniping at ‘the rich’ because it does not identify as rich but also cannot identify as poor. Precarius Ex Matrimoneum still has a sports car and a golf club membership but everything else went in the divorce. (I recently had an Opulens DNA test done – I got a printout of my bank balance – and I can confirm that I am a Precarius Condescens Literaria Jackpotens; someone who takes pot-shots at the very rich while hoping that his book will be a bestseller and transform him into a Fugens.)
As I said earlier, these are broad distinctions. The difference between the richest and least rich variations of Opulens is clear to even the casual observer, but it can be extremely difficult to tell more closely related subspecies apart. Certainly, there are some basic rules of thumb. My wife, Tanya, believes that you can generally tell how rich someone is by how quickly they are exonerated after murdering their spouse. I, on the other hand, tend to believe that you can tell subspecies from subspecies by looking at the items they collect in their burrows and insist on calling ‘art’. Abstractus and Transparens, the two richest subspecies, have tastes more or less in line with their species names. Abstractus, for example, will pay tens of millions of dollars for conceptual art that exists in no physical form – a cube of air, say, contained in a metaphysical box, displayed in a room that doesn’t exist in a city constructed purely out of critical discourse theory. Transparens prefers pieces that exist in the material world, but only on certain wavelengths and at certain times of year, such as a hologram of their deceased mother, created by reflecting the sunrise on the anniversary of her death through a crystal made of her compressed remains.
Idon’t know the kinds of art preferred by Fugens and Humilitas Bogus in the wider world, but in South Africa they each have very clear tastes. Fugens is drawn relentlessly towards large, impressionistic bronzes of cheetahs. I don’t know why this is the case but perhaps it sees something of itself in cheetahs, which are also highly specialised, largely opportunistic creatures bedevilled by in-breeding. The local strain of Humilitas Bogus, on the other hand, prefers enormous paintings of the faces – just the faces – of unnamed black women, painted by white women. The wealthier the Humilitas Bogus, the larger the face: some are two storeys high, laboriously manoeuvred into cavernous entrance halls by teams of stevedores. For Humilitas Bogus, the Anonymous Black African Woman As Décor is irresistible.
Because of its diversity, range and smaller budget, Opulens Precarius tends to scavenge a much wider and more eclectic selection of decorations for its burrows, but even so, a keen-eyed zoologist can pick out certain favourites: photographs of familial groupings of Precarius, all dressed in white or black; antique maps of Africa with Latin place names and an etching of a ship in the corner; an excellent and treasured painting or etching of the foreign city Precarius visited as a young person before it had offspring and a motor plan and things got dramatically more precarious; fetish objects such as Carrol Boyes salad spoons and metal geckos; or the sensible reminder, spelled out in large words screwed into the wall, to ‘LIVE’, ‘LOVE’ and ‘LAUGH’.
The trouble with using art to tell who’s who, however, is that you have to be physically inside the burrow of an Opulens to see it, and even then it’s not foolproof. For example, if you wake up strapped to a block of marble, surrounded by people wearing nothing but Venetian masks, and then someone chants, ‘Let the harvest commence!’, and a nurse appears and pats you on the arm and says, ‘This will only sting for a moment, dearie,’ you would rightly assume that the marble block is some sort of decoration, but it would be almost impossible to know if you’ve become the centrepiece of a Fugens fertility ritual, a conceptual art piece for a Transparens, or an organ donor for an Abstractus.