The growing inequality in today’s world and the radical indifference with which the dominant elites view the impoverishment of large sections of the population in our societies have led the French writer, Luc Wingest to speak of a so-called “Marie Antoinette Syndrome”. The famous phrase “if they don’t have bread, let them eat cakes” attributed to the Empress Marie Antoinette of Austria, wife of King Louis XVI of France, who lived from party to party in Versailles, in response to the protests of the people of Paris that suffered many hardships, has gone down in history as the most graphic expression of this “disconnection” from reality, this living outside of reality (hence the Syndrome) of the dominant elites.
As people so little suspicious of radicalism as Anton Costas, president of the “Círculo de Economía” of Barcelona, have pointed out, the situation of our society, with an enormous growth in social inequalities, recalls the time before the French Revolution or the stage of the Belle Epoque, which preceded the First World War.
We know very well that inequality affects the quality of democracy and that it increases social tensions and violence. At the health level, it has been pointed out that inequality is the worst epidemic we suffer from. Thus the risk of dying from a chronic disease is more than 50% higher in low-income socioeconomic groups. Growing inequality is making it extraordinarily difficult for young people to develop their personal projects, the stability of their affective relationships, the creation of families… frustrating their vital projects.
Unfortunately, a negative effect of the emergence of social networks is that it encourages people to increase, above all, relationships within their own group. And in the case of the dominant elites, that 1% that controls a large part of the planet’s wealth, being connected to each other all day, continually receiving inputs that reaffirm the ideas and perspectives of the group itself, favors isolation with the other social groups. contributing to enhance this Marie Antoinette Syndrome.
Barely a decade ago the term “mileurista” arose as a protest slogan against inequality. Unfortunately, today that mileurista salary is increasingly far from what many workers earn.
The Marie Antoinette Syndrome is therefore an evocative image that makes us reflect on this cancer that is taking over our societies: inequality.