The New Aristocracy or Why We Worship Billionaires

America loves her billionaires. While the rich of the past tended to have a quiet, understated elegance about themselves (Vanderbilts, Astors, Mellons) the trend since the 1980s has been to wear the wealth out loud. Worshipping and emulating the wealthy is not new. Trends in food, fashion, and lifestyle have all descended from the wealthy to people or more modest means. But in the US, billionaire worship has gone into hyperdrive, for a country that makes granting titles unconstitutional, we have found our own way to create an aristocracy, not of birth but of the bank account.

People, special people

More digital ink gets spilled on the habits of billionaires than the latest break up of the celebrity du jour. Sites will proudly announce the daily habits of Warren Buffett or Oprah Winfrey, and the articles always take the same tone: follow these simple tips, and you too can be insanely wealthy.

We’ve all seen the listicles about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and how their tremendous net worth does not cause them to live lavish lifestyles. Warren Buffett is so saintly frugal that he still eats McDonald’s and is said to clip coupons. He still lives in a modest house in Omaha and drives a late model car. Bill Gates can be seen standing in line (like regular people!) at Dick’s burger stand in Seattle. He dresses in jeans a button down like any Microsoft engineer. However, this does not stop people from writing about them. The edict to the unwashed masses is clear: live like these guys, and you too can be rich! These special people have “cracked the code” to wealth and the lifestyle we all wish we had. In a country where the national myth is based on social mobility, the success of other people is enticing. It seems like it’s just unreachable.

This is the root of Steinbeck’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” syndrome that he observed during the depression. It is American to believe that with a little more hard work and some luck, you too can be one of the special people.

Better than us

Admiring those higher on the social hierarchy is a tale as old as time. This was the basis of the Roman household system, and it is one of the aspects of Monarchy. As Queen Mary of Teck says in the Netflix series, The Crown, “Monarchy is God’s gift to man…(monarchy) gives meaning to people’s wretched lives.” In this country, we’ve dumped the God-ordained monarchy in favor of fetishizing those who are wealthy. For us, without an aristocracy or a monarchy, wealthy elites have taken their place as the people to give meaning to our wretched lives.

For the poor, unwashed masses, the wealthy are not merely people to be admired but people that have unlocked the secret to “the good life.” The media promotes these people with the constant but pervasive idea that only feeds in the America attitude of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire”—follow these people/steps, and you too can be just as rich. What has only begun to be talked about in the last 15 years or so, is how much privilege the wealthy came from at the start. The idea of someone, through talent and cleverness, can ascend the social hierarchy and become wealthy is central to the American dream, but it is a myth at best for most people. People like Jeff Bezos already had privileged childhoods and often the financial means to pursue their business, fail, and never have to face down poverty. Jeff Bezos did not build Amazon while pulling shifts down at McDonald’s. The stark reality is that these people aren’t better than anyone else; they just happened to be born to the right people. This is probably the thing they have most in common with the landed aristocracy of Europe: accident of birth.

In this country, particularly in the past 45 years, wealth has been considered a proxy for goodness. However, this concept is not new by any means, that extends back to the protestant work ethic and financial success being an indication of God’s blessings.

Money, Blessings, and Protestantism

Prosperity gospel is a phrase that you’ll hear sporadically coming out of the evangelical movement in the US. However, its roots go back to the earliest days of protestantism and putting together money and godliness. Protestantism appealed to the new trading middle classes. While the Catholic Church implored its clergy to take a vow of poverty (that was not well-followed at the time), protestants began to equate financial success with godliness. Good business and good virtue went hand in hand.

Extend this idea forward to today, a suddenly the wealthy are people for whom the poor should emulate. We write articles about the sainted-frugality of Warren Buffett and people like Shaquille O’Neal who promises not to leave his children any money so that they will go out and make their own fortunes. We view this behavior as good in our society. In other cultures, parents not leaving a financial legacy to their children would be looked down upon as simply irresponsible. The wealthy person who lives simply is considered virtuous and that virtue is a source of their financial success. The message is clear: if you’re poor, there is something wrong with you. I saw a TED talk once that riffed on this idea. To be poor is not a moral problem, it is simply a cashflow issue.

Ultimately, billionaires are worshipped because they are the pinnacle of what we consider to be “good people.” They have been blessed by God and if everyone else lived like them, they might get those blessings too. Never mind that many billionaires take advantage of situations (George Soros), exploit people (Jeff Bezos, Waltons), or simply play the market making money off other’s labor (Buffett, Munger).

Final thoughts

We worked so hard to dump Britain’s stratified class system. However, as we learned in the great book “White Trash” we just made our own version of the class system based on money and professional status. We don’t give titles like the Duchess of Sussex or Cambridge, instead we look to the wealthiest and follow them incessantly. No one in Britain believes that they will one day have a peerage (although some do get lifetime peerages!). They weren’t born into it and that’s just not happening (except for women by marriage) but in America, we believe that we can be one of those special “upper” people if we work a bit harder. In that way, I think our system is a bit more cruel. At least in the UK, if you aren’t born with a title and posh, you know where you stand in life. In America, we dangle it out to keep people on the treadmill of life.

How different might our lives be if we decided not to chase the carrot anymore? What if we quit worshipping billionaires and believing the hype? Would that change our politics and social policy? What would it do for our mental health?