While certainly not an elite, I'm not a low paid worker, either, but my father was. Yet he was still able to feel for those who had less. Maybe not give, but certainly understand.

He was able to do that because he was a thinking, feeling human being and not someone who could be generalised about, unimaginatively, and lumped into some huge group.

One would think that those who do have less would understand more what those at the bottom are going through.

There does seem to be something which happens in society where each class strives to move away from the class which is closest behind them i.e. middle class from working class and working class from classes below them such as poor whites and poor non-whites. But I don't think it means that they don't understand the class below them, just that they want to move on from them! People talk a lot about the desire for 'equality' (another secular religion) but when the views of people are analysed being equal to others is often the last thing they want because they're striving to be better than the next guy! That's partly what the exam system is about, to filter out which student is better than the other - students don't want to be equally at the bottom but at the top and ahead of their peers.