We once heard a conversation on a radio show hosted by a constitutional scholar, talking to a woman who called in while sounding like she was drinking Mountain Dew and eating Pop Tarts. He brought up the problem of medieval wealth mis-distribution, and he said the fact that we even have billionaires in the first place shows the sickness of our society. She couldn't even process that comment.
Enter the Billionaire bootlicker - the volunteer infantry of plutocracy. The people who speak of tax havens with the reverence medieval peasants once reserved for psychotic syphilitic kings - they internalize the billionaire as a kind of cosmic parent, a stand-in for divine authority in a desacralized age. These people admire the kind of morbid wealth to the point that if you have 100 people on an island, 1 of them would have all the money and 99 would have no money, and even though they are one of the 99, still think that's a rational thing.
The best rich people, and we sometimes cite the example of someone who has 3 to 30 million bucks, and puts their money into good causes to help others and the planet and has time and resources to work on their own development. Fair enough and we have a handful of people like this who are our friends actually. But when someone has multiple billions of dollars with 12 houses, 3 yachts, 87 automobiles, 2 helicopters, 5 newspapers, 4 companies, 3 rockets, 16 trafficked women, and 4 private jets, many of these billionaires are spiritually impoverished beyond belief. Not to mention decades of zero accountability means they start trafficing, raping, torturing, murdering, and more. They possess the technical means to reshape civilization, yet often exhibit the psychological depth of anxious adolescents trapped in optimization loops. And the cult around them persists because overly dereg to nearly totally unregged capitalism has mastered one of the oldest tricks in the shamanic playbook: the manufacturing of artificial consensus reality.
When cultures lose authentic connection to nature and our Jedi capabilities, meaning initiation into mystery, into art, into eros, into the felt presence of the transcendent, they begin worshipping artificial machinery and strict heavy hierarchy which is asshole hierarchy. The billionaire becomes a magician-king in the collective imagination. The bootlicker says, “If this man has accumulated unimaginable wealth, he must therefore possess superior wisdom.” But this is cargo cult logic. By that standard, cancer would be a philosopher because it has the capability to expand so efficiently. You hear them insist: “If you tax billionaires, not even if you tax them progressively and thus logically, if you even tax them at all, they’ll stop innovating!” As though the human species spent millennia huddled in caves until a oil sultan or hedge-fund manager descended from the heavens carrying the sacred gift of ride-sharing apps, gasoline, and overpriced water bottles.
The modern bootlicker has achieved something extraordinary: they identify not with their fellow beings, in the form of a citizen, nor with labor, nor with democratic accountability, but with a tiny sliver of a sliver class that would not cross the street to spit on them if they were on fire. It is a kind of aspirational feudalism in the regressive mind which has blind allegiance to authority. “One day,” they seem to think, “I too may own a private island and outsource my conscience.” What is really happening is identification with Sauron style dark power in the face of existential terror. The modern individual is atomized, economically precarious, drowning in informational overload. To kneel before wealth, just as to neil before fictional corporealized deity, offers psychic relief. One imagines proximity to the king will spare them from the storm. It is feudal psychology re-emerging through digital media.
Now, of course, financial success deserves admiration when it is genuine. Invention, artistry, entrepreneurship - splendid things. But no billionaire worked a thousand times harder than a millionaire and as Robert Reich has stated well, there are only 5 ways to accumulate a billion dollars - Monopoly, insider trading, political payoffs, fraud, or inheritance and 4 out of those 5 will one day, during more enlightened times, become illegal.
There is a Grand Canyon of a difference between respecting achievement and kneeling before wealth itself. A surgeon may save lives. A scientist may cure disease. A teacher may shape generations. Yet somehow the loudest applause is reserved for a keynote for the guy on stage who manipulated stock buybacks while underpaying warehouse workers and trying to break unions. A society that treats billionaires as sages and workers as disposable has confused price with value.
A godzillionair can purchase a submarine, a anti-social media platform, or a cock rocket because they have a botched penile implant, but they cannot buy respect, or exemption from death, or access to the infinite dimensions latent within consciousness itself while incorrectly using that word on their SEC filing to go public. As Terence Mckenna would say, "The psilocybin mushroom knows this. The stars know this. The archaic world knew this". Once a person truly encounters the mystery — whether through deep contemplation, ecstatic experience, or genuine confrontation with nature — the obsession with status begins to appear absurdly theatrical. Since a rainforest contains more true sophistication than any boardroom on Earth. And so the spectacle continues: frightened monkeys in designer suits, applauded by frightened monkeys with podcast microphones, all trying desperately to convince one another that domination is equivalent to meaning.
So the only slightly good billionaire is one who says "fuck that, raise my taxes. 999 million should be the global cap on individual wealth."