We all know the “tall poppy syndrome”. That peculiar form of cultural cringe that drags down successful Australians as if their prominence somehow offends our sense of selves. It’s not a great look, alienating our best and brightest instead of celebrating them as the best of ourselves.
But today that has been replaced by something altogether more destructive that holds far greater sway socially, politically and economically than any upward envy. It is downwards envy, the jealous persecution of the victim as the touchstone of Australian currency. Let’s call it the small poppy syndrome.
Yesterday we saw an exemplar of it in the mutterings of property magnate Tim Gurner:
A young property tycoon has claimed Generation Y needs to stop travelling and spending money on overpriced food to save for their first home.
Tim Gurner, 35, from Melbourne, has amassed nearly half a billion dollars since buying his first investment property when he was just 19 years old.
He said his generation can become home owners by changing their spending and lifestyle habits, despite Australia’s housing affordability crisis.
‘When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,’ he told Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes program.
Kicking the dog is now a de rigueur part of success in Australia. It’s not good enough to rise above ones peers. The titan must despise those he’s left behind.
I’m not going to tell you that Mr Gurner is not a smart fellow. He no doubt is. But, equally, for him to judge all others by the same yardstick is transparently absurd given homes are astronomically more expensive than they’ve even been before. They got there thanks to loaded dice masquerading as a market not through a generation turned lazy.
Small poppy syndrome is rife among our millionaire and billionaire class. I could list them all here but what’s the point? They are much of a muchness, putting their own interests ahead of their fellow man and country at every turn and blaming those spectacularly less fortunate than themselves for their misfortunes.
It’s as large a chip on the shoulder as any tall poppy syndrome before it, indeed emanating from the same empty place of cultural inferiority.
In part it is identity based, the poor white trash of Asia made good. An isolated and largely sub-altern Angloshere nation risen to the top of global prosperity and keen to slough a degenerate past.
In part it is political, with a dominant globalising, neo-liberal ideology that disdains failure and glorifies international acceptance.
In part it is political, as many years of the above ideology has informed policy that encourages hatred for the victim, scorn for the loser and the denuding of the helpless.
In part it is economic, as the bubble economy has produced several generations of inflated spruikers in place of genuine entrepreneurs that actually built something that changed people’s lives.
All of these things have produced the small poppy syndrome, the strangely bitter envy poured upon the those in need, or in need of a hand, versus their outrageously successful selves.
Ironically this elite reference liberal capitalism as their moral centre. Yet the roots of liberal capitalism as defined by Adam Smith, its godfather, put forward two propositions not one. The first we know well:
The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.
But he also argued explicitly:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.
US liberal capitalism knows this well. Though its government is less supportive than the Australian, it’s rich are far more giving. When we replicate them in liberalising our economy, as we should, we should take its generous spirit as much as it avaricious one.
If not the for the good of their fellow Australian, the rich might want to consider that the current deglobalisaiton movement is what happens when the wealthy are defined by downward envy. As IMF economist Fred Hirsch argued in the Social Limits to Growth, the modern market economy is successful only to the extent that it stands on the shoulders of a pre-capitalist ideology. He was concerned that the growth and maturation of the market economy undermined the moral and ideological foundations upon which it depended. The market economy depends on respect for rules that cannot be enforced by law alone. It depends on the owners of business being permitted to maximise their own wealth and incomes in certain defined ways, and on others in society foregoing the opportunity to take advantage of their own positions to do likewise. Hirsch presented a pessimistic prognosis for capitalism and the market economy, ‘as the foundations weaken’, he concluded, ‘the structure rises ever higher’.
