The Social Climber's Bible: A Book of Manners, Practical Tips, and Spiritual Advice for the Upwardly Mobile
Dirk Wittenborn, Jazz Johnson, 2014
Why would a rich man pay four hundred dollars for a bottle of vodka that costs twenty-eight? An heiress of a society family and a novelist who has been thrown out of private clubs wrote a mocking manual for people on their way up. In the guise of cynical advice, the book shows how the games of status, flattery and snobbery work, and helps you recognise them.
Who it is for
For lovers of clever satire and for anyone intrigued by status, snobbery and society games: who wins them and why.
True enlightenment comes only when you realize that no matter how high you climb, there is always someone above you looking down their nose at your accomplishments.
Dinner with Bono or a date with Mum
Imagine: tonight you're meeting your mum or an old friend, and suddenly you're invited to spend the evening with Bono. Would you cancel? Dirk Wittenborn and Jazz Johnson are sure the honest answer is "yes", and that anyone who says "no" is lying. And if so, you are already a social climber, that is, a person who seeks the friendship of those higher up.
The book came out in 2014 and is written as a parody of self-help manuals, complete with mantras, quizzes and a stern warning not to read it in public. The authors know the subject from both sides. Johnson, an heiress of the founders of Johnson & Johnson, belongs to the most exclusive clubs, while the novelist Wittenborn has been thrown out of such clubs.
Every piece of advice in the book is deliberately cynical, and that's the joke. The authors laugh at snobs, at those who climb, and at those who won't let them in. But beneath the mockery lies a fairly accurate map of how status and snobbery work.
Ahead are seven chapters on the rules of the society game. You don't need to follow this advice: it's more useful to understand how it works, especially when it's used on you. Let's start with why people who reach upwards have such a bad name.
The ladder gets burned by those already at the top
In the authors' version, America's first social climbers were the Pilgrims. They survived a hungry winter because they made friends with the Native Americans and invited them to the first Thanksgiving. But as soon as they had enough food of their own, the Native Americans were no longer invited to the feast. Later the colonists clung in the same way to the English Crown's governors, and once they grew rich, they staged a revolution. The Puritans, the authors joke, burned not only witches: they tried to burn the ladder they had climbed themselves.
After that, history repeats itself. The Vanderbilts, who grew rich on railroads, married their daughter to the not very wealthy but extremely well-born Duke of Marlborough, and so bought what money alone cannot buy. And the names on the walls of museums, hospitals and universities, the authors say, belong to the same climbers: charity has always been another name for climbing.
Even the very phrase used to brand such people, in the authors' view, was invented by snobs so that other snobs could feel superior to you. Snobs are like a passenger who has scrambled into a lifeboat and pulled the rope ladder up behind him.
Hence a useful question. When someone is shamed for wanting to rise, it's worth looking at who is doing the shaming, and from what height.
About the author
Dirk Wittenborn is an American novelist and screenwriter and a producer of the documentary "Born Rich". His niece Jazz Johnson, an heiress of the founders of Johnson & Johnson, runs the family estate and breeds heritage turkeys.
All books by this author: Dirk Wittenborn, Jazz Johnson
Terms from the book
- Thanksgiving
- Puritans
- Simpson
- James
- Clinton
- Jolie
- Bono: An Irish rock musician, lead singer of U2, also known for his charity work.
- social climber: An English expression for a person who seeks the acquaintance of people higher up the social ladder in order to rise themselves. The authors also call such people Mountaineers.
- Johnson & Johnson: An American company that makes medicines, medical supplies and hygiene products. Founded in 1886.
- Pilgrims: English Puritan settlers who sailed to America on the Mayflower in 1620 and founded Plymouth Colony.
- Vanderbilts: An American family that grew rich on steamships and railroads in the nineteenth century. In 1895 Consuelo Vanderbilt married the ninth Duke of Marlborough.
- Marlborough: A British ducal title. The family that holds it lives at Blenheim Palace, where Winston Churchill was born.
- blackball: A vote against in a secret ballot on admission to a club. To blackball someone means to keep the candidate out.
- Big Fish: An image from the book rather than a common expression: a rich or influential person through whom a climber hopes to rise higher.
- Wilde: Oscar Wilde, the nineteenth-century Irish writer famous for his witty aphorisms.
- ennui: A French word for weary boredom and jadedness. The authors joke that the rich say "ennui", while the poor just say "boredom".
- Windsor: The title given to the former British king Edward VIII and his wife after he abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry her.
- Unicorns: An image from the book rather than a common expression: rare people in whom talent, influence and great fame have come together.
- Clooney: George Clooney, an American film actor and director and an Oscar winner.
- Serengeti: A national park in Tanzania, famous for its huge herds of antelope and its big predators.
- wampum: Shell beads that the Native peoples of North America used as money and as a token of an agreement.
- Whale: An image from the book: what the authors call a Big Fish worth more than a hundred million dollars.
- Museum of Modern Art: One of the world's largest museums of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, in New York. It opened in 1929.
All terms
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