Moral sermons of the modern celebrity

The virtuous imposed authority of the insulated elite

The stories that take Hollywood by storm are often tales of the ‘little guy’ triumphing over the bolshy, ethically compromised, rich dude. They are tales of struggle and overcoming the cultural forces that seek to hold the people back. Film and television often capture what is so ugly about an elite class that looks down upon the masses, preaching to them, scolding, sneering. And it is truly a quirk of our world that the very people who bring these characters to life are so blissfully unaware of who they are when they take their costumes off.

Actors and actresses have brought to life the elite moral hypocrisy of The Capitol in The Hunger Games, playing lavish and absurdly decadent elites. Without irony they aestheticise suffering, turning violence into pageantry, and then attend the conspicuously decadent awards shows as if they bear no resemblance to peacockery they portray on screen.

The room erupted when Parasite won the Academy Award in 2020. A story about a wealthy family who prides itself on being kind, progressive, and benevolent while remaining utterly oblivious to the structural violence that sustains their lifestyle. Do you think the wealthy and woke at the Oscars recognised themselves in the characters who “feel bad” about poverty, donate to charity, but whose kindness evaporates at the slightest inconvenience? Do you think they understand that, just like in Parasite, their morality works only at a distance?

Have any of them ever watched Squid Game, The Handmaid’s Tale, Children of Men, Elysium, Don’t Look Up, The White Lotus, Succession, or V For Vendetta, and seen themselves in the elite classes?

There is something uniquely revolting about the moral sermons of a modern celebrity. The cloying smug confidence that they are just morally right oozes past the layers of carefully curated concern. Delivered from stages drenched in light and carpets of red, the proclamations of what it is we should care about above all else are unencumbered by self-reflection. When you’re flanked by publicists, protected by security, and some poor sucker is there to hold your bag, I suppose it is difficult to keep your feet on the ground.

These professional pretenders have their every word captured in microphones and broadcast to every corner of the globe. Their pontifications are given undue importance, amplified by social media algorithms, and received by millions of people whose material circumstances bear no resemblance to those of the speaker. Their lectures are rarely modest, devoid of self-awareness, and almost never accompanied by any meaningful personal cost. They are moral declarations without sacrifice, politics without consequence. And yet, they are treated, by media, institutions, and sometimes even by governments, as authoritative contributions to public debate.

But celebrity moral posturing is not merely irritating or hypocritical in a superficial sense, it is fundamentally reflective of contemporary class politics. A politics of insulation where views are formed and expressed from a world where scarcity, trade-offs, and consequences are largely abstract. The celebrity activist can afford to preach in absolutes because they will never be the one living with the consequences. What unites these overpaid performers is not ideology alone, but material distance from the people they presume to lecture.

At the Golden Globes this week, a man who has been paid millions and millions of dollars to pretend to be a massive green monster wore a little badge bearing a political slogan. Wearing a suit worth more than my car he responded morosely to an excited red carpet correspondent that it was not a good day before launching into a political spiel. Mark Ruffalo has spent the better part of the last decade positioning himself as Hollywood’s conscience. He is outspoken on climate change, wealth inequality, energy policy, immigration, and any trending progressive social cause. He supports the Green New Deal, rails against fossil fuels, criticises capitalism’s excesses, and regularly chastises “the rich” as if he were not firmly ensconced among them.

Mark Ruffalo wears “Be Good” badge in honour of killed anti-ICE activist Renee Good at the Golden Globes

Ruffalo’s activism may be earnest, but it is also cost-free. His political positions do not threaten his livelihood, his lifestyle, nor his social standing. If anything, they enhance them. In Hollywood today, progressive orthodoxy is not counter-cultural; it is the expected house style. Ruffalo is rewarded for his boringly predictable conformity.

Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than during awards season. Ruffalo appears to want us to think he attends because of duty. Reluctantly. He is obliged to show up like we are expected to do those worst parts of our own jobs. He has glasses of Moët & Chandon thrust into his hands and is force fed a tray of Nobu Matsuhisa’s yellowtail jalapeño, caviar pot, lobster salad with spicy lemon dressing, trio of nigiri, and miso black cod.

