The rich who were put on display as personal heroes for universal adoration and the patterns of universal emulation used once to be the ‘self-made men’, whose lives epitomized the benign effects of the work ethic and of reason strictly and doggedly adhered to. This is no longer the case. The object of adoration is now wealth itself – wealth as the warrant for a most fanciful and prodigal life-style. It is what one can do that matters, not what is to be done or what has been done. Universally adored in the persons of the rich is their wondrous ability to pick and choose the contents of their lives, places to live in now and then, partners to share those places with – and to change all of them at will and without effort; the fact that they seem never to reach points of no return, that there is no visible end to their reincarnations, that their future looks forever richer in content and more enticing than their past; and, last but not least, that the only thing which seems to matter to them is the range of prospects their wealth seems to throw open. These people seem, indeed, to be guided by the aesthetics of consumption; it is the display of extravagant, even frivolous aesthetic taste, not the obedience to work ethic or dry, abstemious precept of reason, the connoisseurship, not a mere financial success, that lie at the heart of their perceived greatness and founds their right to universal admiration.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman