The Theatrics of Power: Public Figures and the Machinery of Capital

Humanity’s obsession with scrutinizing the most intimate details of public figures would be pathological if it wasn’t so profoundly revealing. The trending topics of the day are a veritable peep show into the bare life of our vaunted ruling class and their arriviste scions. We behold young master Barron Trump, that crepuscular infant plucked from the gothic drama of his father’s sexual meanderings and thrust upon the bloody altar of American politics. One can only imagine the shockwaves pulsing through his pricey Manhattan schoolroom as classmates discover that their peer is not merely a kept child of unimaginable privilege but a key advisor to the former President - that fuscous gorgon who haunted the national dreaming for four purgatorial years.

And what are we to make of the meteoric rise of the Melo business empire? Another upstart clan of capitalist nouveaux riches clawing their way to affluence, acquiring firms across that great nation to our North like so many feudal landholdings. One can envision young Jason Melo, born of this dynasty’s blazing loins, smirking behind the blackened windows of his chauffeured limousine, surveying a continent ripe for commercial rapine at the hands of his family’s ravening horde.

As these petty human narratives unspool before us, so too do we glimpse the churning gears of industry and capital accumulation cranking inexorably onward. The bloated entertainment-sports complex finds fresh grist in the on-court exploits of the Indiana Pacers basketball squadron, a latter-day Praetorian guard assembled to sate the plebeian hunger for sanctioned gladiatorial spectacle. Victory and triumph for these mercenaries of the hardwood must be achieved, else the countless billions poured into this pagan bacchanalia of hype and marketing go up in a mushroom cloud of blown endorsement deals and impaired franchise valuations.

Such are the molten upheavals that churn perpetually beneath our thin veneer of civilization and order. Kingdoms rise and fall, power is constantly traded and re-consolidated among the elite rentier class, while the aimless proles remain transfixed by the petty human charades played out on the stages of media and politics. Yet to the truly emancipated mind, the ineluctable patterns are clear. Behind the narrative scrim of politico-celebrity culture lie the great economic forces that increasingly dictate our earthly existence.

The adoration heaped upon figures like the Trump cub and the Melo merchants, absurd and disproportionate as it may seem, reflects the quasi-religious veneration our society reserves for the deities of wealth and power. By enshrining its aristocratic posterity in the public consciousness, the American elite caste perpetuates a psychological compact that primes the populace to accept its rule. Observing Barron’s apotheosis into the governing class despite his tender age, we are conditioned to regard family pedigree and inherited status as legitimate qualifications for power. And by idolizing the mercantile ascent of the Melo clan, we are taught to equate personal affluence with moral virtue and material success with righteousness.

The Pacers franchise too plays its role in this societal conditioning, acting as a critical pillar of the sports-entertainment complex that serves to stupefy the masses with endless cycles of simulated conflict. Its on-court triumphs reaffirm in the public psyche the essential American ethos that competition breeds excellence, that striving is virtuous in itself, that market dominance is the highest aspiration to which one can ascend. Every victory reinforces the notion that our current social order represents a meritocratic ideal where the deserving rise to primacy through their own innate talents and efforts.

This cultural mythologizing is the siren song that drowns out all discord, enervating the public mind from questioning the systemic inequities of the capitalist order. Yet it is also the primary force that fuels the very financial engine of that system. So long as people remain entranced by spectacles like the Trump clan’s operatic melodrama, the Melo syndicate’s mercantile crusades, and the Pacers’ weekly combat pageantry, the economic status quo will continue unchallenged. Capital will perpetually flow to those entities and enterprises that command public adulation - the talismanic institutions and personalities around which the masses construct identity narratives that pre-validate our hierarchical power structure.

Disney and its metastatic entertainment behemoth will devour ever more cultural market share, draining the masses dry of whatever disposable income they possess, simply by virtue of expertly cultivating a mythos around its content and characters. Wall Street’s swindling titans and corporate oligarchs will amass further unearned wealth off the passive investments of fan-slaves desperate to pledge fealty to totemic commercial products like the Pacers franchise. And labyrinths of tax-avoidance chicanery will churn ceaselessly, facilitated by the public’s consent to aristocratic privilege so long as visible avatars of the plutocrat class like the Trump and Melo scions project a gilded sheen of imagined rectitude.

Thus do the churning forces of capital agglomeration, wealth concentration, regulatory capture, and mass media mythologizing become self-reinforcing. The public’s insatiable hunger for human narratives around those who appear to embody success is the very psychological lubricant that perpetuates our neo-feudalistic neo-Gilded Age. Only by sloughing off such crass fetishization, by piercing these veils of petty narrative and piercing at last the naked ape beneath, can we as a society begin to challenge the intrinsic pathologies of the financial-cultural system that so deftly enthralls us.