You Don't Have to Be Meek to Inherit the Earth

JED ROSALES

Everyone, especially the financially well-off, wants to show empathy for the poor, maybe because it feels good, or maybe to answer a higher calling, or maybe out of fear that Jean-Jacques Rousseau might be right in saying the poor will eat the rich when there’s nothing left to eat anymore. What many people don’t understand is that being poor isn’t just about money, and it’s one of the main reasons why they get duped.

Your “poor card” is automatically revoked when you know a lot of things only the rich know, and do a lot of things only they do When you can name good brands, good places, good games, and good food, people think you’re bathing in cash They won’t think about the money you’ve earned and saved They won’t even think you’re lying to them so long as you walk the talk, or at least play pretend

Clearly, there’s a reliance on a rule of thumb, which Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman refers to as a simplifying heuristic

The mind often disregards facts in its path towards least resistance And of course, it’s easy to surmise opulence from someone sporting Prada, Dior, or Balenciaga and overlook the existence of affordable Class-A imitations in Greenhills Yet even if you spend time (and money) collecting phony luxury tags and attending sessions at John Robert Powers, you won’t belong with the alta sociedad without being “alta” yourself

Which brings me to one of my favorite shows: Inventing Anna

It takes big brains (and balls) to pull off the confidence game, but Anna Delvey’s, or rather Anna Sorokin’s, was exceptionally crazy, enough to get its very own Shondaland docuseries on Netflix, much to the dismay of some financial bigwigs in the Big Apple

It’s difficult to imagine that someone with a peasant face and obnoxious accent could fool New York’s elite and fake millions of dollars, though not much mental calculus is needed to understand how fraudsters like Anna perform their magic tricks The Soho Grifter’s grand larceny is grounded in the exploitation of cognitive biases in transforming perceptions into truths which wouldn’t work if she didn’t entertain her own delusions In other words, she had to believe she was not poor

But here’s the thing: she wasn’t poor

She was born in Russia and moved to Germany, where she lived a fairly normal life with good and hard-working parents Her father had a stable business to support her education She even landed a competitive internship at Purple, a renowned French fashion magazine

So what went wrong?

Should we assume she was once poor because she came from a former communist superpower (admit it, we were all thinking it)?

Perhaps she was tired of dull and monotonous deskwork Perhaps she resented the ordinary Perhaps she envied the vieux riche

Perhaps she’s (clinically) wrong in the head Perhaps we’ll never know I’m certain, however, that one dreary day, she came to the same realization as I did about society To quote New York Magazine writer Jessica Pressler:

“Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else And the thing was: It was so easy ”

She’s right When you’re smart, ballsy, and morally bankrupt, it’s easy to get ahead of everyone else Everyone has lied and deceived, thieved and destroyed, donned facades and raced to the top of the food chain, attesting to human nature Anyone who tells you otherwise is a hypocrite who relishes the idea that, in the end, the meek shall inherit the Earth But really, you don’t have to be meek to fall heir to the world; you just have to look rich and be a little insane