F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald is invoked as a literary witness to the book’s central claim that the rich form a distinct social order, separated from ordinary people by the effects of inherited or accumulated wealth. His significance lies not in a developed plot role but in the precision of the distinction attributed to him: economic privilege changes how the wealthy perceive themselves and how they relate to those who had to construct meaning and security without it.

Identity and Appearance

Fitzgerald enters the discussion through a passage about the very rich, presented as people who are “different from you and me.” The book uses this observation to describe wealth as a formative condition rather than a simple possession. The rich have enjoyed advantages early, and those advantages are said to make them soft where others are hard and cynical where others are trusting. The contrast is therefore psychological and ethical as well as economic: privilege is represented as something that reshapes sensitivity, judgment, and expectations.

Wealth and Social Distance

The Fitzgerald passage emphasizes that people born into wealth are difficult for outsiders to understand. Those without comparable privilege must discover life’s compensations and refuges for themselves, while the rich are portrayed as receiving such protections early. This unequal formation creates a durable distance between classes. Even when wealthy people enter the world of ordinary people or fall beneath them materially, the book argues, they continue to regard themselves as superior. Fitzgerald’s formulation thus supplies a compact account of class habitus: inherited position remains visible in outlook even when circumstances change.

Relation to the Ownership Class

The book places Fitzgerald’s observation within its analysis of the Ownership Class and the power of money. John Carpenter’s depiction of yuppies as aliens is paired with Fitzgerald’s claim that the rich are unlike ordinary people, turning class difference into an image of species-level estrangement. The comparison is deliberately sharp: the rich are said to have so little in common with the rest of society that they might as well be extraterrestrials. Fitzgerald’s words give literary authority to that metaphor while preserving its focus on social conditioning rather than biology.

Narrative and Thematic Role

Fitzgerald is used as corroborating evidence in an argument against the belief that money measures human worth. The book contends that the rich rule because wealth is treated as a direct index of value, and that ordinary people participate in this hierarchy by accepting the abstraction of money as proof of superiority. Fitzgerald’s distinction between the rich and everyone else helps expose the consequences of that belief: the wealthy are not presented as natural friends or representatives of the majority, but as a ruling group whose privilege has produced estrangement. Once the illusion of money’s power is rejected, the book imagines the rich stripped of the magnificence that wealth projects onto them.