On a recent 5-day trip to Marathon Key, Florida, while waiting for a table at an upscale waterfront restaurant, my wife and I spent about half an hour wandering around the Faro Blanco Resort & Yacht Club gazing with open-mouthed wonder at the obscene size and number of gleaming yachts and super-yachts docked there. It was here that I found conclusive answers to questions I had been asking myself for years, that is, why are the rich and super-rich so fixated on not paying anything close to their fair share of taxes while they maximize returns on investments that already generate tens of millions of dollars of surplus income, more money than they or their immediate descendants could ever need or spend? The answer I discovered at the yacht club (which should have already been obvious to anyone) is that there is no end to the things the rich and super-rich are intent on buying and consuming, for use or primarily for display. Caught up in the narrow, one-size-fits-all stylings of prestige capitalism, the new oligarchs sequestered in Malibu and Montecito, Greenwich and Southampton, occupy beautiful surroundings but like my old friend Dr. Faustus never appear to be satisfied in their quest to possess or be possessed when their contract with the devil comes due. Such individuals consider every failure to gain a loss; are in constant competition with their peers to build or buy bigger, more expensive homes or compounds; and are intent on assuring that the workers who generate their wealth are paid as little as possible, thus the union-busting practices of Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, and mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, who could, if he chose, facilitate leaps into the middle-class of thousands of his employees without missing a beat of consumable or bankable profit. What the character Raphael Hythloday says towards the end of Book II of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a book composed over 500 hundred years ago, holds terribly true today: “When I run over in my mind the various commonwealths flourishing today, so help me God, I can see nothing at all but a conspiracy of the rich fattening up their interests in the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent ways and means to hang onto whatever they have acquired by sharp practice, and then they scheme to oppress the poor by buying up their toil and labor as cheaply as possible.”

Five hundred years on, we should all already know this but in the intellectually quiescent confines of contemporary America more often than not we prefer to facilitate the wealth-creation of the greedy super-rich rather than question or contest it. Why and how do we do this? Before responding, let me broaden the field a bit. When we (all of us) think of the super-rich, we tend to isolate out the identifiable oligarchs of Silicon Valley—in addition to Bezos, these would prominently include Mark Zuckerberg as well; the less anonymous movers and shakers of hedge funds and the financial industry (like Michael Bloomberg); media moguls like Oprah Winfrey and Rupert Murdoch; and the bumbling behemoth, Elon Musk, who formerly strode the blast. We don’t usually include athletes like Lebron James or Tom Brady, Aaron Judge or Carlos Correa, who sign contracts that pay them $40 million a year and have comparably lucrative contracts with advertisers and apparel companies. Nor do we tend to include performers like Beyoncé or Cardi B. or Taylor Swift, or even self-styled working-class hero Bruce Springsteen who pack huge arenas year after year with worshipful audiences who pay hundreds of dollars a head simply to be part of the spectacle, sometimes traveling by plane to get to the venue of choice (and, reportedly, having to max out their credit cards or empty their savings accounts to do so). And, finally, we do not generally calculate how much we pay the stars of stage, screen, and television to perform successive replications of their starry selves, whether our payouts involve theater or cinema tickets or subscriptions to cable TV. What fuels this component of the mega-millions moneymaking machine? Worshipful adoration of the most billable stars and athletes of the moment, uncritical consumption of each and every spectacle or commodity on offer, informed by the kind of self-abasement (“we” are nothing compared to “them”) more common among religious true believers than (presumably) among citizens of a self-styled democratic republic.

Like true believers, the fan base of popular performers is grounded in a quest for self-aggrandizement that takes the form of projective emulation. Fans want to see their enlarged selves, avatars, or reflections in Lady Gaga or Rihanna or possibly even in the grotesquely deformed face recently displayed by Madonna—which some commentators, who should know better, want us to believe constitutes yet another cutting-edge act of transgression by the quondam Italian-American girl from Queens. Of course, what all this really suggests is that the kings and queens of pop culture, rather than privately reveling in their highness, are driven to keep replicating performances of their prime moneymaking selves long after their primes have passed in order to maintain their hold on their acolytes’ imagination. Why, I wonder, can’t Madonna–whose music was made as much with her mind and imagination as with her dancing body and protean costumes–scale down to live and age as ordinary super-rich people do, properly compounded in the privacy of their multimillion-dollar homes? Or why, if she is so worried about the effects of aging, not take a behind-the-scenes role as choreographer or record producer? Clearly, the drive to be seen, to be displayed, and ultimately to be worshipped by the idolatrous hordes is a drug far more powerful than heroin for these never satisfied celebs, who are, in the end, as narrowly limited in their dreams as they are in their desires. As another for instance, replay Rihanna’s display of her transcendent pregnant body at the recent Super Bowl half-time spectacular surrounded by troops of uniformly costumed onstage acolytes. Displays like these at other Super Bowl spectaculars and Olympics Game opening ceremonies confirm Guy Debord’s prophetic observation that “The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world” (1967).

What’s particularly galling is the extent to which many stars of the recent past—e.g., Michael Jackson—and present are so taken in by, and invested in, myths of their own making that they see themselves as so elevated above their fan base that they owe nothing so crass as responsibility or loyalty to anything other than their own magnificence. I sensed this years ago when I witnessed Michael Jordan, then the reigning greatest player in the NBA, suddenly lose interest in feeding the rapture of Chicago Bulls fans in order to try his amateurish hand and bat at baseball. Why did he do it? Because he could, because it made a change, fans and teammates be damned. More recently, we have Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant demanding immediate exits from the Brooklyn Nets, the former (arguably the most irresponsible player in NBA history) for being “disrespected” and the latter for not wanting to play for a team that, because of Kyrie’s defection, had no chance of winning a championship. As a last example of the blinkered thinking that often informs celebrities as much as it does their uncritical fans, I’ll leave you with Irving’s repeated claim that the world is flat, despite his having been born in Australia where no one has, to my knowledge, yet witnessed someone falling off the southeastern edge of the map.

The extravagance of Irving’s delusion is exponentially exceeded by the mass appeal of wealth, rage, resentment, and the freedom to be your worst self that prompted mainly white (and quite a few nonwhite) voters to elect and then strive to re-elect Trump president, but even more by the sustaining of the illusion, carefully cultivated by Trump, of a “rigged election”. The ignorance that initially only countenanced but quickly began to celebrate Trump’s crimes, lies, bullying, and boasting is an ignorance born of narrow horizons, of people who never look or think beyond their backyards or a single channel on cable TV, and who myopically assume—despite the hateful rhetoric they level at ethnic and racial minorities and people of all kinds who live in big cities—that everyone elsewhere looks, thinks, and acts just as they do, and hence are outraged into incomprehension when the numbers indicate they are mistaken.

Recall how well Trump’s quip about being too smart to pay his taxes went over with voters struggling to pay their rent and medical bills, while the infrastructure around his working- and middle-class supporters was visibly crumbing because rich people like him and large corporations don’t pay the taxes that help maintain it. Ignorance like this involves a complete failure of the kind of critical thinking that purportedly used to appeal to Midwesterners whose response to grandiose claims was “Show me. I’m from Missouri.” But worse even than this is the complete lack of empathy of Trump’s supporters, particularly their failure to identify with underdogs like themselves instead of with puffed-up tyrants, whose bullying and bluster and reckless abandon thousands felt compelled to emulate on the January day they put their delusions to work as their shameless puppet master egged them on.

As a final note on the intersectionality of greed, ignorance, and celebrity worship, consider the extent to which the love of high-powered weaponry, intoxication with violence, lethal attacks on Black citizens by police, and contagiousness of mass murders has been fed and fueled by the steady diet of sensational ultra-violent action movies in which body counts of often CGI manufactured victims exceeds calculation. These are, effectively, the only films boys and men, aged 10-40, tend to watch in their time out from equally violent, but more excitingly interactive, video games where the gamester himself is doing the killing instead of the bulked-up film star of the moment (who is now black as often as white, with women often taking the place of men.) A familiar enough scenario, no doubt, but one whose profits are almost entirely collected by Hollywood moguls and production companies who salve their collective conscience by donating heavily to progressive politicians whose advertised commitment to gun control is legion. So the intersectional wheel comes round to embrace even the presumptively high-minded donors who could have spent the last 40 years making blockbuster climate change disaster films, linking global catastrophes to their movers and shakers, or making more granular, reality-based films whose viewers could see mirrored reflections of their variably driven, dignified, or damaged selves and derive from them a sense of self-importance otherwise only granted to the bad, the beautiful, or cartoonishly bloated and expansive.