Oscar Wilde has many interesting things to say in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But one statement in particular caught my attention: "Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating." Although it didn't work out too well for the fascinating Wilde himself, I believe that this line perfectly captures the nature of society, Victorian and modern.
The past ten years provide the perfect examples of the truth in Wilde's words. Take the banking crisis, for instance. How many CEOs, insurers, bankers, hedge-fund managers, traders, and government agents were, at the end of the day, breaking the law? How many illegal acts were committed at the expense of us "peasants" to make sure the "kings of finance" could afford that tenth island, or that seventh Maserati? Quite a few, to put it mildly! Now, were some of them caught? Of course. But how many? Nowhere near the true amount of wrongdoers. But the ones that got away got away for many reasons that I'm not interested in right now. Let's just focus on the wrongdoers that were caught. Bernie Madoff will do just fine.
How would you describe the Bernie Madoff case in one word? Would I be wrong in guessing "scandal"? That's certainly the go-to word whenever somebody rich and famous gets caught doing something outrageously wrong, such as swindling billions of dollars worth of other people's money to line one's own pockets. But say a poor man from...Cleveland, let's say, did something equally outrageously wrong, such as killing his neighbor. If he gets caught, would we call it a scandal? No, of course not. We probably wouldn't ever hear of the case. Why? Because to society it is natural that poor people do bad things. Why did the Bernie Madoff case make such a splash, and why was it considered a heinous scandal? Because society does not believe that rich people do bad things. We watch them go through life surrounded by money and power, and cannot conceive that there would be any traces of the criminal within them. Their aura of respectability is like one of their tailored suits, it comes on and off. But clothes make the man, and the poor can't afford to have their clothes tailored, can they?
Wilde really hit the nail on the head with this observation. The gap between the apathy and derision we offer to poor people who do wrong and the shocked, "How could you?" mentality we adopt when rich people do wrong is telling. It shows that even in our supposedly "progressive" and "liberal" society, money talks. And people are more than willing to listen. For Dorian Gray, undeniably rich and apparently charming Dorian Gray, this works out quite well. His high social standing and monetary resources enable his crimes to go unpunished. His reputation for sin and wrongdoing and decidedly ungentlemanly behavior is met with only a few tuts and a shake of the head. Nobody ever says, "Hm. I bet Dorian's up to some shady, illegal business. Someone should look into that." If anything, trading in his veneer of respectability for one of mystery has given him more social and legal leeway. Because no matter what Dorian gets up to, he is still a rich man with a strong social presence. And who is anyone else to doubt that?
