The Empty Vault

 Imagine planning a heist at a well-protected bank. They're guards and fences and gates and special dogs. Inside it's a never-ending series of doors that you need keys to get through and as you pass the hallway gets smaller and the next door gets smaller until you're practically crawling on the ground. And you inch worm yourself to the last door and say the magic password to the guard who hands you the key. You open it and find...nothing. 

Now imagine you're an emerging theatre artist.

 You spent your whole life planning to 'break' into theatre, assuming the exclusivity of upper echelon theatre was a sign of quality and taste. Until one day you discover that all the guards and gates were protecting...the idea of exclusivity itself. There's nothing in the vault but a certificate that says 'congrats, you finally made it.' You look around and you want to scream. And you feel ashamed and ripped off. Then you discover there's a backdoor you could've just gone through the whole time. So you storm out of the theatre only to find adoring fans who heard that you made it inside. These awestruck, starved people desperate for hope ask you 'what's inside?' So you...lie. You tell them it's the most extravagant wonderful thing. You lie to save face. You lie to give them hope. You lie to maintain the belief that all that pain was worth it. But mostly you lie because someone lied to you. When you were outside begging, an old-timer came outside and the only thing he could trade on was status and in order to maintain that he had to buy into the lie of the empty vault. So he told you there was treasure and riches and glory inside. You just have to get through a few doors. He even wrote a book on how to break into theatre...like him. You bought it and gobbled it up and planned. 

Now that you've been on the inside and lost the best years of your life, the only thing you have is status. So you trade on that and promote the riches of the empty vault. 

The allegory could be theatre, the arts, socialites, or the finer circles of society. It's an empty vault. The velvet rope and red carpet exist for the appearance of status. The thing you seek is not there. Exclusivity rooted in bitterness leads to cruelty. It's what always happens in this part of the story. The old-timer has promoted the lie because it's all he has, and he hates it. He hates the adoring followers for being so stupid. He hates that he was once so stupid. And so he goes back to the bank...and builds another wall around it. He etches his name on the wall, adding another phalanx of security. He makes his wall extra high and filled with the sharpest wires. He wants to see people cut on his wires. He wants to see people die on his wires. He wants blood and sacrifice and pain to be experienced by all those who try to pass because of his curdled rage.