Feudalism Makes a Comeback
While the world burns and plagues abound, the billionaires party.
One-time or recurring donations can be made at Ko-Fi.
You can listen to me read this essay here:
The world might soon look like this…
…but the billionaires aren’t worried.
They will be on some distant planet or deep underground or uploaded into the cloud, or so they say.
Until then, they’re going to party. And they don’t care who knows it.
Below are a few choice selections from our overlords’ excesses, along with a warning from the past.
No party illustrates how much fun the billionaires are having better than Anant Ambani’s pre-wedding bash last weekend.
Anant is the son of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries and Asia’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $113.8 billion. Anant’s bride, Radhika, serves as marketing director at her family’s company, Encore Healthcare.
Here’s the bridegroom on the right, posing during the festivities with his personal astrologer, Bharat Mehra. Anant is wearing a $6.5 million Patek Philippe watch, the most expensive watch in the world.
Here’s Priscilla Chan in a hilariously gauche, nouveau riche moment, salivating over Anant’s watch, while her husband Mark tells her to back off.
The average annual salary in India is about $2,750, but hey, you can bet everyone was watching the extravaganza on the devices their overlords made for them. It looked like something out of a Disney movie.
More than 1,500 guests were invited for the pre-wedding event. Rihanna was paid $8 to $9 million to perform. There were glass castles, a "Mela Rouge"-themed carnival and custom Versace gowns.
For one event, Radhika wore a Manesh Malhotra dress. The designer “spent six months developing a mesh, or jaal, from a thin sheet of metal for a modern twist on the traditional dupatta,” explained the bride.
Dozens of specialty chefs prepared dishes, the estimated number of which ranged from 500 to 2,500. A mini train transported guests to and from dinner. After one dinner, 5,500 drones took to the sky to tell the story of Vantara, becoming India’s largest drone show ever produced.
Ugh, that’s enough, right? Except, I just have to include one more photo. The Ambani Family owns the most expensive residence in the world. It cost $1 billion to build. What do you think of it? I’m from Los Angeles. Earthquake country. That building makes me nervous.
Let’s move on to yachts. There’s serious competition among the uber-wealthy to see who can build the biggest yacht.
Jeff Bezos’s yacht cost $500 million and yes, it’s the biggest in the world. I mean, how much bigger can a yacht get? Surely at some point enough is enough. Wild parties happen on yachts, out there on the open sea.
They happen on land, too. Maui might have burned but that didn’t stop the billionaires from buying up land like there’s no tomorrow.
The wildfires on Maui “destroyed some of the only low-income housing in one of the most expensive markets in the U.S.” while the homes of the wealthy remained untouched. The locals can’t afford to rebuild, and many are selling their homes to, yes, you guessed it, the billionaires.
Larry Ellison bought 98% of Lanai Island in 2012 for $300 million.
Once the pandemic hit, Ellison moved to Lanai full time. While the masses locked down, it was a favorite party spot for elites. Tech gods, politicians and celebrities, such as Tom Cruise, Elon Musk, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu, flocked to the island in their yachts and private jets.
Ellison has promised to make it more “sustainable”. That’s all very nice, but who will benefit? Ellison bought out the locals who could no longer afford to live there.
On the Hawaiian island of Kauai Zuckerberg and his wife…
…seized a total of 5.5 million square meters of land [from locals] and surrounded it with a 2m high wall, with guards positioned along the perimeter and a security force conducting patrols on quad bikes.
“[The] compound consists of more than a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms in total,” ...
“It is centered around two mansions with a total floor area comparable to a professional football field [5295 square meters] which contain multiple elevators, offices, conference rooms, and an industrial-sized kitchen.
“In a nearby wooded area, a web of 11 disk-shaped tree houses are planned, which will be connected by intricate rope bridges, allowing visitors to cross from one building to the next while staying among the treetops.
“A building on the other side of the main mansions will include a full-size gym, pools, sauna, hot tub, cold plunge, and tennis court. The property is dotted with other guesthouses and operations buildings.”
“The plans show that the two central mansions will be joined by a tunnel that branches off into a 5,000 square foot [464 square metres] underground shelter, featuring living space, a mechanical room, and an escape hatch that can be accessed via a ladder.”
The incredible size of the bunker, which has a blast-proof door, is double that of the average Australian home.
Oprah Winfrey purchased a 163-acre estate in Maui back in 2002, and has bought further plots of land since then, totaling over 650,000 square meters.
Two years ago, the billionaire Frank Vandersloot purchased a 2,000-acre ranch just south of Zuckerberg’s. How cozy!
Bill Gates owns at least eight properties in the US alone and, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “is rumored to have underground security areas under every one of his homes.”
Wall Street companies like Blackstone are buying up houses at a record rate. Stephen A. Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone Group, is worth $37.83 billion.
