The billionaires thought they were so smart.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Historically narcissistic injury is intricately bound to capitalism and consumerism

Very little studied. Real American advertising began post-WWI. Didn't a few fear the effect on the public? (I never took the history of psychology, regrettably). Seems to me I recall there were warnings in the 1920s, but psychology rumbled on through psychoanalysis, behaviorism, cognition, humanism. Narcissistic abuse, in my view, was an underlying element of control that survived them all and lives today, in public, in private, in families, in consumerism, in health care. It helps support hierarchical, pyramidal social and financial structures. It's like we can't escape.