We love to mythologise the rich and powerful, especially the further away they are from us in the pages of history. But it’s important to separate the fact from the fiction.
Some people call billionaires human dragons who are nothing but hoarders of gold, sitting atop mountains of wealth. I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s more accurate to say they’re puppets for a much older, larger and stranger beast. Their money and influence aren’t just theirs. They’re sigils for a vast, invisible force that feeds on inequality, ownership, and power. The human faces that this creature wears like Musk, Bezos and Gates are just vessels to carry out its will. The true creature is a ghost within the system itself, and it repurposes the system to sustain itself.
If one of the human figures disappears from the board, the creature doesn’t die. It just finds another vessel. That’s why treating billionaires as purely evil people will not solve the problem. They’re shadows cast by a structure that produces them, and that structure – weakness in our laws, inequality in our economies, our blind spots – these are the real challenges we need to face.
The Grimm story of the bird and the diamond mountain comes to mind. Every thousand years, a bird flies past the mountain and brushes it with its beak. When the mountain has been worn down to nothing, a single day of eternity will have passed. That’s how long real systemic change takes and how it feels to those involved in it – it is slow, grinding, impossible to witness within a single lifetime. But it does happen, eventually, through persistence and small acts that compound over time.
One of the great challenges today is that there are really two economies now. The real economy, which deals with work, goods, and services, and the virtual economy, where financial institutions, hedge funds, and private equity firms hold the majority of the wealth and power. The first is where most people live. The second is where the cosmic creature hides. It feeds on the gaps between the two economies – on speculation, on debt, on the illusion that wealth can exist untethered from reality. And yet, it’s the real economy that bears the cost when the illusion collapses.
The people sitting at the top of this system like to see themselves as taste makers and shapers of humanity’s destiny. They buy art, fund think tanks, and try to brand themselves as visionaries. But in the digital age, many of them might as well be wild animals, driven by instinct and greed, with almost no understanding of the technology that underpins their empires. A billionaire who doesn’t know what open source software is should be seen as jarring as one who doesn’t own a yacht or a Rolex. It’s no longer acceptable for the most powerful people on Earth to be technologically illiterate when their decisions shape digital life for billions. It’s even worse when some of them cosplay as “tech CEOs”, sidelining real experts and ruining public perception of the field with their inadequacies.
Why do the rich and powerful serve the beast? It’s not just about greed or narcisstic behaviour. If greed were the only force driving them, we should already be living in a far wealthier and more balanced world than we do. The real issue is belief – entrenched cynicism dressed up as realism. The powerful cling to scarcity because it justifies their control. They frame collapse as inevitable so they can hoard what remains. But the truth is that a system built to serve everyone would generate more prosperity than any private empire could ever hold. Even the ultra wealthy would likely be better off in a world that trusted abundance over fear. But they simply can’t imagine it, and so we all remain trapped in the myth of not enough.
If we want to wear down the diamond, we have to focus on what truly matters. Nepotism and inherited wealth must face real scrutiny and fair taxation. Systems that allow narcissists to climb unchecked into leadership need to be redesigned with accountability and mental health safeguards in mind. Ignorance of technology can no longer be an excuse for policymakers or business leaders. We’ve had computers for over half a century. It’s time to act like we understand the tools shaping our future.
Cynicism feels powerful. It feels like clarity. But it can also be a trap, causing us to spiral into wanting to burn everything down. The modern world, flawed as it is, sustains billions of lives. The answer isn’t to destroy it, but to refine it – to separate what is toxic from what is essential. We cannot risk throwing away the entire structure just to start again in chaos, or to degenerate us to a form of society we had already evolved from. Progress means protecting what works while fixing what doesn’t.
It’s like the long defeat of Sauron in Lord of the Rings. Evil wasn’t destroyed in a single blow, or by one hero’s will. It was worn down across ages, through stewardship, resistance, and the courage of people who knew they might never see the end. Each generation inherited the same struggle, fought their part, and passed on the hope that one day the shadow would fade a little more.
That’s what being human really means: living under the shadow of a cosmic creature, knowing it can’t be slain, yet still choosing to be the bird and peck the diamond mountain. To keep chipping away, feather by feather, beak by beak, believing that somewhere beyond the shimmer of all that wealth, the world could be made lighter. Not perfect, not pure – just more human.