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@nick_h.
You're not English, are you? Snobbery is the biggest factor. Snobbery doesn't prevent conceptual understanding, but it instructs you to ignore it and to stay behind the barriers between you and the ordinary people. The barriers are expensive - living in certain areas, private education for your children, business class on planes, private doctors, private hospitals, au pairs and maids and housekeepers to go to the supermarket for you. That whole package of barriers costs a fortune in London, and there is great peer pressure and parental pressure to make enough money to afford it all. If you can't afford it you share some of your existence with the common herd, which is unforgivable. It forces you to be ruthless and self-serving.
It's exactly the same mindset of the colonial administrators whose job was to exploit the natives throughout the British Empire. The same schools, the same families. Now they have to find other ways to get to the top of the pyramid.