To Get Rich is Glorious

Societies flourish when wealth is seen as a virtuous pursuit tied to creative power, and decline when wealth is treated with suspicion and resentment.

"To Get Rich is Glorious"

Deng Xiaoping

Throughout history, the surest sign of a civilization's decline has been its transformation from celebrating wealth to condemning it.

The West today has grown deeply distrustful of private accumulation of wealth – "something in which Xi Jinping's China seems to be converging.

This perspective can be difficult to grasp because our society appears obsessed with acquiring wealth—or rather, with what wealth can buy.

Yet this fixation stems not from admiration but from the anxiety of perceived deprivation, a fear of missing out fueling a mainstream narrative built on resentment. Wealth is consistently portrayed as something tainted, a source of guilt that must be confronted rather than celebrated.

That younger cohorts only see opulent consumption through the often tacky lifestyle of influencers and celebrities of questionable renown helps to reinforce that view.

Through social media, we often see displays of exuberant consumption more than of wealth itself—related but distinct phenomena. Consumption is immediate; wealth implies some sort of permanence.

But we find a rhetoric of opposition to wealth also permeating all official government and cultural institutions. 

After the Trump-Musk alliance took form, we find their opponents embracing a quasi-socialistic attitude against the influence of "the rich" in politics—as if the influence of wealth in politics began in 2024.

We can even find a discourse of distrust for wealth coming from the most unexpected corners. 

The EU administrator-in-chief, Ursula von der Leyen, has shamelessly said that in the EU "we don't have bros or oligarchs making the rules," as if it weren't commonly known the extensive networks of lobbyists operating in Brussels – or her own considerable private wealth.

Despite the fact that the pursuit of material success is in theory the foundation of Western capitalist societies, in the West, the distrust of wealth has become hegemonic in cultural discourse since the sixties and has become part of the mainstream since the Financial Crisis of 2007 and the 2020 pandemic—a distrust that is more acute in Europe than in America, but that has also taken hold in the U.S. more than I as a European would have ever imagined.

For the past decade or so, this contrasted with the vibe in China, where the praise of wealth had become a defining feature of the Reform and Opening Up era.

However, the mood shifted when Xi Jinping took office. The explosive growth of the Reform era gave way to more moderate economic conditions, social mobility froze, and the middle class began demanding corrections to the inequalities that had emerged during the reform period.

This shift culminated during and after Covid with Xi's crackdown on tech, his push for 'common prosperity,' and a growing social backlash against ostentatious displays of wealth.

The transition from an economy of limitless opportunity to one of structural limits has transformed how developed consumer societies view wealth accumulation - from a symbol of national progress to a source of social tension. China had caught up with the West again.

Lesson: Societies flourish when wealth is seen as a virtuous pursuit tied to creative power, and decline when wealth is treated with suspicion and resentment.

This convergence of attitudes against wealth led me to reconsider Deng Xiaoping's famous quote "To get rich is glorious" (致富光荣). Though he may never have said it, the phrase became popular because it captures the spirit of his era. And for what it is worth, it is as if Deng said it, if not the real, the mythical Deng that history will remember.

I may have read this quote hundreds of times, however until now I never stopped to think about why it is so powerful. Deng's phrase is not "to be rich is good" but "to get rich is glorious." 

To "get rich," instead of "to be rich," shows a goal, a horizon for the future. And glory is not just a socially accepted behavior, but a socially recognized metaphysical virtue.

In legends of old, the hero often brought back wealth home after achieving the glory of slaying a dreadful monster, as an enduring proof for him and his descendants of his mythic victory. And the Calvinists believed that earthly wealth indicates salvation in the afterlife.

Deng’s slogan here is framing prosperity as a spiritual achievement. Glory is not the goal of a professional career, it is the goal of an epic quest. Glory isn't a material goal, glory is the transcendental manifestation of will to power.

There may be a meaningful distinction between wealth as glory and wealth as mere material opulence. However, the current hegemonic narrative fails to make this difference. 

In this context, a culture that accepts even unvirtuous wealth might serve us better than one that sanctions the very idea of wealth indiscriminately. 

We understand the risks of pursuing wealth for its own sake, but rarely consider how discouraging wealth accumulation damages society's soul. Unequal wealth generates immediate envy, but systemic distrust of wealth creates spiritual stagnation.

Accumulation of wealth is not the only worthy goal to pursue in a society, but societies that view wealth accumulation as unworthy rarely leave open avenues for greatness.

That both China and the West are responding to broken systems by concentrating power and distrusting private wealth under the banner of equality should not surprise us. This shared phenomenon, despite manifesting through different forms and mechanisms, springs from the same foundations.

Modern nation-states, especially the late 20th-century managerial state, treat private wealth with suspicion because it represents autonomous power. The logic of centralized states taken to extremes seeks to eliminate any internal alternative power sources. 

The logical consequence of securing the monopoly on force is to pursue a monopoly on wealth—justified through the lofty ideal of social equality but in reality producing state and para-state bureaucratic and corporate factions, often competing to have control over the sources of monopoly of wealth.

Indeed, the narrative of opposition to wealth is a stream of the narrative of opposition to power. And again the irony here is that it often comes from the structures that aim to monopolize both, power and wealth – which are to a certain extent different dimensions of the same.

Yet the distrust of private wealth ultimately serves as a mechanism for expanding state control. By framing wealth accumulation as inherently suspicious, authorities redirect frustration with broken systems away from paths that might generate independent bases of power. This ensures that the status quo remains unchallenged, as alternative centers of power never coalesce.

Let me be clear: defending wealth accumulation as a worthy pursuit doesn't mean ignoring the reality of our flawed economy - one often built on outright fraud, where not all wealth is deservedly earned, and where mass-produced luxury consumption has become a grotesque caricature of true prosperity.

The generation that has drifted into adulthood amid broken promises and diminished expectations deserves more than a sterile choice between bureaucratic control and nihilistic consumption.

We need horizons that inspire greatness, not narratives that constrain possibility. The path forward requires reclaiming the idea that to get rich can be glorious—both as material achievement and as the expression of creative power that builds civilizations.

Without breaking the taboos around the pursuit of greatness in the form of wealth and power, we condemn ourselves to mediocrity, relegating glory from the realm of aspiration to mere memory.