It's called patronage and it's as old as time. The lives of common people are largely meaningless in terms of recorded history, and in days past you had to appeal in some way to the elders of your community, however 'elder' was defined, if you ever hoped to have a chance of rising above the flotsam, as they say.
For a good portion of history, we looked to religious authorities for relevance in this regard. However, religion has waned significantly as a source of hope for humanity and serves largely as a reinforcement of the power structures keeping us divided. Thus we look to other 'cults' of personality in these times in order to sustain our faith, which just happen to be the sort of elites showing up on social media extolling their perceived virtue while also obfuscating the reality that most of us will never be able to acquire the advantages they have.
Nowadays we're frightfully aware of it, this wealth disparity, because information travels faster than it ever has and we get to see just how badly and painfully marginalized the unfortunate actually are in the midst of absorbing popular propaganda, which feeds the lie that anyone can have whatever they wish whenever they wish with relative ease. And since we crave relevance and connection, and abhor discomfort, individually we move in the wrong direction and try to latch on to anyone and anything which can potentially confer relevance while completely ignoring the elephant in the room, that being our own self-centered nature, thus stultifying any decent collective effort to elevate the masses.
It takes a great deal of time and effort to consciously elevate everyone gradually, and there's a good chance a lot of people will miss out in the process because it takes so long. They basically won't live to reap the rewards of their own effort. And since diamond rings are a highly attractive hedinistic staple of materialism in the moment, no one is going to want to spend their lives trying to ensure their descendents might be able to own one at a fair price. And that's the key to breaking the wealth disparity. Stop trying to measure wealth in terms of materialist barometers and start measuring what is worthwhile in terms of how humanely the 'wealthy' treat the rest of us, for one, but also in terms how well EVERYONE gets to live in the here and now, not some imagined future contrived to pacify the masses on the assumption that they might get to live well if they scramble harder and faster than the next guy.
