| power money is power. or, capital is power. social capital seems to be our driving force these days. money is cheap, followers are harder to come by [en masse]. socialism becomes this monolithic vacuum which eventually devours it's participants. mostly for the reasons you're pointing out; prestige, or the pursuit of power. as you point out, even a high level of financial and social capital is not enough. we've created a vacuum of unrealistic perception. i think this is where media comes into play... the opiate for the masses. your 15 minutes of prestige is not even near good enough to compete with the monolithic personas we've allowed to vacuum up all the power. gates, jobs, Trump, rockefellers, even the house of windsor [how do you even complete with the outside of a monarchy?]. power corrupts. absolute power corrupts absolutely. chasing prestige is very quickly becoming a pipe dream. a race to the bottom if you will. eventually, the only way to gain prestige will be to topple these monoliths. else we wait/fight/plot/etc for the next monolith. ... which will be a space miner ceo, ai breakthrough ceo, fusion power ceo, or quantum programmer ceo. |