by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
Virtue-signaling texts from your $100 million yacht no longer impress, they enrage.
For the past five decades, celebrities and other wealthy folks have sought conventional status signifiers / symbols: a couple hundred thousand acres of ranchland, a luxe bug-out bunker in New Zealand, a private islet in the Caribbean, a winery, a mega-million dollar yacht, a hip bistro in Manhattan or Santa Monica, a sprawling mansion, and so on.
The more civic-minded mega-millionaires donated enough dough to a university to get a building named after them (modesty is my middle name, etc.), funded a children’s hospital or donated some of their couple hundred thousand acres of land to the Nature Conservancy or equivalent mainstream environmental group.
Now that the bogus “prosperity” of past 20 years has imploded, the nation is slip-sliding into the Greater Depression, and one consequence is that all these signifiers of obscene narcissism and ahem, privilege, will increasingly be viewed with extreme prejudice. (Look it up, along with the film Apocalypse Now.)