Billionaires in America are gods.
Billionaires in America are gods.
Not metaphors. Not exaggerations. Gods. They do not need to be liked. They need to be treated like gods.
Scrape before them. Offer sacrifice. Bring tithe. Speak their names with weight. Adoration does not require affection. Fear is acceptable. Awe is acceptable. Deference is acceptable. What is not acceptable, in a system like this, is casual contempt.
Because when gods are treated casually, they leave.
This has been true since the robber barons. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt. We did not approach them like neighbors. We carved their names into stone. We built temples in their honor and called them libraries. We understood instinctively that scale demands ceremony.
Over the last thirty years, federal abundance blurred the theology. Money flowed so widely that people forgot the hierarchy. Rain felt automatic. Gratitude thinned. Entitlement thickened. The gods receded behind bureaucracy and people started speaking about them like they were just men with large bank accounts.
They are not just men.
They are concentrated power at mythic scale.
Trump embodies this cleanly. Praise him and doors open. Cross him and things close. Agencies shrink. Funding evaporates. Access disappears. It isn’t subtle. It isn’t delicate. It is godlike behavior in a modern form.
The broader billionaire class operates the same way. They expect acknowledgment for the crops. They expect tithe back. They expect constant reinforcement that the rain came from them. Not from “the system.” Not from “the public.” From them. When that reinforcement stops, they withdraw.
And when they withdraw, it feels like drought.
The mistake isn’t recognizing inequality. The mistake is forgetting the structure. If survival depends on liquidity, and liquidity flows from personalities at mythic scale, then ritual becomes structural. Not because it is morally beautiful. Because it is functionally effective.
You don’t negotiate with gods as if they are peers.
You placate them. You honor them. You fear them. You maintain the relationship. Otherwise, the temples move. The rain follows.
