FEB 19, 2026
https://alimcforever.substack.com/p/cruelty-is-functional
You have to understand that for this class of modern billionaires, wealth is not the goal. Rank is the goal. And rank requires someone beneath you.
Positional goods
Wealth that only works if others lack it.
In 1976, the economist Fred Hirsch coined the term “positional goods”. These are things whose value comes not from how much of them exist, but from the fact that other people do not have them. A penthouse is not valuable because it has four walls. It is valuable because most people live below you. An elite school is not valuable because it teaches better maths. It is valuable because most people cannot get in.
This applies to wealth itself.
Beyond a certain comfort threshold, people do not value money for what it buys. They value it for where it places them relative to others. If everyone has enough, the positional value of being rich collapses.
A Yale study found that liberal rich people consistently chose “efficiency” (keeping the gap) over “equality” (closing the gap), because equality would destroy their social position.
Socialism does not threaten the wealthy’s access to food, their houses, or their health.
It threatens their rank. And rank is the thing they are actually addicted to.
Veblen: the predatory instinct
Thorstein Veblen wrote in 1899. In “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, he argued that the wealthy do not just consume. They consume in ways designed to prove dominance. He called it “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste”.
Veblen traced this back to what he called the “predatory instinct”: the shift from cooperative, productive cultures to cultures where status comes from taking, not making. In predatory cultures, trophies, booty, and evidence of “successful aggression” become the markers of worth. The leisure class, he argued, is the modern descendant of warrior‑raider cultures, where the whole point was to prove you could take from others and not work.
The display of wealth is not about comfort. It is about proving dominance over those who must work. And that display requires an audience of people who visibly do not have what you have.
Fromm: necrophilia as a character structure
Erich Fromm, writing in the 1960s and 1970s described a “necrophilic” character orientation: a personality type drawn to control, to turning the living into the dead, the organic into the mechanical, the free into the managed.
Fromm connected this directly to capitalism. He argued that the system selects for and rewards people who relate to other humans as objects to be owned, moved, broken, and discarded.
The necrophilic character “loves law and order”, bureaucracy, predictability, and the administration of things. They are “fascinated by all that is dead” and find living, unpredictable, autonomous people threatening.
Fromm linked this to sadism: the desire for total mastery over another person, to make them an object of your will, to humiliate, enslave, and torture them. Not for any practical gain, but because the act of domination is the point.
This is why, it is not really about money.
Social sadism: cruelty as a structural feature
China Mieville described “social sadism”: the deliberate, invested, semi‑public cruelty that is not a bug in capitalism but part of its deep grammar.
His argument is that the creditor class derives pleasure from exercising power over the powerless, and that this pleasure is “more highly prized the lower and baser the debtor stands in the social order”.
The permission to be cruel to someone beneath you functions as a psychological wage, a small share in domination handed down through the hierarchy.
He traces this through real examples: foreclosure lawyers holding Halloween parties dressed as the homeless people they evicted; Enron traders laughing about “Grandma Millie” freezing during the California blackouts they engineered; rich commentators calling inequality “unrelentingly beautiful”.
The pattern: it is not enough to profit from suffering. There is a need to see the suffering, to know the sufferer knows you caused it, and to enjoy that knowledge openly.
Status, power, and the brain
Neuroscience and social psychology research shows that humans are wired to track relative status from early childhood. Status activates reward circuits in the brain. But status is not absolute. It is relational. You cannot feel high without someone feeling low.
Research on power shows that people in high‑status positions develop reduced empathy over time, increased sense of entitlement, and a greater willingness to dehumanise those below them. Power literally changes how the brain processes other people’s pain. The longer someone holds power, the less they register the humanity of those beneath them.
Why they need you poor and in pain
Wealth is positional
It only feels like wealth if someone else is poor. Abolishing poverty would abolish the feeling of being rich.
Status is relational
The brain’s reward system runs on comparison, not on absolute levels of comfort.
The predatory class evolved culturally, not biologically.
Veblen showed that “taking” cultures reward domination and punish cooperation, and these values are transmitted through institutions, inheritance, and social selection, not genes.
Capitalism selects for necrophilic character.
Fromm showed that the system promotes people who treat living beings as things, and that this orientation is self‑reinforcing.
Cruelty is functional and pleasurable
Social sadism is a structural feature that disciplines the poor, entertains the rich, and trains everyone in between to accept hierarchy as natural.
Equality is experienced as loss
If your identity is built on being above others, then raising others up feels like being dragged down. This is why the rich oppose redistribution even when it would cost them nothing material. Even when the price of sustaining inequality has become environmentally existential for everyone.