This is another contribution to my practice on Saturdays to run articles about our fellow citizens of the One Percent (actually .01 of the 1%, or one out of every 10,000 of us) hoping that by doing this that we don't lose touch with their world and their concerns--you know, to promote understanding. It is important that we become better acquainted so that we can serve them better and make it easier for them to carry out the daily burden of making important decisions, decisions which affect whether we go off to war in foreign lands to kill their enemies, if we have jobs, if we live in a home or under a bridge, if we can afford their health care services, education, etc.
Unfortunately, for some reason they tend to hide their lives from the rest of us behind walls of secrecy, literal walls of guarded gated communities, private clubs, esoteric publications, by traveling with private jets, etc. We should not let that deter us.
Today we have to thank Vanity Fair for making us aware in this article of a widespread disease plaguing the rich. I think it reasonable to believe that many of the rich were not even aware of it, and probably not conscious that they, too, might be suffering from it. Thankfully, you and I don't have to worry about it.
When you have 15 houses, yachts in three oceans, planes, cellars, mistresses, surgery, a library, and a personal charity, new purchases become just a matter of upgrading. And this is where the Perfection Anxiety kicks in. What you need is to have not just the most but the very, very best. The super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who’s got a slightly better loafer, a pullover made from some even more absurdly endangered fur. They will go to any lengths to find the best tailors. I know of a man who gets his suit pants made in Italy and the jackets on Savile Row.Gill reports on some other symptoms of this disease plaguing the rich:
And when you’ve got the best of everything, when you have your tea flown in from a micro-garden in Darjeeling and it still tastes rather like tea, when you’ve designed your own scent made from the squeezed glands of civets and the petals of rare orchids and that fails to give you the high—“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer”—then you’re reduced to collecting art.