The super-rich are only doing what seems natural — we need to change that view
We all derive our behaviour from a number of sources — our genes, the specifics of our upbringing, our life experiences — but importantly also from the cultural norms of our society.
What cultures consider normal and desirable can differ radically. Yet from within it is very difficult to see how things could be different. Cultural norms offer us the paths we can walk down, but they also create the walls that constrain us. Like the air we breathe, they are vital, but often invisible to us.
Cultural norms can drive small, insignificant variations, but they can also be powerful forces, driving seemingly bizarre and unreasonable behaviour. They are what has allowed some societies to practice head hunting, human sacrifice, foot binding and genital mutilation. To the people living in these societies, these things seemed normal, even necessary.
Cultural norms are not static — they change over time. In our own societies, only a few generations have passed since slavery was common and the idea of women owning their own property and having the right to vote would have seemed extraordinary.
It is precisely this variation over time that can make it difficult to know how to interpret historical figures. Thomas Jefferson, for example, is revered as one of America’s founding fathers, but was also a slave owner and did little, if anything, to further the cause of emancipation. Does that make him a bad person? It certainly would if he was alive today, but it is impossible to draw any conclusion without taking into account the cultural norms that a person lived with.
But cultural norms are not a thing of the past. They remain just as important today. In the West, cultural norms help us us to ignore the poverty of developing nations — poverty that we are often complicit in maintaining and gaining advantage from. They allow us to largely ignore climate change, despite the enormous existential threat that it poses. Cultural norms encourage parents to hire after-school tutors for their primary-school children to avoid them ‘falling behind’. They encourage us to worry about the health of ‘the economy’, without questioning whether such a thing exists, and whether it is serving our needs, or we are working for it. They allow us to take on debt to buy more and more material possessions that we don’t need. They allow us to drive a little above the speed limit, without arousing anyone’s complaint.
We don’t really question these things, because they are embedded in the fabric of the culture that surrounds us. We are most likely to be confronted by the fact that these views are not universal when we travel. It is one of the exciting and dizzying aspects of visiting truly ‘foreign’ cultures: things that we take for granted turn out to be completely different. They have rice for breakfast, can you believe it? They don’t have tea in the afternoon. They go to bed after lunch and then stay up late into the night. The toilets, well…
Such differences are surprising and exciting and often challenging too. But the thing is, we usually fail to do more than shake our heads and store them up as stories to tell our friends. We don’t learn the huge lesson that we could from them — that there is another way to be, or indeed, many other ways to be. Once we get home, we fall neatly back into our lives and pick up where we left off, largely unaltered.
While differences in cultural norms are obvious over time and between countries, they also exist within them. No society is a single homogenous culture, instead they are a complex mix of sub-cultures, some of which are more obvious than others. The expectations of someone growing up in a working class background are very different to those experienced by someone born into a wealthy family. We experience this when we treat ourselves to a night at a really fancy hotel, or attend the wedding of a rich friend. Suddenly we are transported into a different world, even though it exists within almost the same physical space as our own.
So why all this discussion of culture? Well, just as we experience life through a set of cultural expectations, so do the super-rich, regardless of whether they started out life at that level, or made their way into it. In an important sense, they live in a different culture to the rest of us. This influences the way they see the world, what they aspire to and what they believe to be normal and reasonable behaviour.
The release of the Panama papers revealed a world of tax avoidance, shell companies and money laundering on a grand scale. If we are honest, it only really confirmed what we already suspected: that corruption is a normal state of affairs in the world of the super rich. (That most of these behaviours may be technically legal is beside the point — the idea that ‘technically legal’ is therefore reasonable and acceptable is an unfounded leap in itself.)
It is easy to think that this means the super rich must be evil or immoral. No doubt this is true for some, but to assume this applies to all is to ignore the role of cultural norms. These people live in a different world from the rest of us, how they see the world is also different. For most of them, they are only doing what seems natural. Avoiding tax where possible makes sense for them — it is a hallmark of efficiency. Why would you lose money to the government if it isn’t really necessary?
The idea of cultural norms can explain more than tax avoidance. One of the mysteries of the successful and wealthy is why they continue to work so hard to expand their already enormous wealth. But seen from within their cultural perspective, the world looks very different. A successful businessman with a net worth in the tens of millions has entered into a world where real wealth is measured in billions. Far from being wealthy, he has barely enough for a seat at the table. For the super rich, there is always someone richer and more successful, always more to aim for.
What are the implications of this? First, that the culture of those at the top is always likely to drive them towards greater accumulation and tax avoidance is a part of that. We cannot afford for laws to be poorly framed, as they will always be put to the test. But it also implies that how we enforce those laws is equally important. Allowing questionable activity to take place without censure, and coming to comfortable settlements with those found guilty of dodgy behaviour only confirms the cultural norms at play: the idea that taxes are flexible, that avoiding them is clever and rational, and that evading them is a minor offence.
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