Popular culture now heroicizes capital appreciation over developed and free citizens

Evidence

It is easy enough to see this displacement of the value of developed, free, and equal citizens by the value of capital appreciation (human or otherwise) in today’s halls of heroism: popular culture does not celebrate inventors of vaccines, advocates for peace, revolutionary leaders, or even astronauts opening new frontiers; it celebrates Hollywood or sports celebrities; creators of Apple, Facebook, Netflix, or eBay; and above all the very rich … some of whom are college or even high school drop-outs. “Who needs a college degree?” is the theme not only of Kanye West’s debut CD, but also countless get-rich-quick blogs, and it was the headline of a 2010 Businessweek story about megarich CEOs. Apart from glorifying uneducated and often vacuous celebrity, much in popular and maverick business culture suggests that higher education is irrelevant to success defined as fame, wealth, or even ingenuity and invention: billionaire Peter Theil’s “fellowship competition,” which pays college-age students $100,000 to drop out and pursue business ventures instead, makes this point explicit. At the same time, of course, university curriculums and culture have been demonized by the Right as saturated with Left agendas and political correctness, while the common rage of the common citizen has been glorified and exploited. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 384

Categorization

• CANDY: Peter Thiel paying students $100,000 to drop out is a crisp, shareable illustration of the anti-education ethos.
• XREF: connects to: Media cultures measure human worth by wealth and political access.; Wealth accumulation in twenty-first-century pop is reframed as democratic heroism — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 544; Hero-worship functions as a placeholder vehicle for propagating economic ideas to mass publics — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 450

Broader Connections

• Wealth accumulation in twenty-first-century pop is reframed as democratic heroism #expands (0.90) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 544
• Media cultures measure human worth by wealth and political access. #expands (0.80)
• Hero-worship functions as a placeholder vehicle for propagating economic ideas to mass publics #expands (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 450