By 2030, institutional investors may control 40% of U.S. single-family rental homes.
Remember, you will own nothing, and you will be happy.
You will live in 15-minutes cities and your carbon footprint will be monitored. You will be penalized if you use too much water, too much heat, too much of anything. You will be given a universal basic income to spend on your climate friendly bug dinner and the virtual world you’re building where you can pretend to live just like the billionaires do.
You will spend more and more time in your virtual world because of all the wars and pandemics and natural disasters you’ve been told make the real world too dangerous,
Of course, the overlords will be having a fabulous time in the real world.
Hey, don’t be mad. They’re doing it for the good of the planet. Don't you realize, “in their fiefdoms, they’re creating entirely self-sustaining ecosystems, in which land, agriculture, the built environment and labor are all controlled and managed by a single person, who has more in common with a mediaeval-era feudal lord than a 21st-century capitalist”.
Feudalism Makes a Comeback
Some have argued the tech industry has invented a new form of “technofeudalism” or “neofeudalism” that depends on “data colonization” and the corporate appropriation of personal data.
“‘Neofeudalism’ is characterized by extreme inequality, generalized precarity, monopoly power, and changes at the level of the state. …The conservative geographer Joel Kotkin envisions the US future as mass serfdom. A property-less underclass will survive by servicing the needs of high earners….”
It’s almost as if we are going back to medieval times.
This strongly hierarchical system was beneficial for the nobility and king, as they received services and wealth from the peasants beneath them.
Life was hard for peasants stuck in a position of serfdom. “Chief among these was the serf’s lack of freedom of movement; he could not permanently leave his holding or his village without his lord’s permission...Serfs were often harshly treated and had little legal redress against the actions of their lords.” Nearly 85% of the population was in serfdom; the lords of the feudal system owned everything the peasants had ...
Covid was the driving force that led us back to serfdom. We lost our freedoms. And billions upon billions of taxpayer money went into the hands of the elite. We got into debt paying for our gadgets and our trinkets that fed us information and kept us amused while we hid in our prisons from an illness we were told was so deadly that our own children would kill us if we breathed the same air.
The billionaires must have studied the plague. They must have thought, wow, if we can manufacture a plaguelike that, we can gain wealth and power like never before. And they did.
Let’s remind ourselves what a real plague looks like, the one that happened in Europe 1346 to 13 53.
Henry Knighton, a chronicler, wrote:
There died in Avignon in one day one thousand three hundred and twelve persons, according to a count made for the pope, and another day four hundred and fifty-eight persons and more. Three hundred and fifty-eight of the friars’ preachers in the region of Provence died during lent. This was one of the worst tragedies to strike Europe. The Black Death killed hundreds of people daily. Two-thirds of the overall population became infected with the Black Death, and half of those died, resulting in one-third of the population succumbing to the disease.
The likeliness of death differed, however, based on social rank: …there were very few casualties among the English royal family….
The difference in deaths was no doubt due to the nobility rushing off to their country estates and locking themselves inside.
The exact opposite happened during Covid. The middle and lower classes were ordered to lock themselves up while the wealthy continued to party.
The pandemic and lockdowns led to “one of the greatest wealth transfers in history,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said.
The top 1% of Americans took $50 Trillion from the bottom 90%.
How did that happen? Because unlike the real plague where nobility ran off to their country estates and locked themselves inside while the poor died in the streets of the cities, the billionaires and the most powerful leaders faked a pandemic, locked everybody up and bled them dry, while they continued to party.
There’s a lot of speculation about the Covid pandemic. Most people believe it’s as they were told and anyone who says it isn’t is a conspiracy theorist. But you don’t need to be a scientist, you don’t even need to be that smart, you just need common sense to figure it out. The billionaires and the most powerful leaders weren’t scared.
They made us scared.
In the middle of all this suffering of ordinary folk, when people could be arrested if they were found outside of their homes, on May 12, 2020, British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson was having a wine and cheese party at Downing Street.
On May 20, 2020, 100 people were invited to “Drinks in the Garden”, another party Johnson attended with his wife.
“Legal restrictions at the time said you could not leave your house without a reasonable excuse. Government guidance was that you could meet one person outside of your household in an outdoor setting while exercising.” (BBC)
Trust me, if there was any possibility that this illness was as serious as they claimed it was, do you really think someone like Boris Johnson would have been out partying? A coward like that would have shut himself up in his country estate—they all would have. Especially since just one month previously Johnson had been so sick with Covid he had been admitted to hospital. It doesn’t make any sense to any sensible person.
In November 2020, at the height of the lockdowns, California’s aristocratic governor, Gavin Newsom, was caught having dinner with friends at the pricey French Laundry restaurant, where the bill for the meal’s wine alone was $12,000.
