The excellent HBO show Succession wrapped up a few weeks back. For those who did not watch, the four season series follows the fictional Roy family, loosely based on the Murdochs and the Redstones, families made obscenely wealthy through the efforts of a patriarch in the media industry. In the show, as in real life for those families, that patriarch has multiple children, all vying for their own piece of the pie as their father nears the end of life. The show is fantastic, with amazing characters, wit and humor to marvel at, and a deep Shakespearean core to the story it is telling.

One of the things it does really well is meditate on the absurdities of extreme wealth, and what it does to human beings. All the major characters are obsessed with accumulating more and more, and all of them are malformed souls, with deep personal flaws, the central of which for all of them is the inability to form human bonds. The presence of such wealth breeds a kind of cynicism and paranoia, which precludes closeness with others, because you cannot know their motives: do they love you, or your money? Better to seal it off, assume they want your cash, and keep everyone at arms length.

I’ve obviously never been obscenely wealthy myself, nor have I run in those circles. My time in politics let me into some of those circles, on a smaller level, but it was limited. However, one of the things I think the show does really well is provide a lens into a world many of us never see. And one thing that was apparent about that window, through all four seasons, is this: wealth doesn’t cover up one humanness. What I mean is, all of these very wealthy, seemingly very put together people, are just in the end, people, and pretty fucked up ones at that. They are all muddling through the world as much as the rest of us, no matter how much they want us to think they are floating above it all. I know this may be obvious to some. But I think its an important reminder, considering how badly our culture wants to lionize and even divinize the elite.

I wrote this in my recent post on AI pessimism:

The moneyed interests of the world – they are all going to get old, and confront mortality, and when we are all gone, this will all remain. The rat race everyone is caught up in – I’ll let others run it, because I have compost to turn over and weeds to pull. You can’t put that on a microprocessor, and I can’t get it delivered to my pocket. How sad for those who are trying to.

I think the rich and powerful accumulate wealth and influence and power because it feels like a kind of Fountain of Youth – immortality, or at least invulnerability, is possible is there are enough zeroes in my bank account. Or at least, that’s what they want the rest of us to think. That, and inevitability: that wealth and influence and power are inevitable, it always was on their side and always will be, and to question otherwise is to question nature itself. And this narrative has mostly worked throughout history, and in a post-French Revolution world, it has worked most effectively in America. We have never really, as a people, questioned wealth and its provenance, no matter how badly some of us have wanted to.

But, that inevitability and invulnerability: it’s all a sham. That’s what’s great about a show like Succession, or even Mad Men or The Sopranos. These are all just people, not gods and not superheroes. The inevitability, the power, the cynicism and detached nature: it’s all a show, meant to hide the fact that they are just like the rest of us, and their situation in life is not ordained from above. Because at the end of the day, you are left with Logan Roy getting confused and pissing in his closet, or Roman Roy crying hysterically at his father’s funeral, or Kendall Roy getting high in a shack in a desert in New Mexico. It’s Tony Soprano having panic attacks, and Don Draper with no real friends.

To go back to my quote above: these inevitabilities want us to order the rest of the world around them. They want us to bend our buying power and our attentional energies and our everyday lives around their needs, and to forget that we are doing so. One of the projects I’m engaged in with my writing, and with the life I am crafting for me and my family, is a refusal to do so. There is another Inevitability to bend ourselves towards, that will ultimately bend all those lesser inevitabilities as well. They can try and make the rest of us conform our worlds to the one they want to build. But all we have to do it say no. Remember, the emperor has no clothes, and we all have the power to notice and to laugh.