But perhaps Ruffalo’s misery is fair enough given when he won a Golden Globe, in the year of the pandemic lockdowns, the winner’s goodie bag was worth a measly US$30,000. This year, at the 83rd Annual Golden Globes, winners and presenters were handed “Ultimate Gift Bags” curated by Robb Report (whoever on Earth he is). These bags have an estimated value of US$1 million. Is that not obscene? People who could afford a trip to out of space are gifted luxury travel experiences, designer goods, and elite indulgences that most people could not afford in a lifetime.

By the way, among the offerings were six-night stays across New Zealand’s most exclusive lodges that I had never heard of because ~I’m just a poor boy from a poor family~. One single New Zealand “koha” package was valued at over US$31,000. The bag it was delivered in was a bespoke Atlas duffel bag. Again, not heard of it, but assume it is a status object masquerading as luggage.

This matters not because celebrities are wealthy, no one is shocked by that, but because these same glamorous figures routinely lecture ordinary people about overconsumption, carbon footprints, inequality, and moral responsibility. Ruffalo will warn working families about climate sacrifice while draped in clothing made from fabric that was probably cut by Tibetan monks, hand stitched by a Dominican nuns in Salamanca, and pressed by an underground illegal immigrant sweat shop in South Carolina. His outfit is likely more well-traveled than me and he has only worn it once. The guy shills for socialism and will condemn wealth hoarding when he allegedly made upwards of US$50 million from the Marvel movies alone. But, like many celebrities, hating Donald Trump has become integral to his personality.

The Golden Globes are not an outlier either. Extravagant gift bags are a long-standing awards-season tradition. The Academy Awards’ infamous “Everyone Wins” nominee bags have, in various years, been valued between US$100,000 and US$200,000, containing luxury holidays, cosmetic surgery vouchers, high-end skincare, and bespoke services. The Emmys have offered similar packages and The Screen Actors Guild Awards, while somewhat more restrained, still distribute gift bags overflowing with extravagances.

The scale of these gifts is accepted by these super wealthy liberals as normal. They are framed as “fun” perks of the job, as harmless indulgences and never subjected to accusations of excess. Yet at these very ceremonies of glorious satiation they conduct their most solemn homilies, issuing moral pronouncements about injustice, suffering, and ethical instruction. The industry has perfected the art of simultaneously consuming conspicuously and scolding conspicuously. Not scolding themselves obviously, rather it is you and me who are supposed to be influenced by their hectoring.

The performance of virtue is itself part of their brand identity. The celebrity must be seen to care, to speak, to signal alignment with the moral sentiments of the day. They must not stray into the wrong causes, however. JK Rowling has well and truly been castigated by vacuous, talentless, pretty people for advocating for women’s rights. The key thing is that there is no expectation that any of these political alignments will meaningfully alter their own behaviour. They will not cease traveling, commercially nor by private jet. Nor will they redistribute their immense wealth to the homeless people of Los Angeles. No, they will retreat to their gated communities where they are unaffected by changing demographics and rising crime.

The same patterns appear outside Hollywood, in political celebrity culture. I’m sure I will upset some of my fellow New Zealanders with this take, but Jacinda Ardern’s post-prime-ministerial career has been defined not by policy or anything particularly productive, but by global moral branding. She is marketed internationally as the embodiment of “kindness”, “compassion”, and “ethical leadership,” a figure invited to lecture others on values without being pressed on outcomes. Much like her record in government.

Jacinda Ardern at Yale University. Photo by Dan Renzetti

Consider her recent withdrawal from the Adelaide Writers’ Festival following the festival’s decision to uninvite Randa Abdel-Fattah, an activist who regularly posts antisemitic content celebrating the October 7th attacks and was previously involved in the uninviting of a Jewish writer. Ardern has framed her withdrawal as a principled stand. But in reality, it was a low-cost gesture that aligned neatly with progressive activist sentiment while avoiding any serious engagement with the complexities of antisemitism, free expression, or institutional responsibility, particularly poignant given, as far as I can see, she had nothing to say about the Bondi terror attack. Happy to be corrected though.

This is Ardern through and through. Public morality as performance, carefully calibrated to signal virtue without risking backlash from her ideological constituency.

Look at her climate advocacy. Ardern has positioned herself as a global climate leader while maintaining a schedule of extensive international travel with speaking tours, global summits, and prestigious appointments, that generate a carbon footprint that is, again, orders of magnitude larger than that of the average New Zealander. The emissions are justified, of course, because her cause is righteous. Sacrifice is something she instructs others to do.

