Us vs them: why the rich are destroying our world
McDonald's work should be read alongside another new book, Goliath's Curse by Dr Luke Kemp from Cambridge University. The 'Goliath' in Kemp's study of civilisational collapse is the elite - the rich who have ruled over us since the Bronze Age.
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His thesis is that societies collapse due to the annexing of wealth by a tiny elite who he calls 'walking versions of the Dark Triad'. The Dark Triad is a psychological term for the worst of humanity's characteristics: narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy.
Taken together these books warn: things fall apart when the rich get too rich, and we're living through a moment when the rich have definitely got too rich.
That disparity in wealth - the figure which marks America as unequal as Caesar's Rome - has a technical term: the Gini Coefficient. Not much separates Britain and America on this measure. Among the list of 37 OECD countries, Britain is 30th; America 32nd. Costa Rica comes last.
The wider a society's Gini coefficient, the greater the levels of unhappiness and anger; the higher the risk of crime.
A picture begins to emerge when you put these disparate facts together: of western societies strip-mined by the few to the point of destruction, of billions of working people cannibalised by a rapacious elite whose unobtainable lifestyles are built overwhelmingly on inherited wealth.
We're living through a new 'Gilded Age': the period at the end of the 19th century marked by grotesque material excess, political corruption, and endemic poverty. It didn't end well. Ask the Tsar of Russia and his family.
The Russian Revolution stands as the greatest, most violent, attempt to slough off the previous Gilded Age. Obscene wealth inequality leads to obscene results.
However, reactions around the world at the beginning of the last century to intolerable wealth disparities played their part in the collapse of European monarchies, the first global war and the rise of new political parties like Labour in Britain.
If this is a new Gilded Age, then while the world's billionaires live in gold, the rest of us live in rust. There's a cartoon from around 1900 called 'From the Depths', drawn as a warning to the rich to rein in their greed.
It shows a glittering ballroom filled with dancers in gowns and tailcoats. The dance floor is held up on the backs of the hungry and ragged poor. One desperate man has punched through the floor, his clenched fist rising up. An aristocrat looks down fearfully at this breech into his candlelit world.
The very same mood is growing in the west. A poster has just gone up outside a London hospital. It says 'Know Your Parasites'. First on the list is ticks. The advice reads 'remove with tweezer'. Then there's worms. The advice reads 'remove with medication'.
Next come billionaires. The advice reads 'remove with wealth tax'. It shows the faces of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos (Image: PA)
The old Gilded Age had its rail and steel barons, the new Gilded Age has its tech barons.
One of the most stomach-churning sights of this year was Bezos's Venice wedding. He rented a city to display his riches, while we pressed our noses against the windows of his palace.
Meanwhile, the world burned. Meanwhile, here in Britain, eight-in-ten dentists report treating cases of DIY dentistry. The NHS spends £50billion on the effects of deprivation and child poverty.
One senior NHS employee recently told the Guardian that Britain is experiencing 'medieval' levels of untreated illness in our poorest communities, including folk attending A&E 'with cancerous lumps bursting through their skin'.
Scottish charities tell of mums dropping three dress sizes as they're going hungry to feed their kids. Outside any city centre office you'll see sports cars one moment, and homeless people the next.
Far from fellow citizens reduced to lives of begging, there's the likes of Dame Debbie Crosbie, Nationwide chief executive and darling of the Labour government, with a £7million annual pay package.
Never forget the bankers. That's where the poison lies. They crashed our economy, and instead of being jailed, our governments across the west bailed them out with our money. Bankers rolled in gold, while our lives and countries were shredded by austerity.
The number - and size - of super-yachts being built increases yearly, from 1024 in 2022 to 1203 in 2023. There's a smart slogan doing the rounds these days: Your enemies don't come in small boats, but private jets.
In the feudal past, the rich assaulted and raped the poor. Today, our news is filled with the crimes of multi-millionaire sex offenders like Donald Trump's friend Jeffrey Epstein.
What makes today so different, though, to times long gone when the poor rose up to defend themselves is that the rich have managed to divide us as never before.
Most media - dominated by the billionaire class - manufactures culture wars pitting ordinary citizens against each other. Better to have us at our own throats, than at theirs.
If we cleared the smoke from our eyes, we'd realise we can change what's happening before it's too late. For change must come. This can't continue. And far better for peaceable than violent change.
I began with a statistic of sheer despair: the matched inequality of America and slaving-owning Rome.
Here's another statistic. It comes from Oxfam. The wealth of the world's richest increased by $34trillion since 2015. If we took that money - not their entire wealth, just the interest on their wealth over ten years - we'd end global poverty 22 times over.
There is hope. You just have to want it.
Neil Mackay is the Herald's Writer-at-Large. He's a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics
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