You cannot buy yourself out of the matrix

Modern wealth does not buy sovereignty

Heritage Standard is a paid publication for men who inherited a civilisation but not the instruction manual. Every week: a free essay naming what was lost, and a paid essay showing what to do about it.

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This week I watched a video of Goatis about influencer Samuel Onuha. It was very entertaining, but not the first time I saw this guy. Since the Onuha brothers are well-known in the online entrepreneur space.

The guy, Samuel Onuha, has Nigerian, and a Dutch mother. He grew up in The Netherlands, yet they divorced when he was 5. And dropped out at 18 years old.

He built a Shopify store from his bedroom, and by 25 had a reported net worth of $50 million, a Palm Jumeirah mansion, and a Rolls-Royce Cullinan worth $600,000. He documented all of it on Instagram for 600,000 followers.

Sounds like quite a standard rags to riches story, and while I highly doubt the net worth, he definitely has more numbers in his bank account than others.

This essay is about the lie at the center of modern wealth: that money buys sovereignty. It buys a more expensive version of the same captivity. The skybox and the couch are the same chair.

Recently he (Samuel) posted a video of describing a €1.5 million day. Boxing tickets at €4,000 per seat. Hotel suites, bottle service and celebrities.

When I watched it I felt one thing: recognition.

It was wat Juvenal wrote it in 100 AD: the panem et circenses, bread and circuses. The formula Roman satirists used to describe how emperors kept a population pacified: fed, entertained, and fundamentally captive. This is what Goatis talks about in his video as well.

Onuha paid €4,000 for a ringside seat. The man watching on his phone saw the same and paid nothing. Eventhough Onuha has a X million dollar net worth, het still lives the same as a peasant, just a bit more premium.

What sovereignty actually looks like

Before the enclosures, an English peasant in 1500 had something Samuel Onuha does not: genuine physical sovereignty over his subsistence. In that sense a peasant even had more freedom than Onuha has.

He had common rights: jus compascui, the right to graze animals on shared land. Jus piscendi, the right to fish. Jus venandi in certain forests, the right to hunt.

These were not lordly gifts, but ancient customary rights, embedded in English common law before Magna Carta. And many countries in Europe had similar systems.

A man who could graze two cows, fish the river, gather wood, and hunt rabbit on common land was not dependent on the cash economy for survival. He could, in a meaningful sense, and tell his employer to go to hell.

Between 1604 and 1760, Parliament passed over 5,200 Enclosure Acts. Common land was privatised, forests were fenced, and fishing rights passed to landed gentry.

The peasant who had grazed his animals on the common since his grandfather’s time suddenly became a trespasser. By 1850, over 6.8 million acres of English common land had transferred to private hands.

Wage an factory work replaced it. We became dependent on the cash economy for every calorie.

The man who had been functionally free: able to feed, clothe, and heat himself from land he had customary right to use became a worker: A consumer, and spectator of his own existence.

To me this is the original sin of modern civilisation. And nobody in a Dubai skybox is discussing it.

The Roman parallel is very precise. Juvenal was not describing mere entertainment in his Satires, but the mechanism by which Roman plebs: once landholding citizens with genuine political and economic power, were pacified after that power was stripped.

The grain dole (annona) replaced their farm. And the games (ludi) replaced genuine contest. The citizen became a consumer. A man who once voted, farmed, and fought became a spectator eating subsidised bread while professionals performed violence on his behalf.

And the games themselves deserve examination too. The Roman munus: the gladiatorial contest was not entertainment originally.

It was a funeral rite, first recorded in 264 BC, offered by Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva at his father’s funeral. Two pairs of slaves fought to the death to honor the dead. The blood fed the spirit of the deceased. It was done as a ritual, not a spectacle.

But by the time of Augustus, it had become the Colosseum with 50,000 seats, professional fighters, scheduled seasons, and imperial sponsorship.

It had become circus. And the Roman citizen, once a farmer-soldier acquainted with real physical struggle, sat eating emperor-provided bread while watching men he would never meet perform combat he would never experience.

Samuel Onuha’s €4,000 ringside seat is nothing else than the front row of the Colosseum.

The Modern Version

Modern sport continues what Rome started.

