Because the 1 percent are politically powerful and directly own or have easy access to the means of mass communication, their values (which simply justify their possession of an obscene amount of wealth) are greatly overrepresented. This overrepresentation (transmitted across the entire social field by waves of imitation—Adam Smith brilliantly discusses this deleterious form of imitation/admiration in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) distorts actual human values, which are fundamentally more social and democratic. Social change, then, can only occur if this distortion is significantly minimized or entirely eliminated.

I'm not, of course, advocating the violent removal of the 1 percent (that's playing by their game), but the recognition of the distortion. If we recognize the problem, we can resort to culture to solve it. Social problems are best corrected by cultural solutions.

That said, let's turn to a section of Frans de Waal's Our Inner Ape to see what happened to a troop of baboons when its most powerful and greedy members were suddenly eliminated....

[O]live baboons have a fierce reputation. They’re not the sort of primates one would expect to go the flower-power route, but this is exactly what happened with one troop in the Masai Mara in Kenya. Every day, males of a troop studied by American primatologist Robert Sapolsky fought their way through the territory of another troop to get access to the garbage pit of a nearby tourist lodge. Only the biggest and meanest males would make it through.

The bounty was definitely worth fighting over until the day the lodge discarded meat infected with bovine tuberculosis. It killed off all the baboons that ate it. This meant that the troop under study lost many males, and not just any males, but the most aggressive ones. As a result, the troop suddenly became an unlikely oasis of harmony and peace in the harsh world of baboons. This by itself was hardly surprising. The number of violent incidents in the troop naturally dropped after the bullies got wiped out. It became more interesting when it was discovered that this pattern was maintained for a decade, even though by then none of the troop’s original males were around anymore.

Baboon males migrate after puberty, hence fresh young males enter troops all the time. So, despite a complete turnover of males, this particular troop upheld its pacifism, tolerance, increased grooming, and exceptionally low stress levels. How the tradition had been maintained remains unclear. Female baboons stay all their lives in the same troop, so their behavior probably holds the key. Perhaps they had become selective in their acceptance of new males or managed to perpetuate the relaxed atmosphere of the early years by grooming more with males, relaxing them.