There’s a swamp at the top of our societies.
A swamp filled with politicians and the wealthiest members of our societies.
I can’t keep referring to them as the wealthiest members of our societies. It’s a bit of a mouthful. They are very much the elite of our societies, but I can’t use that as a name for them either.
That sounds too much like a shadowy global ruling class from a conspiracy theory. We’ll be looking at a few conspiracy theories soon enough, so let’s just accept I don’t want to use the word elite.
I’ve considered various other descriptive names, but the main problem for me is that, like the elite, they all sound a bit too cool and aspirational.
Which is very much not the case with the word heffalump.1 Who wants to be a heffalump? I don’t, do you?
There’s a bigger reason for choosing to refer to the members of this wealthy overclass as heffalumps, though. If you don’t recognise the word, you must have missed out on the stories of Winnie-the-Pooh2 as a kid. The heffalumps were scary monsters, but in the original books, Pooh and Piglet never met any. They only ever dreamed about them or saw them in their imagination.
Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet were terrified of the heffalumps, but they gifted the heffalumps that power over them. It’s the same with the heffalumps at the top of our societies. We gift them their power. We accept that a small minority of the people can hoard the majority of the wealth that our societies produce. And come the next election, we vote for more politicians who choose to work with the heffalumps rather than working for the majority of society.
That’s the swamp that drips down onto us.
A swamp whose purpose is to make you, me and our peers, the majority, weaker while grabbing more and more wealth for the heffalumps who already have more than they need or could ever use.
A big problem in this swampy mix is the power of reciprocity. That is the action of responding to someone else’s good deed by doing a good deed in return. This is a well-known concept among marketers and there’s been lots of research on it.
You probably don’t need to think too hard about a time when someone did something helpful for you and you found yourself instinctively returning the favour.
If you ever find yourself working in a service role, you may be able to increase your tips very easily by just handing out mints. An experiment by Robert Cialdini found waiting staff could increase their tips by 23% by just handing out a couple of mints for each diner.3 Another study found that just giving physicians a low-cost meal, less than $20, increased the likelihood of them prescribing drugs sold by the supplier of the meal.4
We might hope that politicians would be immune to this effect, but people are people. A researcher looked at the voting behaviour of politicians and found a pattern of reciprocity, much the same as the rest of us exhibit.5
We have politicians more concerned with serving themselves than their constituents, surrounded by heffalumps, various lobby groups and organisations all intent on bending them to their way of thinking.
As if things weren’t already messy enough at the top, it seems to be getting worse with the wealthy looking to cut out the middle man and take more direct control.
Towards the end of 2023, a study found that of more than 2,000 billionaires across the world, 11% had held or had run for a political office.6 Granted, this is a more common phenomenon in autocratic societies, likely because billionaires in such countries are motivated to assume positions of power to give them leverage to protect their wealth.
However, the study’s authors suggested billionaires were less driven to seek formal office in democratic societies because they have access to more informal ways to exert political influence in such countries.
The study also found that some 75% of billionaires push more conservative, right-wing agendas. In the USA, though the figure is a little lower with about 66% or so of billionaires being affiliated with the Republican Party, rather than the Democratic Party, they’re still strongly weighted to the right.
So, unsurprisingly the study reported that the wealthy, like these billionaires, are more likely to “view economic inequality as a result of individual choices and characteristics rather than structural factors”.
Just to break that down to a simpler statement, the wealthy think that it’s the poor’s own fault that they’re poor, despite research showing that people born poor are more likely to stay poor.7
On that basis, we shouldn’t expect the conservative wealthy to have any interest in trying to influence politicians to take action to make society fairer. They already think it’s perfectly fair, the poor are just letting themselves down and effectively keeping themselves poor by choice.
That makes it surprising that the poor can be persuaded to vote for those so focused on their own advancement at the expense of the weakest and poorest in society, but the wealthy know the right things to say, the right ways to divide the weak and the poor and turn them against themselves.
The report also claimed that the wealthy are more likely to “compete over social status” too. Basically, they want to be in power to prove that they’re better than us, not to make our lives better. For them, political office is like a hugely expensive car or a private jet or an attractive young trophy wife.
While there seems to be more and more super-rich looking to gain direct political control, we’ve already seen that they don’t need to do so to exert their influence.
It’s The Sun Wot Won It
Perhaps the most powerful people in our societies are the owners of the media. You’ve got to be truly minted to own a newspaper or TV channel, so we know these people will be moving in privileged circles. Of course there’s more to their power than that though, they get to control the news we read or hear.
The day after the 1992 General Election in the UK, The Sun newspaper front page headline was “It’s The Sun Wot Won It”8, following the previous day’s headline of “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights”. The Sun was proudly declaring that their front page on the election day had swung the election result from an expected Labour Party win to a win for the Conservative Party.
Various people from both political sides supported the paper’s claim, though The Sun’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, later claimed “the media does not have this kind of power”, perhaps realising that crowing about such power comes with the risk of those powers being curbed.
We don’t have to listen to Murdoch or any of the others who shared opinions on the role of the media in UK elections, as a group of researchers looked into the matter.9 Contrary to Rupert Murdoch’s claim that the media doesn’t have the power to swing elections, the study found evidence that The Sun’s endorsements in the 1997 and 2010 elections significantly increased support for their chosen party each time, to a degree in 2010 that could have affected the result. Interestingly the endorsements had no effect on the existing political preferences of voters, but just influenced the party they chose to vote for.
In the run-up to the UK referendum on leaving the European Union, most of the British press were supportive of the Brexit campaign that wanted Britain to leave. During that time, a survey of some 600 economists found that 88% believed that Brexit would make the UK poorer in the five years following Brexit, while just 4% believed Brexit would make the UK richer.10 Across a longer timeframe of 10 to 20 years, 72% believed the result would be a poorer UK, against 11% believing the UK would be richer.
Those figures are very dramatic. Why didn’t the British press focus on those and present a very clear warning to the British people that the vast majority of experts expected Brexit to make the British people poorer? On the contrary and despite that survey, much of the British press continued to big up Brexit and tell the readers that it was in their best interests to vote to leave.
That’s the swamp for you. The heffalumps at the top don’t care about the majority of the people, all they care about is what they want.
And shockingly, most politicians don’t really care about what’s best for most of the people either. They’re too busy sucking up to the heffalumps and doing what’s best for them because they believe that’s where the power lies.
It isn’t. As long as we live in democratic societies, the power lies with us. The power lies with the majority of the people. You just have to decide if you really want your share or if it’s just easier to let the heffalumps and the huge corporations and the selfish billionaires walk all over you in the race to take even more wealth off the table.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heffalump ↩︎
- Ooops, this isn’t the Winnie-the-Pooh I remember – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3E74j_xFtg ↩︎
- https://www.influenceatwork.com/7-principles-of-persuasion/ ↩︎
- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2528290 ↩︎
- https://ajps.org/2023/03/16/the-preference-for-reciprocity-in-congress/ ↩︎
- https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/billionaire-politicians-shockingly-common-study.html ↩︎
- https://ifs.org.uk/inequality/intergenerational-mobility-in-the-uk/ ↩︎
- Here’s an image of the election day front page – https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/06/sun-ed-miliband-neil-kinnock-murdoch-labour ↩︎
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X15001854 ↩︎
- https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/economists-views-brexit ↩︎