The “Let Them Eat Cake Syndrome”

What we are living through now is not capitalism in the raw, not the bourgeoisie of steam engines, ironworks, or railways. No — that class at least produced something, and in producing, they dragged entire societies forward. What we face now is the true bourgeoisie: a class of people swollen with extractive wealth and debt-fueled illusions, parading around with status symbols that have no substance behind them. The “let them eat cake” crowd.

Think about it: How many cars can a human being drive at once? How many sofas can one ass occupy? How many bedrooms does a familyless, childless household need? Yet whole suburbs and glass-tower condos sprawl with excess bedrooms, spare living rooms, pointless square footage. The houses keep growing even while the population stagnates and couples collapse. It’s not utility — it’s theater. Theater of wealth. Theater of success. Theater of meaning.

This is the sickness of late capitalism: consumption for the sake of appearances. People drowning in debt while pretending to be rich, leasing cars that depreciate into junk the moment they leave the lot, paying off mortgages for houses that feel emptier every year. “Rich” in image, bankrupt in reality. Even those at the top aren’t innovators anymore. They don’t build steel mills or lay railroads. They don’t revolutionize agriculture or industry. They extract rents. They manipulate finance. They inflate bubbles and sell air as assets. They have mastered the art of creating nothing, while convincing the world it is worth everything.

Meanwhile, societies that still produce — the Chinas, the countries that once we dismissed as “poor” — have built themselves up on real engineering, real logistics, real work. And now the Western bourgeoisie cries foul: “They stole our wealth! Block the supply chains! Give us back our dominance!” No, the truth is harsher: you atrophied. You built offices of nonsense jobs, created managerial fiefdoms, cushioned your drones with coffee stations, lounge chairs, and air conditioning, and called it “the future of work.” You raised a generation of office aristocrats who have never touched the engine of production, who think value comes from slideshows, reports, and video calls.

This is not resilience. This is decadence. It is Marie Antoinette sipping chocolate while peasants starve, transposed into the modern office: cappuccino machines, kombucha on tap, beanbags and yoga rooms. It is “work” without work, “wealth” without wealth, a civilization fattened on its own illusions.

And like every class in history that grows too comfortable, too theatrical, too obsessed with the image of itself, it is sowing its own downfall. Because outside this bourgeois bubble, the world is still awake, still hungry, still building. They don’t want your version of stupidity. They don’t want your “lockstep” of comfort and decline. They want to grow — and they are.

The real “cake” is this: the bourgeois class hands out scraps of comfort to its own middle layers — better coffee, more ergonomic chairs, fancier offices — and calls it progress, while the foundation rots. They mistake indulgence for achievement. But history has no patience for those who confuse the two.

“Let them eat cake,” said one queen, before her world burned. Our elites don’t even need to say it aloud. They live it every day. And like her, they mistake their luxuries for permanence. They will discover — far too late — that the cake always runs out.