Not a day goes by that you don’t hear that ‘inequality’ needs to be lifted, but the ideas on how to do that have so far been disappointing.
Writer Rutger Bregman’s proposal to abolish private wealth has had the opposite effect of turning him into a millionaire, and neither is the most recent attempt by journalist and entrepreneur Sander Schimmelpenninck to make all people brothers.
In the VPRO television series Sander and the gorge in which he denounces wealth inequality, he raises his hand. Or rather, in those of his parents. In the first episode he sits with them at the kitchen table of the castle Nijenhuis in Diepenheim, which his father acquired through inheritance. There he confronts them with the question whether that is fair. That one person gets nothing at birth and the other a lot. Why should one be allowed to live in a castle, while the other has to be crooked for an upstairs apartment? Why is a euro you work for taxed more than one you receive?
According to Schimmelpenninck, the solution is simple: levy more tax on capital and less on labour. “You’re right”, says his father, “I get it”, says his mother, although she thinks it is “sour”.
It seems clear as a piece of cake, but the image of the noble lucky bastard who, if God puts everyone behind in France, does not correspond to reality. Rather the opposite is the case.
The castle had become an office
Fifteen years ago I and my colleague Dorine Hermans sought out the descendants of the noble court dignitaries who grouped around Queen Wilhelmina in 1898, when she was inaugurated as queen. How had that class fared since then? We found them in rather deplorable conditions. Their parental estate or castle had usually become an office, and in one case even a brothel. The few who managed to preserve it were left without central heating by an old stove and depended on government subsidies for maintenance.
Since the nobility was socially ridiculed from the 1970s onwards, it has gone ‘underground’, as one baron put it. The class also dissolved itself, as arranged marriages did not survive the sexual revolution and members outside of their own species married. The barons, earls and barons were economically overtaken by the descendants of their former cooks and their gardeners. And meanwhile, the professionals and the “bourgeois girls” ruled the court, so that a baroness sighed: “You see, it is no longer our milieu.”
Because Schimmelpenninck skips the historical phase in which the nobility was dealt with in his series, a revolutionary development is hidden from view, which is exactly the opposite of what he suggests with the image of his parents on their castle.
Over the past thirty years, the question of whether you become rich or poor has been determined less than ever by where you were born. After the Second World War, the old Europe, ruled by church and king, turned into an individual inhabited, free, democratic space, where more and more individuals could develop and more and more of them could get more and more money, faster and faster. John de Mol’s mother, to name just one, worked in a drugstore in Hilversum in the 1970s.
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Marketing is everything now
Another sanctuary took its place for God and descent: that of marketing. The question of where you come from has been replaced by the question of whether you will be able to sell something, or yourself. Whether it’s peanut butter, art, politics, science or royal status, everything became a matter of marketing. And that is a talent that not everyone has.
A society built on the post-war ideal of equal opportunities is confronted with the painful fact that, insofar as a government is able to organize those equal opportunities, they do not lead to an equal outcome in a free space. In fact, the more opportunities that arise, the greater and more striking the differences may become.
People with a talent for marketing have an advantage in that big race over those who understand the art of packaging less well. If you don’t make a bite-sized product, you’ll soon be finished. This not only results in a difference in income, but also impoverishment in social, political and cultural life.
Freedom and equality have given rise to a marketing culture in the western multimedia world, where economic value and quality are decoupled. This imbalance, which also takes place in the public sector, cannot be solved by taxation. The inequality crisis is not about the central distribution of money, but about the power of marketing, which suppresses the appreciation for craftsmanship and limits the possibility for one’s own development. For example, Schimmelpenninck is a journalist himself, but also the face of internet bank Brand New Day, ABN Amro and Vodafone.
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Professionals undervalued
From the 1990s, not only did the colonization of cultural life by John de Mol and Joop van den Ende (although not of nobility) begin, the consultant also emerged, who earns more than a police officer one day.
He who has learned to carve a cabinet is less respected than one who has studied ‘leadership’, and the politician who builds a cathedral of slogans is more successful than one who cares about the technical quality of legislation.
Propelled by visual culture and multimedia, the marketers have become masters of almost every field. In a universe where long lines form daily for the branches of hot air salesman Louis Vuitton, the problem is not ‘inequality’, but loss of value. The VPRO should make a series about that.
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