Her virtue signalling is about as deep as a puddle with downstream consequences for her basking in adulation seemingly unconsidered or dismissed. While in office, she unilaterally banned new oil and gas exploration in New Zealand, a move applauded by international activists and elites, but one that had very real consequences for working-class communities dependent on the energy sector. Jobs were lost, deindustrialisation sped up, and energy prices rose. New Zealand actually became more reliant on imported fuels and dirtier stopgaps. We had to get ship loads of coal from Indonesia. The cost of these trade-offs, which earned a double-Damehood, were borne not by her and the elite classes, but by households already struggling with cost-of-living pressures.

More recently, Ardern spent a significant amount of time at the world’s largest gathering of private jets (COP in Brazil) publicly advocating for Australia to host COP, ignoring completely the public concerns back in Australia about affordability and economic strain. Some estimates suggest a price tag for hosting of potentially exceeding AU$1-2 billion. In the run-up to COP30 in Belém, Brazil, a new four-lane motorway was constructed bulldozing a chunk of the Amazon rainforest. This was specifically built in an effort to improve access and connectivity for the city hosting the climate summit. Nothing like bulldozing the Amazon to save the environment.

COP is less a climate summit than a global costume party for the ultra-wealthy where luxury hotels are booked out years in advance, and delegates lecture the world about sacrifice while sipping champagne behind security cordons. It is a playground for professional grifters who spend the junket dining lavishly, networking, chasing cameras, and posturing, all while insisting that ordinary families must accept higher energy bills, restricted travel, and lower living standards “for the planet.” The hypocrisy is gross. As is the excessive consumption and the audacity of the Arderns, DiCaprios, Emma Watsons, and, of course, our now preoccupied-with-Palestine Greta Thunberg.

Ardern’s activism-as-personality is no different to that of many liberal celebrities who use moral rhetoric as a form of status display. Climate activism is perhaps the most glaring arena, but wealth inequality, billionaire bashing, and open borders are also terribly fashionable.

Speaking of billionaire bashing, I have been somewhat bemused by the emphatic condemnation of capitalism and billionaires by singer Billie Eilish. Now, I love her music, don’t get me wrong, but my goodness the woman is a terrible hypocrite. While denouncing the evils of capitalism she is simultaneously actively flogging merchandise including basketball singlets, UNO playing cards, hats, hoodies, belts, necklaces, bandanas, pullovers, earrings, socks, beanies, tote bags and gift cards for her merch store. She did a perfume too.

I won’t apologise for assessing the behaviour of these entertainers and political figures as utter personal failings. Narcissism is at the core of the desperate need for relevance and a podium from which to preach. It is toxic empathy that achieves nothing of worth, but validating the expresser’s sense of self-importance as a “good person”. In fact, often the celebrity class occupies a material position so removed from ordinary life that the negative impacts, the costs, of their preferred policies are externalised entirely to the populace they think they are so much more wise and virtuous than. Energy costs, rising crime, job losses, unaffordable housing, failing education standards, diminished quality of life… these are foreign concepts to them.

The problem is not that wealthy people have opinions. It is that they are so completely out of touch and their opinions are treated as morally weightier precisely because of their status, despite that status insulating them from consequences. In celebrity politics, the media frame up their grandstanding as leadership. We have allowed a class of people whose lives are defined by exemption to dominate moral discourse about how everyone else should live. The celebrity activist is always cushioned, always protected, always morally absolved in advance.

This does not mean their views are automatically wrong. But it does mean they should be treated with far more scepticism than they currently are. Moral authority without shared material stakes is simply performance. A healthy democratic culture demands that those who advocate sacrifice are willing to share in it, that those who speak of justice are accountable for outcomes, and that those who claim moral leadership are subject to scrutiny rather than adulation.

And, I have said it before and I will say it again, no one has exposed celebrity hypocrisy better than Ricky Gervais when he hosted the Golden Globes in 2020. He first eviscerated them for their hypocrisy:

Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama. Yeah, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. Well, you say you're woke, but the companies you work for, I mean, unbelievable, Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service, you'd call your agent, wouldn't you?

…Our next presenter starred in Netflix's Bird Box, a movie where people survive by acting like they don't see a thing, sort of like working for Harvey Weinstein. You did it, I didn't, you did it.

Before delivering the iconic lines:

If you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech, all right? You're in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world, most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. If you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your God and f*** off.