I spent last weekend in Ibiza. That makes me sound like a plutocrat, but I discovered that if you’re prepared to arrive on the island at 1.15 a.m. on EasyJet it’s just about affordable. A friend who’s taken a villa invited my whole family to come and stay and that’s so rare these days I couldn’t turn him down.
He took Caroline and me to a party on Friday night that was attended by the crème de la crème of Ibizan society — and Ibiza is pretty ritzy these days. These are the sort of people commonly described as the ‘super rich’ — the owners of high-street fashion chains, hedge fund billionaires, Russian oligarchs. Many of them had arrived in Ibiza that morning on private jets. It provided a fascinating glimpse into a world I usually only encounter in the pages of the Daily Mail.
The most striking thing about them was that they were all dressed like teenage clubbers. It was as if their luggage had got mixed up with that of the passengers arriving on the Ryanair flight from Birmingham. Men in their late sixties — leather-skinned robber barons — were sporting diaphanous white cotton shirts, their necks festooned with thongs and peace symbols. But this was not fancy dress. My host assured me that this is typical evening wear for the super rich in Ibiza.
Later, as the evening wore on, the guests were directed towards the dance floor, where a famous DJ was playing the latest club sounds at top volume. To my 47-year-old ears it sounded like the sort of ‘music’ the psy-ops division of the US Army blasts at entrenched enemy forces in the hope of driving them out of their hidey-holes. But these goaty old billionaires grabbed their supermodel girlfriends and started hopping from foot to foot. Again, my host told me there was nothing unusual about this.
I was dumbstruck. The social anthropologist in me wanted to know why the richest men in the world were impersonating the behaviour of a bunch of drug-addled club kids. Is it because they’re in thrall to the cult of youth? No doubt this is part of the explanation, since staving off father time has long been an obsession of the super rich. There’s also an element of nostalgie de la boue — the well-documented phenomenon whereby people at the top of the social pyramid are mesmerised by those at the bottom, attributing an authenticity and spiritual purity to them that are lacking in members of their own class.
But as I stood on the edge of that dance floor, staring at these shaven-headed septuagenarians, a third explanation occurred to me: I was witnessing the triumph of the principle of equality. Not economic equality, obviously, but social equality. One of the more curious phenomena of our age has been the way in which the huge growth in income inequality in the world’s most advanced economies has been accompanied by a form of social convergence. This is a trend that Ferdinand Mount remarked upon in Mind The Gap, his anatomy of modern Britain. In their habits and manners, our social elite no longer maintain the welter of distinctions that used to mark them off from the mass of ordinary people. On the contrary, even to acknowledge the old social codes — noticing that someone says ‘pardon’ instead of ‘what’, for instance — is now taboo. Classlessness, at least when it comes to cultural matters, is de rigueur. Mount was writing of the British ruling class, but it’s equally true of international court society.
In a sense, this is a dazzling sleight of hand carried out by the world’s financial elite. They’ve spiked the guns of their left-wing opponents by embracing social equality, but done it in a way that involves no transfer of wealth to the least well-off. As a form of triangulation, it’s been devastatingly effective. I’ve no doubt that one of the reasons the electorates of Western Europe and North America don’t vote for political parties that favour redistributive taxation is because the wealthy have abandoned their separate cultural existence. Their impersonation of the hoi polloi is a form of ritual obeisance, a paying of respect that is handsomely reciprocated.
There’s no cunning mastermind who’s devised this strategy. It’s entirely unconscious. The extraordinary thing about the social set I encountered in Ibiza is that in spite of their vast wealth — or perhaps because of it — they just want to be like everybody else.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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