Tonight, I am actually going to do a blog entry on an actual subject! Amazing.

The subject is this video :

Watch the whole thing, it’s really quite astounding how clear the science is on this subject.

And what subject is that? This one.

I swear, I made the video below before I ever saw the one above.

But the thesis remains the same. Wealth is power. Power corrupts. When people gain wealth they lose morals. They become worse people on any meaningful scale. They no longer care about the consequences of their actions on others.

Wealth turns people evil. It cannot be denied.

Now proving scientifically that people in expensive cars drive like total assholes is merely an exercise in proving what everybody already knows. I am sure everybody has had an opportunity to observe this effect for themselves, either on the road as a fellow driver or, as in my case, as a pedestrian keen on crossing the road without getting run over.

I can’t say for sure that every car that has ever nearly clipped me when I was crossing at a crosswalk was expensive (hard to take note of such things when you’re lunging for a lamp-post to climb) but I can definitely say that almost every time I see someone parked like they got paid by the number of parking spaces they took up, it’s been an expensive car.

Usually a BMW. Well, don’t you know, all truly great people love BMWs.

After all, they were Hitler’s fave.

And well, the fact that rich people are willing to literally take candy from children is no surprise to me, because their wealth makes them act like greedy little children themselves. Everything is always for me and I have the right to do whatever I want and anyone who says different is MEAN.

Myself, diabetes or no, if I had been told not to take any of the candy because it’s meant for children, I would not have taken any damned candy. And it’s not that I would not have wanted to take some. Those look like one of my favorite kinds of mint, and I love mint.

And then there’s lying about your dice rolls for a chance to win $50. No surprise, the top earners cheated four times as much as the people on the bottom. The people on the top live in fantasy worlds where everything around them is theirs and all the people they interact with are employees and everything is about what the wealthy person wants.

This creates an oral-retentive personality, just like we all have when we are infants and our parents cater to our every need and all we need to do to solve any problem is cry. The world revolves around us and our needs and everyone else is evaluated solely on their usefulness.

This is a pre-ethical state of mind, almost purely solipsistic (Mommy might also be a person…. maybe… when she’s a good mommy), and the concepts of self-restraint, empathy, and patience are completely foreign to it. If it is unhappy for even a second, it demands immediate gratification.

Doesn’t that sound like how rich people act? Yelling at servants for being ten seconds late with their coffee, brimming with righteous rage at the thought of being asked to share or wait their turn, absolutely convinced that the world is for them and everyone else is just along for the ride.

But the real kicker in the video for me is the Monopoly game. There can be no clearer clinical result than that. People who only got what they got in terms of fake wealth because they won a coin toss nevertheless acted exactly as if they were winning due to some inherit merit of their own.

This makes it clear that it is not just that evil people are better at getting money. The money actually makes people worse.

Now why is this? Like I said in my video, I think it has to do with the status instincts we human beings have as members of a hierarchical species.

These instincts are, for most of us, most of the time, dulled by modern middle class society. When everyone you deal with is in roughly the same income bracket as you, the differences do not cause strong differences in behaviour.

A middle class mother might grumble about the family next door having nicer furniture, but odds are, in a social gathering, they would act more or less the same.

It takes large degrees of difference in status to make these instincts very clear. The classic “workers versus management” divide is a perfect example. Why does management treat the workers so poorly? Because they no longer identify with them but with their new peer group, other managers, and view anyone below them as merely means to their own ends.

Just like a spoiled baby.

In this, ironically, we are exhibiting more primitive behaviour than the most primitive hunter-gatherer societies. Humans, in the state of nature, band together, are bonded by shared dangers, and form a tight knit but very shallow hierarchy where all the mean are equal as hunters and all the women are equal as gatherers. There is only one level above them, and that consists of the chieftain, who provides the necessary executive function, and possibly a shaman, who deals with spiritual matters.

However, if we go back further to our primate ancestors like the chimpanzee, because the executive function is relatively unimportant and complex coordinated action is not necessary, the leader tend to be a bully and a tyrant who takes all the best things for himself and then doles them out to his cronies in order to maintain his power structure.

Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? It’s exactly how corrupt power always acts. Grab power, take everything you want, reward your friends, and brutally dominate everyone else while also resenting the fact that you have to give those beneath you anything at all.

Why, that’s almost like the most evil thing in the world : sharing. To the oral retentive mind, all sharing means is “I have less now!”. And it doesn’t matter if what they have, they got because someone else shared with them.

Belief in reciprocity require belief in the validity of others, after all.

So it’s nice to see that my theories are backed up by science.

I should write a book called “The Pathology Of Wealth”.