Lauren Sánchez Bezos opened the red carpet at last week’s Met Gala, setting the tone for an evening defined by the conspicuous excess and insatiable appetites of the billionaire class and their celebrity pets.
With tickets priced around $100,000 and tables starting near $350,000, the event featured 400 of the world’s most rapacious egos across entertainment, fashion, and business. All the celebs famous for being famous were there, but it was Beyonce’s opaque narcissism that stood out among the horde of image addicts parading before the cameras. As children in Gaza are reduced to skin and bones and eight million Sudanese citizens suffer displacement and death, Beyoncé wore a sculptural Olivier Rousteing gown featuring a nude, crystal-embellished bodice and a wearable diamond skeleton mapping her entire body in jewels.
The symbolism was unmistakable. Her jeweled skeleton was not decoration, it was revelation. She wasn’t wearing a dress, but an ideology — the conviction that unimaginable wealth, excess, and self-glorification are virtues, even while the rest of the world starves, bleeds, and burns.
Why do we worship these people? There is nothing admirable about a class so obscenely wealthy, so insulated from consequence, and so intoxicated by their own importance that they can hoard, consume, and indulge without limit while the rest of us scrape to find the faith to ask for daily bread. Beyoncé and Jeff Bezos, Katy Perry and Kim Kardashian—they are not cultural royalty. They are participants in, and beneficiaries of, a system that drains labor, devours resources, and turns a blind eye to human suffering.
It’s why calling them “the elite” or “A-listers” is problematic.
In reality, they are the Vampire Class — people whose wealth depends on siphoning life from others while remaining permanently insulated from the consequences. They feast on labor they never performed, amass fortunes no human being could spend in twenty lifetimes, and hover safely above the poverty, instability, and suffering their industries and brands create. Like vampires, they survive through extraction: draining workers, communities, ecosystems, attention, news cycles, and entire nations to sustain their endless appetite for more.
But this is not a new phenomenon, and it is not even uniquely modern. It is part of an older human memory, a recurring archetype that shows up whenever power becomes predatory and life is reorganized around consumption. Every age has had its name for it: in myth, in religion, in folklore, and in the warnings of poets who recognized what happens when the human world forgets its limits.
Enter Irish philosopher John Moriarty, stage left.
Born in 1938, Moriarty spent his life asking a question most modern cultures cannot tolerate: “Ask of your society, does it nourish me or vampire me?” His answer was increasingly clear. A civilization that reduces the living world to resources, and the human person to a product, does not sustain life, it feeds on it.
Long before the rise of today’s billionaire class, John Moriarty saw the outlines of a civilization that survives by sucking life upward — feeding on the bodies, labor, and inner vitality of ordinary people to preserve the glittering immunity of those at the top. What we are now witnessing at the highest levels of wealth is not an anomaly, but the logical endpoint of a system that has forgotten how to be human.