As the NY Times put it:
…the party at a restaurant where dinner for two costs more than many people earn in a week reinforced a fundamental schism between those who value government as a force for good and those who resent it as the bastion of an out-of-touch elite oblivious to people’s needs.
Yep, it was all “bollocks”, as they say in England.
The total wealth of the world's billionaire class grew 54% during the pandemic year of 2020-2021.
“The stock market boomed through 2021,” said Molly Kinder at the Brookings Institution. “Companies did extremely well. They benefited from [Federal Reserve] policy, from low interest rates, from big government spending.”
“And that’s because the bulk of stock in this country, of shares, are owned by the wealthiest households. Upwards of 70% of all stock is owned by just the top 5% of richest households,” she said.
Did they “trickle” that money down to their workers. Hardly. Shareholders of 22 top companies grew $1.5 trillion richer, while workers got less than 2% of that benefit.
We were scammed, plain and simple. But most people refuse to see it. Most people would rather keep on being scammed than admit it.
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled,” said Mark Twain
Yep, those were heady days for the uber-wealthy. No wonder they were partying. And they aren’t about to stop.
Partying in Space
One of the most audacious ways billionaires have of flaunting their wealth is by space travel.
In October 2021, while millions of people were suffering shortages due to supply chain bottlenecks, the uber wealthy were contributing more than their fair share to “climate change” by taking off in gigantic spaceships for fun.
William Shatner, Captain Kirk in Star Trek, became the world’s oldest space traveler to date. It was the sixth tourist trip in 2021 for Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space travel company. The trips cost between $200,000 and $300,000, last 10 minutes, 17 seconds, and give four passengers about four minutes of weightlessness.
Nobody does space travel bigger and better than Elon Musk. Initiated in April 2022, Elon Musk’s SpaceX offers a 10-day trip to International Space Station for a cool $55 million.
Set for some time “soon”, is SpaceX’s Dear Moon Crew. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has contracted SpaceX to send himself and eight celebrities on a SpaceX Starship spacecraft for a trip around the moon. The trip is expected to cost around $500 million. Now that will be quite a party.
Imagine how much money those celebrity moon travelers will make off of their followers once they get back to earth—and yes, I know, I have readers with all kinds of theories about space travel, but let’s just put that aside for a moment and use our imagination. Imagine all the millions of people watching on their smart phones as the celebrities enjoy themselves on a trip to the moon. There will be so many new products for them to buy. New songs to download, new games, new t-shirts.
Ordinary folks want to have fun, too. Billionaires spend money on extravagant things. The problem is, when a hard-working citizen spends $1,500 on Taylor Swift concert, for example, they aren’t investing in an asset that grows in value, like a Patek Philippe watch, or a plot of land. They are spending on something that has zero value and that puts them in even deeper debt to the uber-rich.
After the Black Death subsided, the peasants revolted against the nobility, but the revolt was squashed.
The leaders, Watt Tyler and John Ball, were killed and their heads stuck on poles to be paraded around London.
However, although the Peasants’ Revolt might have seemed to fail, it did not:
King Richard II and the Parliament were shocked by this outburst of rebellion and violence, and stopped trying to regulate peasant wages. The manorial system could no longer function profitably due to the increased economic power of the peasants, and consequently, during the following decades, the feudal system declined, becoming obsolete by the time of Queen Elizabeth.
Thanks to our recent scam of a pandemic, the feudal system has returned with a vengeance. But rather than rebel, the peasants have welcomed it. As long as they have the devices the billionaires have made for them, they are content.
Will they ever wake up and revolt? Or are they already too drugged, too dependent, and too unwilling to face the truth that they’ve been scammed to do something about it?
Thanks for reading and listening and God Bless!
I would offer that feudalism has persisted in varying degrees since the Middle Ages and the lords have simply repackaged and/or rebranded it, while distracting your attention away from its existence. A simple starting example might be: I "buy" a home and, should I fail to pay the mostly illegal taxes assessed on it, my supposed property is forcibly seized and taken from me. So where exactly was my ownership? COnVID simply helped pull back the veil for a growing number of the peasantry. "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." (von Goethe)
The Billionaire club is storing up wrath for themselves even quicker than the stolen wealth they are accumulating. The frenzy of partying they conduct themselves with I think masks a deep rooted unease within their shriveled souls. They cast off the fetters of God and His anointed one, and in doing so the gift of life weighs heavy on them. As hard as life is for many of us “serfs”, we have the Good Shepherd of our souls walking beside us to comfort and encourage us with blessings that no amount of money can purchase. I know who actually gains the most in this equation.
It is certainly distressing to read of their excesses. But as you pointed out in your excellent article, Karen, this is a cycle that has come around before. It won’t last, for us or for them. May God’s grace continue to be with us in the days to come, and may we find we really can do all things through Him who strengthens us.