When Everything Is Free

Noah Hawley’s recent essay in The Atlantic, “What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat,” is not finally about luxury. Private jets, elite guests, curated conversation, and expensive weather are part of the tableau, but they are not the burden of the piece. Hawley is after something deeper and more unsettling: what happens to the human soul when consequence begins to disappear.

His most memorable line is also his thesis: for the richest men on earth, “everything is free and nothing matters.” That sentence deserves to be heard not only as cultural criticism but as theological diagnosis.

The biblical tradition has older language for the condition Hawley describes. It calls it having “no fear of God.”

That phrase is easily misunderstood. In modern ears, “fear of God” can sound like terror, coercion, or religious manipulation. But in Scripture the fear of the Lord is usually something more like reverence, humility, and answerability. It is the knowledge that one is not ultimate. It is the recognition that one’s life is lived before a reality higher than one’s own will. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” because wisdom begins when self-sovereignty ends.

To have no fear of God, then, is not merely to lack religious belief. It is to live as though one were beyond accountability.

That is the atmosphere Hawley describes. The issue is not simply that some people possess staggering amounts of wealth. The world has always had rich men. The issue is that wealth at this scale can become metaphysical. It can create the illusion of immunity. When losses do not wound, when failures do not diminish, when ordinary constraints can be bought away, the world ceases to function as a teacher. Other people’s claims grow easier to evade. Empathy begins to look optional. The neighbor becomes less a reality to be honored than an inconvenience to be managed.

One brief scene in Hawley’s essay captures this with almost parabolic force. He tells Bezos that his wife has broken her wrist during the retreat. It is an ordinary human moment, the sort of exchange in which one person’s vulnerability might call forth another’s concern. Instead, Bezos recoils and is quickly whisked away by an aide. Hawley does not overplay the scene, but it lingers. The issue is not simply poor manners. It is a thinning out of responsiveness itself.

The Bible knows this thinning. Pharaoh knows it. The unjust judge knows it. The rich fool knows it. In each case, the problem is not intelligence or achievement. It is the practical conviction that one need not answer for how one lives or whom one harms. Power ceases to experience itself as accountable.

This is why Hawley’s essay feels spiritually charged. It is not merely reporting on a strange weekend among the elite. It is showing what happens when human beings begin to believe that they can control not only events, but meaning itself. They can stage the setting, gather the audience, manage the optics, and escape contradiction. They begin to act as though they can control the narrative.

But the biblical witness insists otherwise. God controls the narrative. That is not to say that history is scripted in some simple way, nor that every injustice is immediately corrected. It is to say that the powerful do not get the last word about themselves. Wealth does not get the last word. Image does not get the last word. The truth about a life is not finally told by valuation, influence, or spectacle, but by judgment.

That is why the loss of the fear of God is so dangerous. Once the self becomes its own highest court, there is nowhere left from which truth may come as interruption. If one is the judge, God is not. And where there is no tribunal beyond the self, there is also no reason to repent, no reason to listen, no reason to tremble before the dignity of another.

A culture formed by such habits should not be surprised when empathy comes under attack. It is difficult to sustain fellow feeling once one has grown accustomed to impunity. To acknowledge another person’s suffering is already to admit that one is answerable to a reality not of one’s own making. That is precisely what the fear of God preserves.

The article’s importance, then, lies not in exposing the eccentricities of the ultra-rich. It lies in naming a condition toward which modern power is always tempted. We all, in lesser ways, want immunity. We all, in lesser ways, want to control the story told about us. Extreme wealth simply magnifies an ordinary human temptation until it becomes socially consequential.

The Christian response is not envy. It is warning. A life beyond accountability may look like freedom, but it is better understood as deformation. Human beings become wise not by escaping consequence, but by learning to live truthfully within it—before God, before neighbor, and before the limits of creaturely existence.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom because it is the end of the lie that we are gods. Hawley’s essay is powerful because it shows what happens when that lie becomes plausible. Where everything is free, nothing matters. And where nothing matters, wisdom is already vanishing.