Why are we so obsessed with the super-rich?

Why do we have a perverse interest in anything Max Key does? Photo / Instagram

Fifty Shades Of Grey reminded the world of two things. One, the phrase "my inner goddess" kills the mood faster than announcing you're a member of a satanic cult. Two, we still love the super rich. You'd have thought that after the GFC, MPs' expenses scandals, reckless bankers, the Occupy movement and Paris Hilton we would have got over our fascination with the wealthy. But we haven't.

Our most popular recent literary fantasy (and I'm using the term literary generously here when referring to Fifty Shades) is a multimillionaire. We have a perverse interest in anything Max Key does. We have Keeping Up With The Kardashians and swathes of celeb mags. We lose it whenever a super yacht is docked in the harbour.

We have a plethora of dating websites like Seeking Millionaire or Sugar Daddy. And in Australia this year the Mercedes Benz C class sedan outsold both the annual sales of the Ford Falcon and the Toyota Aurions combined. Everything suggests that we still love luxury.

Nothing seems to prove this more than the Rich Kids of Instagram phenomenon. For those of you who haven't met them yet, the RKOI are an infamous group of super-rich youngsters who document their extravagant lives online. There's a Tumblr account set up to following these guys, television programmes about them and extensive media coverage of their champagne-soaked exploits.

I am one of their thousands and thousands of followers. And I don't even have an Instagram account - I go online specifically to check what they do (them and Silvio Berlusconi).

So why do we follow RKOI? Why did we make them famous? Why do we pay attention to these spoilt young money bunnies and their diamond bathtubs? The most common explanation is that this is part of our celebrity culture; we're just obsessed with the rich and brainless. After all, their lives are exclusive and we are fascinated by things we don't often see and can't have.

Maybe we are interested because we're jealous. (That's how RKOI justify the amount of hatred they get.)

Yes, part of us is probably jealous. But it's not just because we're pining after a crystal coffee keep-cup. Their gaucheness, brashness and often amazingly insensitivity fascinate us. These are the sort of people who will take pictures on their private jet holding a wad of dollars with the quote, "always make sure to tip your pilot and co-pilot 10K. #rulesofflyingprivate". They eat noodles while waving fat stacks of notes in the camera. They take selfies with all of their Rolexes on one arm. Subtle, eh? I reckon it's the stunning lack of self-awareness of how spoilt they appear that draws us in. If these guys were very rich but also very modest, respectful and spent all day nursing wounded chinchillas, we wouldn't care. We might glance over and say, "Oh, what nice people." Then we'd forget. But their attitudes are so unapologetically arrogant that we can't really believe they exist. That's why we keep coming back.

We are curious about the rich. We hold them up as something to aspire to. And we fall under their strange magic. We unconsciously expect them to be a bit nicer than normal people. Well, if not nice, then at least cultured, sophisticated and polite. Princes from fairy tales, kindly benefactors from Dickens, misunderstood millionaires from Fifty Shades, sophisticated royals like William and Kate ... We grow up on stories that assume that the rich have a certain genteel way. They're like actors and beautiful people; we unconsciously expect them to be more pleasant than the average.

It helps that this mystique has been maintained because old money rich don't stray too far into the spotlight. (Flaunt one's money? How ... tasteless.) And because we didn't see them much, we just assumed the fairy tales were true.

But now RKOI shows us that rich people aren't necessarily as magical as we think they are. These are the people who take a picture of a waitress and caption it #thehelp. (What is this? 1950s America?) RKOI shows that having money doesn't mean you have manners. Of course some rich people are nice, but there's no certain correlation between the two.

And these insights are so different to our residual idea of a benevolent benefactor that they fascinate us. We might have suspected they'd be a little pampered, but not that they'd be so stunningly vain.

We follow RKOI because it teaches you how deluded you can be about the effect money can have on people.