I have never met someone who smells so good. As I shake the hand of His Royal Highness, I am suddenly hyper-aware of the tuberose scent I am wearing. I try to remember the scent of oils from the Gold Souk, all of which lack Taif Rose, Ghazal Musk, ambergris, and agarwood. I highly doubt the Souk supplies this royal family.
The scent’s beauty, rarity, and understatement scream undeniable, unachievable otherness. It does not take Grenouille’s hyperosmia to cut through the aesthetic surface to the base notes of our respective social positions. Someone less nosy would have to rely on our manners, fabric cut, ability to appreciate poetry, or a Google search.
Ever since the printing press cracked the foundation of the Great Chain of Being, the wealth gap has required a new, socially legible justification to frame hierarchy as natural. A visible disparity in economic power demands a belief system where wealth and merit reinforce one another. To be accepted as superior, otherness requires genuine sophistication, acquired taste, and an appreciation of form over function. Together, they form a language of embodied cultural capital—a pillar of inequality that is as necessary for the preservation of wealth as it is for the justification of social stratification.
Those atop the pyramid paradoxically see hierarchy both natural and in need of reinforcement. The rationalization narratives that make the belief compatible with their self-image are best explored through fictional characters, who, stripped of immense human complexity, can serve as ideological vessels. Suzanne Collins created such a vessel for a young audience: Coriolanus Snow, a character routinely reduced to a ruthless, power-hungry dictator. Beneath the cruelty lies a fully constructed worldview, an internally consistent belief system about human nature and civilization that mirrors the paradox of modern meritocracy.
Snow’s impeccable education and heritage make him entitled to power and wealth. When he attempts to escape into the wilderness for his crimes, he grieves, “This was his life now. Digging for worms and being at the mercy of the weather. Elemental. Like an animal. He knew this would be easier if he weren’t such an exceptional person. The best and the brightest humanity had to offer.”
His lack of wealth, which is perceived as unfairly taken, leads him to disproportionately focus on what is available: the embodied state of cultural capital, which requires prolonged, deliberate investment and reveals itself naturally. His status anxiety breeds resentment of people rising above their predetermined status, who, despite their wealth, are lacking cultural fluency: “It was pitiful, the way she clung to that backward mountain region. Poor little displaced person without a hope of ever fitting in.” New money is almost as pitiful and offensive as poverty.
The Hunger Games served as a distraction, a means of fear management, and a divide-and-conquer mechanism, but its most baseline function was ideological. The view of humanity's progression from primal existence to sophistication provides a natural explanation for the Capitol's dominance over the impoverished districts. The treatment of districts was directly correlated with their proximity to refinement: from district 1, which produced luxuries, to district 12, a dust-covered coal-mining district. Scent follows the descent from art to dirty labor, transforming from a curated composition to an indelible brand. As Zola wrote of French mining towns, the onion-fried air of the poor's kitchen was 'that good odour which gets rank so soon, and which penetrates the bricks of the settlements with such infection that one perceives it far off in the country.'
Harrow footer, Newport races, study sessions at Tatte, Zero Bond rooftops - there is plenty of variety within the class-bound taste, given that it develops alongside an aversion to popular culture. When accumulated cultural and social fluency signals belonging, inherited position passes as demonstrated merit, making systemic advantages appear natural. The body becomes an archive of deliberate investment: accent, manners, taste, posture, athleticism, knowledge, note reading, whether in music or perfume. It is no accident that children with parents in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend elite universities than those from the bottom 20%.
Nietzsche imagined a social order where “the hard work and misery of life will be allotted to the man who suffers least from it, that is, to the dullest man, and so on step by step upwards to the man who is most sensitive to the highest, most sublimated kind of suffering”. If the most intellectual and sensitive minds require the most comfortable conditions, those in comfortable conditions had better acquire intellect or at least a convincing resemblance to such. But should the dullest be assigned the most miserable labor, or should those who are assigned the most miserable labor be intentionally kept dull?