Our Billionaire Worshipping Must Stop
The more we think it’s alright to have insane levels of wealth, the more held back we become.
“Instead of being envious of someone’s life, try to emulate what they did to get to that position.”
In any other decade, this advice would be pretty inspiring. A tinge of hustle-culture to chase after what you desire mixed with a little bit of humbling sounds good.
But these days, the quote can be more insidious than ever before because of one simple thing.
Billionaires.
A cornerstone of self-help, billionaires are presented as the perfect example of human brilliance and excellence. We care about their habits, their views on the world, and if they show a shred of human decency we herald them as a benevolent billionaire.
We love billionaires and everything about them. We want to become just like them.
We build cults in their name and go as far as defending them and being offended by even the slightest jab to their character.
I had a commenter confess once that they hate Elon Musk, but the jab I made on his efforts at SpaceX “shreds what little creditability that I’ve accumulated.” Even though Musk doesn’t actually run the one company he formed.
That’s not to deny SpaceX has done nothing helpful. But to claim Musk had any hand in (beyond founding the company) it is a stretch and shows just how much influence billionaires have over ourselves and our views of them.
This behaviour needs to stop for several reasons.
It Makes The Planet Worse Off
With vast amounts of resources comes a vast amount of waste.
When it comes to saving the planet on an environmental scale it’s clear large and worldwide sweeping changes have to be made. In terms of companies, it’s a push to be carbon neutral beyond just planting trees. For other people, it’s opting for more public transportation or biking. It’s about reducing food wastage and learning useful skills like sewing.
For us regular individuals we can learn to do those things and make a small impact in reducing our carbon footprint, but those efforts are squashed by a single billionaire’s average carbon emissions.
And right now, there’s over 3,000 billionaires in the world.
It doesn’t sound like much, but similar to wealth inequality, a small minority of people are producing much more of something truly harmful for the rest of humanity. A small group is squandering what little good the vast majority of people are trying to prevent by making small changes in their every day lifestyle.
This doesn’t just apply to climate change and wealth inequality though. We’ve already seen the dangers of having billionaires in affairs of war, let alone general politics. Beyond that, there is the billionaire’s foundations, which as I covered before, allow them to play God with little consequence and get massive tax breaks because of their “generosity”.
All in all, the cost is steep to have a small group of people have all the money and power they could ever want.
It Makes Us Less Human
Getting back to that quote I opened up with, it’s truly a bad quote around this time. For sure, this could be appropriate for someone who isn’t a billionaire.
There’s nothing wrong with finding a writer you like on here and try to emulate their writing style or adopting their work ethic. If there’s someone at your local gym that’s doing something you want to do, getting some tips and guidance from them isn’t bad either.
But the slope starts to get slippery when we turn to people that aren’t in our immediate circle. Looking at celebrities or multi-millionaires or worst billionaires. Primarily because they means they took to get to where they are might not be the best thing to encourage.
You’ve got rags-to-riches stories like Oprah who truly is a rags-to-riches story. She gained her billions through syndication, even though her platform did cause issues.
But that’s not as bad as Sam Bankman-Fried who stole billions from people.
Or how Jeff Bezos exploited workers and still does since he obviously still has shares of Amazon. Workers do still pee in bottles even without Bezos at the helm.
People make mistakes and no matter what kind of action you take or don’t, you’ll always have critiques and people who don’t like you and what you stand for. But it’s another thing entirely for every day people to be encouraged to be billionaire-lite. To exploit others around you and see people more like stepping stones on your path to “greatness”. To be uncaring for those around us and to believe that who we are right now is the absolute best version of ourselves and to never change.
It’s not the greatest look despite the obscene levels of wealth that person has.
It Makes Us Inadequate
This idea of wanting to be billionaires is something that’s rooted in our psychological make-up. While billionaires emerged by loosening tax rules among a few other things, their continued survival and their actions up to this point were encouraged by us.
Why?
Because deep down we see ourselves in these individuals and we continue to be pulled in by the various wealth rhetoric.
Looking at ardent Musk fans, the only reason Musk still has supporters despite all the terrible things he has done is because people see themselves in Musk. When they root for Musk or defend him, psychologists argue that these individuals are defending a part of their character rather than the man himself.
It’s in a similar sense where in 2016, we all enjoyed Trump tearing into other Republicans in debates and his speeches — at least a little. This is despite the fact he was a terrible president and is a looming threat to American democracy today.
Fans of billionaires see themselves in this small group of billionaires because to them these billionaires are masters of the universe, they’re “winners” and they’re never questioned at all by the media.
And the reason they do that is because for years and decades, they’ve chosen to believe in that rhetoric due to themselves being inadequate.
At some point in time, people get in their heads that to be successful you need millions or billions of dollars. So people work hard and hustle and grind their way to the top. We hear inspiring stories of how these successful people made it and we dream about our stories playing out exactly like that.
I would know. When I published my first book I seriously believed my story would play out like J.K. Rowling’s. That’s before I learned of Rowling’s transphobia.
But they often don’t because we face vastly different challenges and are under vastly different circumstances. What’s worse is a lot of that rhetoric instills this idea that we all suck unless we’re living like them. It implies that much even though it’s presented as motivating or inspiring.
And for those of us with low self-esteem or certain vulnerabilities, we believe in that stuff.
I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: we don’t need billionaires and billionaires themselves are a sign that something has gone terribly wrong. Not only are they not benefiting humanity a lot in comparison to their wealth, they’re also suffering themselves.
You hear stories sometimes through the cracks of CEOs commonly facing problems of isolation, and depression. We’ve seen celebrities be exposed for all kinds of addictions and have had to go to rehab. Or sometimes make matters worse. We’ve seen well recognized people meet untimely ends to poor habits.
What these kind of stories say is that these people face problems that many of us face ourselves. And yet even though they face these similar problems, we regard them so highly because of their lot in life. That they somehow earned this position — even though for most it’s through inheritance, exploitative means, a generous parent helping at a key moment in their life, or a mixture of them.
At the end of the day, we really don’t need billionaires since as we can tell it only adds more suffering for everyone involved. For billionaires it’s the same mental issues we are struggling to face and for everyone else it can run to systemic levels of issues.
And the first step to changing this all around is for us to view billionaires as humans rather than gods to be worshiped.
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