Whether it is boxing, football, or basketball. All are simulations of genuine physical contest, stripped of real stakes and packaged for consumption. A man who hunts does not need to watch hunting. A man who fights does not need to pay for the privilege of watching others fight. Spectator sport exists because the population has been removed from genuine physical contest and requires a managed substitute.

The numbers confirm it. The global sports industry was worth $512 billion in 2023. The Premier League alone generated £6.8 billion in the 2022–23 season. Ajax’s annual revenue runs approximately €180 million. These are not athletic institutions, but entertainment businesses that use athletic performance as content. The players are their employees, the fans are consumers. And the guy in the €4,000 front row seat is a higher-margin peasant than the man on the backseat.

What Onuha purchased is not access to something real, but proximity to a performance.

The gladiator bleeds, the emperor’s guest applaud. But the distance between them: social, experiential, existential, is absolute, regardless of how close the seat sits to the ring.

This is what modern wealth actually buys. It is not sovereignty, but better proximity to spectacle. A hotel suite instead of the hostel. A skybox instead of the standing section.

A private jet instead of economy class. The activities are always identical: flying somewhere to watch something, eating food someone else prepared, sleeping in a room you do nit own, returning home to a screen.

The cash economy has tiered the experience. Onuha bought the premium tier, but is still inside the ‘matrix’.

What money cannot buy

Onuha’s wealth is, by his own accounting, largely imaginary. It is Shopify revenue, Dropshipping margins, Instagram influence monetised through a mentorship program called Millionaire Commerce. A program where he sells the promise of replication.

His asset base is Dubai properties, a clothing brand, and social following. None of this produces food or warmth. And none of it can sustain him 30 days if the cash economy stopped functioning.

A medieval peasant in 1450 had a more durable existence. He knew which mushrooms grew in which part of the forest in October. He knew the fish runs on his river. He knew how to slaughter a pig in November and cure it for winter: a practice so universal it gave us the word carnival, from carne vale, farewell to meat before Lent’s fast.

He was embedded in a specific place, in specific seasons, with knowledge that was genuinely his and could not be erased by a market correction.

His knowledge is mostly gone, and is not reformed, digitised, or improved upon. The enclosures took the land. The industrial revolution took the craft. And the supermarket erased the last remnant of genuine subsistence. Farmers are completely dependent upon subsidies now.

Wages replaced it, and wages require an employer, and an employer requires that you show up, perform, and consume on schedule.

Onuha shows up on Instagram, performs wealth, and consumes at the premium tier. He is, in every meaningful sense, a successful serf. One whose feudal obligation runs not to a lord but to an algorithm, an audience, and a cash economy he cannot exit any more than the man watching his videos hoping to replicate him.

His €1.5 million day proves it. A genuinely free man is one with land, animals, and the knowledge to feed himself from what the earth produces. He has no need for a €4,000 ringside seat. He had a real contest in his life, and does not need to buy proximity to someone else’s.

What should have been understood

The Onuha story is not necessarily a failure of taste. It is not that he is nouveau riche, lacks refinement, or spends on the wrong things. These critiques miss the point, and most people who make such accusations would spend the same money more quietly on identically stupid activities.

The critique is rather structural. The entire framework within which his wealth operates is a closed system. You can move up the tiers: from coach to business class, standing section to skybox, hostel to Burj Al Arab, but you cannot exit through wealth alone. Onuha has optimised his position within modern slavery. But that is not freedom. It is successful captivity.

Juvenal grasped this in 100 AD. The peasants displaced by the Enclosure Acts grasped it viscerally as their commons were fenced and customary rights extinguished by Parliamentary decree. What they lost was not sentiment, but their sovereignty. Which was their ability to subsist outside the cash economy, the ability to say no.

That ability does not cost €1.5 million. It cannot be purchased within the current system at any price. It requires land, knowledge, and the willingness to live close to the ground. You cannot order that from a Shopify store, nor be taught in a mentorship program, and will not fit in a skybox.

The ringside seat might be very close to the ring, but is still just a seat.

—Robbert

Further reading:

• Juvenal, Satires (c. 100 AD)

• E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)

• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)

• Robert Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (1992)

• Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

• Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (1979)