TYPE-2 CLEOPATRA SYNDROME

Since moving to Dubai I’ve observed a curious phenomenon within the (admittedly middle class) expatriate community I have become a part of. In the process of coming up with a name for it, I was railroaded in to calling it Type-2 Cleopatra Syndrome because a quick google search revealed that some tweed-bearded psych grad had already nabbed ‘Cleopatra Syndrome’ for something completely different. I didn’t spend the extra 5 minutes it would have taken to find out what the symptoms involve because unless it was about having a fringe and doing the flat palmed ‘walk like an Egyptian’ dance, I would have been devastated. Cleopatra’s claim to fame in the pop psyche is as the lady who bathed in asses milk. Why would anybody want to do that? A couple of reasons; maybe she thought it would provide any number of the miraculous benefits modern cosmetic companies say are unleashed by their own new formulas derived from the humble cumquat or maybe because, like damn it, I can afford it and I’m the freaking queen.

The syndrome manifests in divacine tendencies: a narrowing of the awareness of others, profound sense of self-importance or marching down the street wearing nothing but stilettos and proclaiming to all within earshot that you are wearing the finest silk robes the world has ever seen. But what is it in this new society that creates these Cleopatra like tendencies?

Service providers, through the huge pool of cheap labour, have created an economy that prioritises convenience for the sizeable middle class. Restaurants will deliver to your door, they will even deliver through your door if you can’t be bothered to get up and you’ve left it open, if you give the delivery driver a tip I’m sure they would even lovingly spoon each mouthful of food in to your mouth and wipe your chin after you’re done. Nannies, drivers, maids, dog walkers, chefs – home help is in abundant supply in Dubai, there’s a couple of niches left to occupy but as soon as the first Candy Crush level beater butler turns up with a chauffeur companion that will flip off drivers that cut you up on the Sheikh Syed Road and listen attentively to the stories about your other half’s day at work, that’s it, all non-employment tasks of the daily routine covered by outsourced personnel. You can’t even pack your own groceries in a super market, even if you want to, try wrestling a sheet of plastic out of the hands of a till clerk in a convenience store – it’s impossible, it’s like trying to take a Jack Russell out of the mouth of another Jack Russell.

If you tell somebody enough times that they don’t have to do a particular task, because it is in some way below them – they will start to believe it. And it is scientific fact, that that will make them a douchebag.

Look it’s absolutely human nature to want a better standard of living. It’s an evolutionary imperative, a fundamental driver of human behavior, perhaps the strongest one after the need to pop out mini-we. Altruism is actually an aberrant behavior if you think about it – poor Dave over there looks hungry, I have some beans, but I quite like the taste of beans and I’m also quite hungry. For me to walk over and give at least some of my beans to Dave is in a nutritional sense, and for the furtherment of me and my clan, absolutely the wrong thing to do. So I stay seated eat my beans all the while telling myself that Dave doesn’t look much like a bean eater anyway. What lifts us out of this mentality, is compassion,  it’s putting yourself in Dave’s shoes and thinking about duties, about the ‘oughts’ of a community; what is fair: whether this is an innately human quality or prerequisite for the contract of society is not for me to decide. Or you, so stop it. Stop deciding.

What dulls these humanising inclinations is not detachment from society, but rather an insidious yet attractive regression to a primal state, a state where a false perception of self-entitlement prevails – made possible by people doing stuff for you, that you previously had to do yourself. In more plain terms – you start off by thinking “that Kanye West is a real piece of work, walking around getting his entourage of fluffers to pick the pulp out of his juice” and then after a period of months and years you end up agreeing with him on almost every single point of his manifesto of all consuming ego.

The reason that I’m sharing this is not to provide a wholesale condemnation of my fellow expatriates, it’s so that we can recognise the warning signs in ourselves and each other and therefore help steer our ship of conscientious objectors to less rancorous waters. To aid our awareness, I have compiled a quick reference guide of some of the possible early onset flags:

1. Looking at your steam iron and contemplating putting mineral water in it.

2. Deliberating about whether it’s proper that a maid might dress you.

3. Expecting people in the service industry to turn their back on thousands of years of capitalist economics and give you something just “because you want it”.

4. Having Victorian era job titles in your employ (please see: scullery maid, chimney sweep, powder monkey).

5. Expecting people in the service industry to hand over their private mobile numbers, so that you can contact them at 04:00 in the morning and assuming they will gleefully answer and sort out your problem using the special abilities of remote server mind control that only people on modest salaries have.

6. Ordering single items from mini-marts based in your apartment building. When you’re not hungover. More than twice. In an hour.

7. Owning ‘house shoes’.

8. If your Chihuahua went to finishing school, has done a Thai cookery course, has a ballet teacher, Latin tutor or term report card.

9. You stubbornly refuse to recycle because the recycling bins are all the way down, RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE RECEPTION AREA OF YOUR APARTMENT BUILDING.

10. Collecting stories of any of the points above.

We can overcome. We can turn the tide. We can become the model citizens this country deserves us to be. But we have to actively try to be less Veruca Salt and little bit more like a guilty feeling Peppa Pig.