Why People Are So Mean to Each Other, but So Nice to Billionaires

It happens to every single one of us.

But we don’t talk about it.

You finally achieve something. All too often, it doesn’t play out the way the influencers tell us it will. In fact, the opposite happens. Any little success or upward mobility we manage inspires just as much bitterness as admiration. Rather than trying to help us, the people in our lives try to tear us down.

Sometimes, it’s coworkers.

Other times, it’s friends.

Even family.

This behavior scales. From our personal lives to international politics, we see the same strange thing happening. To put it bluntly, everyone is so mean to each other, but they’re so nice to billionaires. They’re so nice to anyone with status, whether it’s their boss or a local corrupt politician, or the world’s richest man—a man with a long, long list of crimes, a long list of evidence that he’s actually not that smart, that he, in fact, barely knows how to code.

So often, people don’t simply invest in their own upward mobility, but they also invest in everyone else’s downward mobility. This mental glitch feeds racism and hate. It feeds sexism and elitism. It feeds ableism.

It feeds injustice—and collapse.

We have aphorisms to describe this behavior, but sometimes you’re left wondering if it’s all just in your head. Surely it’s just a myth. Surely, half the people you know couldn’t secretly be hoping you fail. Surely, most people want to see each other succeed, whether it’s a promotion or a movement for higher wages. Surely, they can understand the idea of the common good or even Nash equilibrium, which we can simplify to mean that we’re better off when we coordinate instead of simply competing against each other.

And yet…

This one behavior, the need to tear each other down, goes a long way to explaining why the public never seems to mount a successful, sustained campaign against the super rich. It explains why, as one oligarch quipped at the height of the last guilded age, he could pay one half of the working class to shoot the other. It’s not just your imagination. This behavior exists in the real world. Psychologists and sociologists have been studying it for a long time.

Here’s what they say: