Today, however, the rich are separating themselves in perhaps the most obvious way of all: by perfecting their bodies, rather than what they put on them. The rich are fit and the poor are fat: reams of research confirms that the prevalence of obesity decreases as income increases. In the United States, where 41% of the entire population is obese — compared with 25% in the United Kingdom — it is a rare wealthy person who is morbidly overweight (blimp-sized Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and portly former New Jersey governor Chris Christie are outliers). Increasingly, the rich in late middle age have come to resemble Jeff Bezos and Sarah Jessica Parker: ripped to shreds and almost certainly “enhanced” with various anti-ageing drugs and techniques, ranging from steroids and growth hormones to Botox injections and liposuction. 

Into this mix comes semaglutide, an antidiabetic medication better known by its trade name Ozempic. Sold by pharmaceutical manufacturer Novo Nordisk, the drug, which reduces food intake by curbing appetite and slowing digestion, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat obesity in 2021. Since then, celebrities and fitness influencers have routinely shared before-and-after pics captioned with details of their courageous weight-loss journeys, which entailed jabbing themselves with a 1.5ml pen that contains a month’s worth of doses and costs roughly $900 without insurance.

Predictably, stories about Ozempic have proliferated in the tabloids and on social media. Some see the drug as a challenge to the celebrity movement that touts “fat acceptance”, and brought us the “slim-thick” era of curvy female superstars. They argue that Ozempic may work hand-in-hand with the return of the “heroin chic” look of the late Nineties. As interesting as it is to consider where these mixed messages might lead us — to a culture in which poor people are told it’s fabulous to be obese, while the rich get ever thinner and fitter — if this is a conspiracy, it’s not a new one. The rich have lusted after youth, beauty and fitness, in others and themselves, since time immemorial, always keeping the poor as downtrodden as possible while pacifying them with bromides about equality, liberty and fraternity. Ozempic, then, is not simply the key to thinness; those who pay for it are buying even more distance between themselves and the hoi polloi. 

In short, this appears to be yet another sign that the elite are headed toward some sort of crude transhumanist utopia, complete with gene therapy and designer-baby selection. Some may scoff that this is science fiction, but this future looms: once they’re sufficiently fine-tuned, gene editing tools will likely eradicate heart disease, muscle wasting, neurodegenerative disorders, and other conditions in embryos that are still in utero — but their price will be nothing short of staggering. Similarly expensive gene therapies will enhance the overall performance of already-healthy humans, raising ethical questions about whether these procedures should “improve” a person or merely “fix” a condition. The rich, of course, will leave those debates to the philosophers and pay upfront for the best bodies that their considerable resources can buy. Already, news stories abound of billionaires pursuing immortality, with a few commentators trying to sanitise the pursuit by arguing that the research will somehow benefit even the least of us.   

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Steroids won't cure toxic masculinity

By Oliver Bateman

I have first-hand experience in the big-bucks world of anti-ageing science, and I can state unequivocally that the most compelling benefits are not going to trickle down. In 2017, I worked for a transhumanist medical organisation, producing marketing content related to stem-cell therapy and other forms of anti-ageing medicine. I received several treatments myself, and while I can only speak anecdotally, they significantly relieved decades of aches and pains related to hard training. And these were one-off procedures, not the monthly “Cadillac plan”, which involved steroids, growth hormones, and Botox. Wealthy clients would walk in as untrained, middle-aged slobs and, less than a year later, boast gym-hardened physiques that might take unenhanced trainees a decade to develop. 

The organisation’s telos was the stuff of nightmares: the acquisition of a yacht to serve as a floating hospital so that various procedures that are illegal in North America could be performed in international waters; or the same-day infusion of stem cells harvested from a delivery of rich clients’ babies. Although peer-reviewed research has shown no difference between using frozen and freshly-harvested stem cells, there was marketing value in promising clients the freshest ingredients possible. It allowed for a considerable markup in the price of the procedure. It wasn’t the “these vampires want to drink baby blood” of conspiracy-nut ramblings — but it did resemble them. 

So, when I see discussions of Ozempic’s social impact, I don’t think about plus-sized singer Lizzo and skeletal commentator Ann Coulter trading barbs about the ideal female physique. That sort of chatter is all a sideshow for the general public; the rich clients doping themselves to remain forever young do not much care about how the poor and middle class choose to identify (be it fat or fit) as long as few have the money to identify as rich. Without truly high-end gene editing that might enable skeletal and organ reconfiguration — still a way off, though one never knows — the rich are limited to the basic shape and size of their natal bodies. But being able to invest tens of thousands of dollars per annum in upkeep will nevertheless produce an optimised body utterly unlike that of the poor American.

The culture of fitness influencers and body performers is downstream of this. Their bodies represent an investment that will yield riches, which can in turn be reinvested in the upkeep of those bodies. They are selling you a picture of health that doubles as a picture of wealth, often lying about just how much they spend on effective drugs. In the marketing of bodies, deception is the key to the kingdom. You might, for example, promote your Ozempic transformation on TikTok while failing to mention the $6,000 “micro-liposuction” procedure you’ve used to improve problem areas, because you’re sponsored by an online clinic that writes prescriptions for the drug. Or you might fail to mention your Ozempic and steroid use completely, touting instead a diet that is far less effective in the absence of all these chemical crutches, but tied to prepared meals and meal-replacement shakes you’re being paid to promote. 

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Western society is built on stigma

By Lionel Shriver

As a lifelong strength athlete, I have toiled in filthy gyms and basements to maintain my own physical condition. I would like to say that remaining “natural” or practising intense physical discipline offers some intrinsic reward. Unfortunately, it does not; it is a hard-to-follow path made more tortuous in my case by my stubborn unwillingness to take any effective shortcuts (even though the stem cell injections I received worked like a charm). But a resistance to emptying my wallet, and an aversion to some of the side effects from these drugs — cancerous tumours in the case of Ozempic — has hindered my route to body optimisation.

For me, glorifying the “natural” in and of itself, then, is little better than writing some trite ode to manual labour. There are loads of people, nearly all of them poor and sick, whose bodies are relatively resistant to weight loss. For them, the simplicity of the Ozempic jab — as opposed to the creation of a stomach pouch via laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery — might offer an improved quality of life in much the same way that cheaper insulin and other band-aids help ease the pains associated with sedentary, unhealthy lifestyles.

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How to get ripped and alienate people

By Oliver Bateman

But the rhetorical appeal of this medicine — that it will produce gains that will “trickle down” from the upper classes to the masses — is an old lie. Time is a thief, stealing each passing minute from us, but as money proves able to purchase ever-increasing amounts of it, it will be disproportionately hoarded by those rich people who are already proficient at squirrelling away their money. Whether by violent nature or scientific nurture, the body is merely something to be overcome. And if you’ve the money to opt for the latter, why wouldn’t you?

In the meantime, those of us doomed to remain mere humans can only watch this process unfold while the rich become superhuman. Consigned to increasingly rare “normal” bodies that are both temples and tombs, the middle class must study this journey from the sidelines, watching on as a vast array of battered, bloated and ruined bodies are left in the wake of a transhumanist train that goes in only one direction. 

Nothing in this respect has changed since the Victorian era, when the middle classes were equally panicked by stirrings from below. Nobody objects to the right to withdraw one’s labour; it’s just strikes that some people can’t stomach. The last thing one should do with this particular right is actually exercise it. If you do, you can be sure that the state will shackle you with even more repressive legislation. Strikes are a nuisance for the general public. Choosing between freezing and starving is also a nuisance for the general public, though not, presumably, for Newman and Wark.

There is talk again of hand-outs, which the Victorians doled out graciously to the deserving poor. Perhaps we should dispense with a new prime minister and ask Bill Gates to take over running the country. Some things, however, have changed since Victoria’s day. Back then, the poor were largely invisible. (I apologise for the quaintly archaic term “poor”; I mean of course those with limited disposable incomes). A lot of them lived in slums, where few of their social superiors dared to tread. They were a ghettoised species to be researched into or moralised about, an alien underworld visited largely by philanthropists and sociologists.

Middle-class people ventured into their midst from time to time to note their physiognomic peculiarities or beg them to be washed in the blood of the Lamb. They were also largely illiterate, which shut them out of the public sphere even more decisively. Nowadays, the poor may live next door, or even closer than that, while a good many of the ghettos are for the rich. The low-paid have also acquired a voice of their own, rather than having conscience-stricken novelists speak out on their behalf. It’s a long way from Charles Dickens to Mick Lynch. The deprived used to be a problem — a distinctive group like the disabled, in need of special measures. But what if the problem is society itself?

Some Victorians saw poverty as a transient state. A poor person was someone en route to becoming a rich person, rather as an ape was en route to becoming a human being. For the state to intervene in the laws of the marketplace would only derail this desirable evolution. Some of these apologists for progress and civilisation would have been aghast at the idea that there would still be widespread hunger almost 200 years on. Much the same view was taken of Empire. Colonial peoples were stuck at an evolutionary point which we ourselves had left behind some centuries ago, and the more enlightened of our forebears felt the need to bring these savages up to date by invading their territories, hi-jacking their labour-power and plundering their resources. They did not pause to reflect that a major reason why the colonies were in a dire state was because they themselves existed, rather as a major reason for the existence of the poor is the activity of the rich.

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Boris Johnson was too Dickensian

By Terry Eagleton

Others in Victorian Britain saw poverty as a natural condition, and thus as unchangeable. This, however, doesn’t follow: not all natural conditions are unchangeable, as the planet knows to its cost. It’s a lot easier to move a mountain than to demolish patriarchy. There are, however, certain natural phenomena which never vary, like the need for nourishment or the nastiness of the US Republican party, and destitution could easily be added to the list. Besides, an authority as unimpeachable as the Son of God had declared that the poor are always with us. If Jesus was a Tory, who were we to say otherwise?

After a while, however, poverty became a scandal. It showed no signs of disappearing, but ideologically speaking it grew less acceptable. This was partly because of the growth of humanitarianism, and partly because too stark a division between rich and poor was politically destabilising. The case that having an empty stomach is as natural as having typhoid thus crumbled away. Fewer people believed that capitalism, too, is just human nature, though this view still has a number of subscribers. It was growing harder to maintain that Neolithic Man could find his fulfilment only by running a corner shop, or that tribal peoples like the Nuer and the Dinka are secretly hankering to be stockbrokers. Aristotle thought that trade simply for the sake of accumulating wealth was unnatural. For some feudal ideologues, capitalism flouted traditional values and would never catch on. Shakespeare was well aware of the New Men, as the Elizabethans called them, and feared the devastation they were wreaking.

So hardship had to be accounted for in non-natural terms, and it was thus that the evolutionary theory became the trickle-down theory. In the end, the wealthy would come to the rescue of the needy. It is remarkable how resistant to reality this pious faith has proved. Karl Marx was derided for claiming that the rift between the well-off and the hard-up would widen as capitalism developed, but he has proved prophetic. It is the rich who are getting richer, not the poor. If it is true that capitalism can lift some people out of deprivation, it is also true that it can plunge others into it, sometimes at the same time.

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Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Even so, the myth persists that granting tax breaks to billionaires is the quickest route to all-round affluence. How many times must this theory fail in practice before it is finally discredited? Imagine someone who believes that the killing of African Americans by police officers is simply a series of tragic accidents. It says nothing significant about the structure of American society. The more African Americans are murdered, the more stubbornly this individual sticks to his view.

If he isn’t entirely dim-witted, one can only account for this by appealing to ideology. There must be some reason why this man can’t afford to acknowledge the existence of systematic racism. To do so might seriously jeopardise his own interests. He might be forced to look at the world in a way that makes it hard to carry on living as he does. The same goes for the Kentucky ex-coalminer standing up to his waist in flood water who, when asked whether climate change may have played a part in destroying his home, hesitated for several seconds before grudgingly replying: “It’s possible.”

It isn’t in the interests of the current economic system to acknowledge that it breeds inequality in the same way that sugar is sweet. This is why some look forward to the time when the low-paid will catch up with Elon Musk, or at least with Gary Lineker. This will certainly come about, but only in the kingdom of heaven, and people surviving on sandwiches because they daren’t turn on the cooker are reluctant to wait that long.

The beauty of the American Dream is that it accepts the reality of poverty, but in an upbeat kind of way. The badly off won’t get to live in Martha’s Vineyard, but individuals here and there will bootstrap themselves to success. There is a ladder leading to the top, but like all ladders it is wide enough to hold only one at a time. Society is one enormous lottery, and what keeps you from chaining yourself to the nearest police officer is the prospect that your number might always come up. Meanwhile, as you visit your local food bank, it is consoling to think that others are paying a fortune for tickets to the moon. The hearts of the unemployed swell with patriotic pride at the thought of the urchin from the Bronx or Detroit who grew up to be a millionaire and throw them out of their jobs.

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Was Jesus a revolutionary?

By Terry Eagleton

Every civilisation has its blind spots — the unsayable or inconceivable, the invisible framework which marks the limits of permissible thought. In Britain today, this is the property system. This situation, too, hasn’t changed since Victorian times. In the 1840s, a famine broke out at the heart of the British Empire, the greatest social catastrophe of 19th-century Europe. One million Irish people died, while millions of others emigrated. One reason they did so was because the British government wouldn’t permit any tampering with the laws of the capitalist economy. Few people today believe that this set-up is divinely ordained, but a lot of them behave as though it is. Watch Kirsty Wark’s blank, uncomprehending visage when someone on the show is rash enough to mention socialism.

Before we squabble about restoring a tax cut here or help for the most vulnerable there, we should step back and contemplate for a moment the sheer surreal lunacy of the situation. In a world in which computers are so advanced that they may be feeling lonesome, and for all we know are secretly dating each another, people are going to die because they are deprived of goods to which they have an absolute right. Perhaps it will soothe the grief and fury of their families to point out that there is no alternative — that, in the midst of the greatest affluence and technological wizardry history has ever witnessed, the wit of humanity is unable to conceive of a different way of doing things. I wouldn’t like to be the politician who tries to tell them.

Following his death, I interviewed one of Ansari’s friends, who said that small business owners along the Boardwalk had spent weeks begging for more police protection to no avail. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time reporting on violent crime in America has heard a version of this story. Contrary to the claims of “police abolitionists”, residents of poor communities often want more and better policing.

This is partly because they happen to live under a far greater threat of violent crime than other communities do: organised criminal networks have a much easier time taking root in low-income neighbourhoods than anywhere else. But this also because residents of low-income communities don’t have nearly as many resources to defend themselves as upper-income communities do.

If Ansari had been rich, he could have simply hired private security to protect himself and his family business. But most Americans aren’t wealthy enough to do that — and, according to a recent paper published in the American Journal of Public Health this inequality is getting worse.

The authors examined violent crime across 13 cities in the United States between March and July in the years 2018, 2019, and 2020. They found that not only was violence much higher in poorer neighbourhoods, but that the gap between low-income and high-income areas in the prevalence of gun violence, aggravated assault, and homicide grew between 2019 and 2020.

One way to address this phenomenon would be to refer to it as “violence inequality”. Just as we track inequality on axes like income, wealth, and health care, we should acknowledge and measure the gap in public safety between the most and least dangerous neighbourhoods.

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Is this the end of progressive America?

By Joel Kotkin

Violence inequality exists virtually everywhere in the United States, but it is particularly dramatic in some areas. The Chicago Sun Times recently analysed violent crime data across the city, describing what it calls the “safety gap”. The article notes that West Garfield Park, a predominantly black neighbourhood located in the West Side of Chicago, “has experienced a per capita rate of shootings nearly 20 times higher than downtown”. The gap in homicide rates is even more jaw-dropping. In 2021 so far, “the murder rate in the seven most dangerous police districts rose to a three-decade high of nearly 100 homicides per 100,000 residents — 30 times higher than the rate in the safest seven districts, where the rate fell to fewer than four per 100,000.”

Put differently, poor and minority neighbourhoods are reverting to historically high rates of violent crime at the same time as affluent white areas are becoming safer. The gaps are even worse now than they were in the early Nineties, long considered the nadir of America’s violent-crime problem. As criminologist Aaron Chalfin recently noted, in 1991, the least-safe communities in Chicago had rates of gun violence 13 times higher than those of the safest communities; in 2020, gun violence in the least-safe neighbourhoods was 25 times higher.

Violence inequality appears particularly pronounced when you break down the statistics by race. Homicide has long been one of the the leading causes of death for African American young men, topping unintentional injuries, suicide, and heart disease. The Violence Policy Center estimates that the ‘black homicide victimisation rate’ is six times as high as the overall ‘white homicide victimisation rate’. And yet this form of inequality is barely mentioned by the media, despite their obsession with nearly every other type of racial disparity. Why is that?

One explanation is that ordinary neighbourhood violence doesn’t fit neatly into the prevailing narrative, in which the primary problems faced by minorities are the result of systemic racism and white supremacy. Outside of the conservative media, it’s practically taboo to discuss the levels of violence that exist in parts of the United States without lengthy throat-clearing about how the real culprit is racism, capitalism or the police.

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How Defund the Police backfired

By Michael Shellenberger

But that’s not the way people who live in these communities describe their own lives. Last summer, as progressive activists waged a sustained campaign to delegitimise the police, Gallup polling found that most African Americans wanted to either maintain current levels of police presence in their communities or expand it.

Still, the fact that addressing violence inequality is one of the most important things that the Democratic Party could do for underprivileged people must be a bitter pill for progressives to swallow (and it is almost certainly the Democratic Party’s job, as the GOP doesn’t look like winning elections in violence-plagued cities anytime soon). Addressing it would almost certainly involve more policing and tougher sentencing for people who have committed violent crimes, many of whom will likely be minorities. This would cut against the progressive project of ending “mass incarceration” and promoting alternatives to policing, and would no doubt feel to many progressives like doubling down on a racist and authoritarian system.

But tackling violence inequality can bring meaningful change to the lives of the people progressives say they care the most about. A March 2019 study published in Demography soberly noted that while homicide remains a leading cause of death for young black men, the dramatic decline in homicide rates that started in the Nineties “led to a 0.80-year increase in life expectancy at birth for African American males, and reduced years of potential life lost by 1,156 years for every 100,000 African American males”. According to the study, the drop in homicide accounted for “17% of the reduction in the life expectancy gap between white and African American males” between 1991 and 2014. In other words, tackling violent crime saved a lot of black lives.

The main obstacle to Democrats getting tough on crime is political. Much of the national media remains fixated on the drawbacks of incarceration and policing; influential political donors are now spending huge amounts of money to elect prosecutors who promise softer sentencing. Joe Biden may have written the 1994 crime bill, but he barely talks about the historic increase in homicides that took place in 2020, perhaps out of fear of alienating his base and playing into the hands of Republicans.

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Will California ever be safe?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Yet there are signs that political reality is changing. During the November elections, voters in Buffalo, New York rejected the self-described police abolitionist who won the Democratic primary for mayor, voting instead for the incumbent mayor, who was forced to run as a write-in candidate. Similarly, voters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, ground zero for much of 2020’s police reform movement, shot down a referendum that would have abolished and replaced their police department. The mayor-elect of New York City is a former NYPD officer who campaigned on getting tougher on crime.

And in San Francisco, one of the most progressive cities in America, Mayor London Breed recently struck a different tone following a series of high-profile crimes. “It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it come to an end,” she said. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to more aggressive with law enforcement. More aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

It is too early to say whether these developments represent a turning point in policy. But one thing is clear: it’s almost impossible to address a problem we can’t even admit exists. Those who profess to care about the disadvantaged should acknowledge that violence inequality is a deep and growing problem. We shouldn’t forget those Americans who fall asleep to the sound of gunfire.