There is a historical parable, sometimes attributed to accounts of slavery on plantations, that reveals a dark core of social psychology. An enslaved man sees another enslaved man from a neighboring estate, happy, riding a horse his master has given him. The first man feels no joy for the other’s fortune. He sends word to his own master, seething with fury. The master, confused, offers to buy him a horse as well. The answer freezes him: “Why would I want a horse? I’m too old to ride. What I want is for him not to have one.” This story is not about greed for a material good. It is about the panic over losing relative distinction, about the erosion of a hierarchy that—oppressive as it is—provides a place. It is horizontal resentment in its purest state: the desire is not to rise, but to ensure the other does not rise to my level, because that level would cease to be special.
Centuries later, in the concrete stadiums of Bad Bunny’s Latin American tour, an apparently trivial controversy echoed the same mechanism. For his show, the artist set up “La Casita,” a replica of a humble Puerto Rican home, as a secondary stage at the far end of the venue. Fans who had paid exorbitant sums for VIP tickets—under the tacit promise of the optimal, exclusive experience—found themselves, for long segments of the concert, looking at the artist’s back as he sang toward the other end of the arena. Those with cheap seats in those distant stands suddenly enjoyed a privileged proximity. The reaction of a sector of the VIPs was not a mere logistical complaint. It was a deep anger that escalated into threats of class-action lawsuits for false advertising. They did not demand a fair refund. They demanded, essentially, the removal of “La Casita.” Their enjoyment did not lie solely in seeing the idol, but in seeing him better, closer, in a way that distinguished them from the rest. When logistics democratized that access, their purchased privilege was devalued. Like the enslaved man in the parable, their claim was: the other must not have the horse.
These two mirrors, separated by time and context, reflect the anatomy of what we may call the “rage of the emerging privileged.” This concept, which transcends the traditional reaction of consolidated elites, describes the aggressive frustration of those who have reached a precarious status, always under threat, and who perceive that the mobility or access of subaltern groups jeopardizes their fragile distinction. It is not the rage of someone with much to defend, but of someone with little who fears that this little—which separates them from those with even less—will cease to mean anything. This rage is not projected upward, against the structures that consolidate inequality, but sideways, against peers or slightly more vulnerable groups perceived as unfair competitors for recognition and always-scarce resources.
In neoliberal Chile, this psychosocial mechanism is not a cultural accident. It is the preferred and cultivated fuel of the neoliberal far-right political class, which has found in the management of envy and horizontal resentment a master formula for power. Its discursive strategy is an engineering of perception. Faced with the real material anxiety of an over-indebted salaried professional, a technician whose wages are stagnating, or a family that obtained a home through an eternal loan, no structural diagnosis is offered. There is no talk of capital concentration, elite tax evasion, or labor precarity as design. Instead, a scapegoat and a restorative narrative are offered.
The discourse points to immigrants who “overload health clinics” and “take jobs.” It targets youth from poor neighborhoods who, through protest, “create disorder.” It stigmatizes the “girls with colored hair” who, by their mere existence, challenge a gender order that for many was a stable map of the world. The message is clear: your discomfort does not come from above; it comes from the sides. They are the ones who threaten “what’s yours.” They are the ones who, by receiving a right, a service, or a simple measure of dignity, are devaluing the merit of your effort. They are the enslaved man with a horse who dares to feel a little less enslaved, thus putting your place in the pyramid at risk.
Thus politics becomes a promise of hierarchical restoration. Figures like José Antonio Kast do not sell a project of upward social mobility for all. They sell nostalgia for a clear order, where places were defined and distinction was respected. Their offer is to symbolically return your horse—not by giving one to everyone, but by taking it away from the other. Or, in modern language, by ensuring that your access to healthcare, education, and security does not “degrade” by being shared with those deemed “undeserving.” The salaried voter—himself an employee within a corporation—ends up identifying not with his class peers, but with the master’s values: individual merit, solitary effort, vertical order. And he directs his rage at those he perceives as invaders of his fragile castle.
This process would not be as effective without a media ecosystem that amplifies and normalizes it. Chile’s major media conglomerates, whose economic roots and ideological affinities are intertwined with the model, operate as the perfect echo chamber. They transform structural discontent into news about security crises starring foreign faces, or debates on “gender ideology” undermining the family. They frame social protest as delinquency and precarious entrepreneurship as an example of meritocracy. This constant production of common sense creates a parallel reality for the average citizen, where the horizontal explanation of conflict—the other as threat—is the only visible and plausible one, while the vertical critique—inequality as design—is marginalized and dismissed as ideology or class resentment.
The result is a virtuous circle for power and a vicious one for democracy. The rage of the emerging privileged, that blend of fear and envy, is harvested and converted into votes. Those votes sustain a political project that, economically, deepens the same conditions of precarity and insecurity that produced the original discontent. The social energy that could question the vertical distribution of power and wealth is exhausted in horizontal conflicts: people against people, VIP fan against gallery fan, national against foreigner. It is a machine that perpetuates inequality, fueled by the fear of losing one’s place in line.
The parable of the enslaved man and the horse—and the fan’s outrage at the concert—lay bare the most uncomfortable truth. In a system of deep inequalities, the most valued privilege is often not the material good itself, but the distance that good establishes between oneself and those below. The greatest fear is not absolute poverty but relative equality. The neoliberal far right has learned to govern by administering this fear. It does not need to convince those at the bottom that they will reach the top; it only needs to persuade them that, if they fight among themselves over the lower rungs, the top will remain intact and they will keep the illusion of standing one step above someone else. As long as this logic prevails, rage will continue burning horizontally, leaving the very foundations of the pyramid untouched.