The Idolatry of Innovators

One thing I keep thinking about is the idolatry of innovators (I’ve heard this term before but it recently came back to me through Scott Galloway on a episode of PIVOT). Not innovation itself, which is obviously important, but the weird cultural thing where we’ve started treating innovators like they’re automatically philosophers, moral leaders, historians, futurists, all at once. Somewhere along the way success stopped meaning “this person built something effective” and started meaning “this person understands reality better than everyone else.”

You can see it everywhere in tech culture. Founders aren’t really talked about like businesspeople anymore. They get discussed like prophets or world-historical figures. Product launches have this almost religious energy around them. Every new app is supposedly “changing humanity” or “reinventing connection” or whatever. And people absorb that language without even noticing it. Wealth gets mistaken for wisdom. Confidence gets mistaken for truth. Fast movement gets mistaken for intelligence.

The thing that bothers me most is how much of society starts orienting itself around this idea that disruption is inherently noble. Like if you break an old system you must therefore be insightful or morally ahead of everyone else. Meanwhile the people actually holding society together usually aren’t innovators at all. Teachers, nurses, social workers, maintenance workers, parents, caregivers, craftsmen, community organizers. People whose contribution is consistency instead of disruption. None of that scales exponentially so culturally it starts feeling invisible.

But honestly, the critique itself can become its own kind of performance if you’re not careful. “The idolatry of innovators” sounds persuasive because it compresses a lot of recognizable patterns into one clean narrative. You can immediately think of examples. TED Talks, founder worship, venture capital mythology, keynote stages, billionaire podcasts, all of it. The framework feels true almost instantly.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fully proven though.

There’s a risk that the whole argument stays at the level of synthesis instead of evidence. Like, once you adopt the frame, everything starts confirming it automatically. Admiration becomes “worship.” Influence becomes “cultural domination.” Excitement becomes “ideology.” At that point the critique can turn into the exact thing it’s accusing others of doing: taking a compelling narrative and treating it as self-evident because it sounds smart and emotionally resonant.

And honestly I think that’s what makes the whole thing interesting. The critique is probably directionally right. There issomething quasi-religious about the way modern culture talks about innovation and founders. But the argument is strongest when it admits its own limits instead of pretending it’s airtight sociology. Otherwise it risks becoming another myth explaining all other myths.

The circle of circles.