A strategy for 2021: stop celebrating extreme wealth

Just look at us this month: the cast of rich kids on HBO, the obsession with the drab offsprings of a kleptocratic Royal family, the divorces of not one but two ultra-rich couples, season 3 of “Succession”, the space travels of two megalomaniac billionaires and the Instagram tarmac shots of influencers heading to summer weekends in Portugal.

We need a great hashtag, something more impactful than #eattherich. And we need to use it to collectively frown upon every unnecessary display of wealth.

Besides the fact that extreme wealth is gross, perception of inequalities, more than inequalities themselves, are fueling instability globally. These misconceptions about what a “normal lifestyle” is, are driven by cultural products.

For the World dominant culture, the emergence of ideas and trends in the United States has always been unreasonably left to chance.

Well more than chance, it is driven by the desiderata of a sacro-saint “market”, our lowest common denominator. Culture, as a response to consumers’ impulses rather than a desire to transcend ourselves, inexorably brings us down. In short, what feels good, what we are willing to spend money on, is often not what’s good for us.

I am writing this as someone who grew up in France, the country of cultural interventionism, a place which believes that the Government has a role to play in granting some independence to culture from capitalism. As a result, a (heavily subsidized) French love story might take place in a middle-class context in the South of France while Something’s Gotta Give had to happen in the world of the uber rich: Diane Keaton’s insane house in the Hamptons.

Leaving culture at the mercy of American consumers ‘s obsession with wealth and fame is problematic. Mainstream cultural products are celebrating extreme wealth which does not serve us any longer.

America and the spirit of capitalism are famously linked to the protestant ethos that wealth is a sure sign of God’s love. But in the past 100 years, we have dropped a key component of that ethos, which is that wealth, as a gift from the Gods, was never to be flaunted. In fact, living parsimoniously was once the hallmark of the wealthiest families.

It is time to reconsider how we celebrate the unsustainable ways people with money live and spend our finite resources and instead encourage frugality, discretion and simplicity.