In our type of Society, one of the illusions that the wealthy always try to perpetrate is that you get wealthy from working hard. The last thing they want you to understand is that most of the wealthy owe their wealthy position to a privileged background. Much better to keep the working class believing that they might make it big time, if they only work hard enough, and that wealth comes from sweat and not from inherited position and/or wealthy connections. How many wealthy people have you heard boasting of how hard it was for them, but because of their fortitude and hard work they won through in the end, omitting to mention any of the privileges that they may have had along the way.
A few experts in that field have had a wee look at this phenomenon in this interesting article from Sage Journals:
Introduction
In a Hawaiian resort four well-groomed men puffing on expensive cigars and resplendent in white dinner jackets settle down to a nice glass of Chateau de Chassilier. Thus starts Monty Python’s classic 1974 ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch about a group of men reflecting on their ascent into Britain’s elite. But rather than an exercise in self-congratulation, it is soon clear that this is an exchange of childhood reminiscences – and one in which the stakes revolve around proving one’s purported proletarian origin rather than privileged destination. ‘We used to live in a tiny, tumble-down ’ouse with great ’oles in t’roof’, John Cleese tells us in a distinctly ropey Yorkshire accent. ‘’ouse!’, exclaims Graham Chapman in marginally improved dialect. ‘You were lucky to ’ave an ’ouse. We used to live in one room. All 26 of us.’ From here a ludicrous race to the bottom ensues, with boasted familial dwellings stretching from corridors to lakes to shoe boxes.
The sketch may not be particularly funny (and indeed a forerunner for the now hackneyed comedy trope of the ‘Northerner’) but its enduring appeal with the British public (it has been repeated verbatim by multiple1 comedians since) lies in the fact that it continues to carry a pertinent thread of social commentary. For over 50 years, survey research has consistently demonstrated that Britons tend to identify subjectively as working class, even when – like the Four Yorkshiremen – this often contradicts their ‘objective’ class position (Heath et al., 2013; Savage, 2007). For example, the latest available data – the 2016 British Social Attitudes Survey – shows that 47% of those in ‘middle-class’ professional and managerial occupations identify as working class (Evans and Mellon, 2016).
