Stop Worshipping Wankers: Wealth, Power and the Myth of Genius

We have developed the peculiar habit of treating extreme wealth as evidence of extraordinary human worth. Billionaires become visionaries, entrepreneurs become titans, and the people who accumulate the greatest fortunes are celebrated as though they have personally dragged civilisation into the future. Their opinions are solicited on everything from education to geopolitics, often with remarkably little concern for whether they possess any particular expertise in either.

Apparently, having an enormous amount of money qualifies you to explain the human condition.

The language is revealing. Tech titans. Industry leaders. Masters of innovation. These are not neutral descriptions. They are expressions of deference, part of a culture that confuses economic power with intellectual authority and commercial success with social contribution. We have built an elaborate mythology around people who are, in the end, just people. As Chopper Read put it, another bare bum in the shower.

Wealth does not confer wisdom, moral superiority or some exceptional understanding of the world.

Nor are the technologies and industries associated with celebrated entrepreneurs the achievements of isolated individuals. Behind great fortunes stands an enormous accumulation of human labour, public investment, scientific knowledge, institutional infrastructure and historical opportunity. Engineers, researchers, technicians, administrators, cleaners, logistics workers and countless others make these enterprises possible.

Much of the underlying knowledge has developed through publicly funded research over generations. Yet the mythology concentrates recognition at the top, while the collective work sustaining an enterprise becomes comparatively invisible. Labour is increasingly represented as a cost, while ownership becomes the principal measure of achievement. Financial reward and public recognition follow rather different patterns from collective contribution.

There is a deeper problem here. Wealth is not simply accumulated within an economic system. Once concentrated, it changes the conditions under which further wealth and influence accumulate. Economic resources provide access to visibility, political institutions, investment opportunities and control over infrastructure on which others depend. These advantages influence the distribution of future opportunities, independently of any individual’s intentions.

The process becomes self-reinforcing. Eventually, we begin mistaking the consequences of concentrated power for evidence that its possessors deserve it. The mythology helps reproduce the conditions that make the mythology plausible. Prestige becomes an effect of accumulation and subsequently a means of sustaining it. The distinction between power and authority begins to disappear.

Technology intensifies this arrangement. Our ordinary activities generate information, transactions, dependencies and increasingly unavoidable demands for further participation. Even inconvenience can become economically productive. Every obstacle generates another interaction, another opportunity for value to circulate or accumulate, another reason to remain within the machinery. The system reproduces its own conditions of participation, often without anyone needing to design or direct the larger process.

We are encouraged to admire the people associated with these systems while overlooking the extraordinary collective effort that sustains them and the growing difficulty of living outside them. The supposed genius of the individual obscures the systemic organisation of the whole.

None of this requires billionaires to be uniquely malicious, nor does it deny that individuals make substantial contributions. The problem is the extraordinary asymmetry between contribution, reward, recognition and authority. It is a structural question, not a judgement about the character of particular people. We have allowed the possession of wealth to become a substitute for examining how wealth is produced, who contributes to its production, who benefits, and how its concentration changes the conditions of participation for everyone else.

The most ridiculous part is how willingly we participate in the worship. We repeat the heroic stories, adopt the language of greatness, and treat the accumulation of private fortunes as though it were a public achievement in itself. Meanwhile, the people whose collective efforts make these achievements possible remain largely invisible.

Stop worshipping wankers. They’re not gods, they’re not titans, and they’re certainly not responsible for everything humanity has accomplished. They’re people occupying positions within immense networks of collective activity, whose rewards and influence cannot be understood independently of those networks.

And that is something we ought to examine, rather than applaud.