In 1971, a handful of college students playing guards in a basement “prison” quickly turned their authority into abuse. Half a century later, the billionaire class wields power on a scale those guards could never imagine—yet the psychological patterns are eerily similar. In both cases, authority is assigned, not inherently earned. Both operate in structures that reward dominance, insulate from consequences, and reduce human beings to numbers. The Stanford Prison Experiment ended after six days when an outsider intervened. The billionaire economy has no such outsider, and the cellblock they oversee has no walls—only an architecture of dependency that the rest of society lives within. Continue reading →