Political Memes

There's a growing body of research from behavioral neuroscience which indicate that wealth, power, and privilege have a deleterious effect on the brain. People with high-socioeconomic status often:

• Have reduced empathy and compassion.
• Have a diminished ability to see from someone else's perspective.
• Have low impulse control.
• Have an extreme sense of entitlement.
• Have a hoarding disorder.
• Have a dangerously high tolerance for risk.

When you don't need to cooperate with other people to survive, they become irrelevant to you. When you're in charge, you can behave very badly and people will still be polite and respectful toward you. Instead of reciprocity, it's a formalized double standard. When you have status, you're given excessive credibility, and rarely hear the very ordinary push-back from others most of us are accustomed to, instead you receive flattery and praise and your ideas are taken seriously by default.

Humans have a strong need for egalitarianism; without it our brains malfunction and turn us into the worst versions of ourselves.

Some sources:

Hubris syndrome: An acquired personality disorder? A study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the last 100 years

(Abstract) or (Full Text)

Does power corrupt? An fMRI study on the effect of power and social value orientation on inequity aversion.

(Abstract) or (PDF Full Text)

Social Class and the Motivational Relevance of Other Human Beings: Evidence From Visual Attention

(Abstract) or (PDF Full Text)

The Psychology of Entrenched Privilege: High Socioeconomic Status Individuals From Affluent Backgrounds Are Uniquely High in Entitlement

(Abstract) or (PDF Full Text)

Hoarding Disorder: It's More Than Just an Obsession - Implications for Financial Therapists and Planners

(Abstract) or (PDF Full Text)

On the evolution of hoarding, risk-taking, and wealth distribution in nonhuman and human populations

(Abstract) or (Full Text)

Aren't successful according to capitalistic ideals. People with empathy are often successful by better measures

There's a big difference between academically knowing how a person feels--in a disconnected way--and actually being able to relate to that feeling as if you were experiencing it yourself.

Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings and emotions of another person.

You're right that it's trivial to find examples of bad people who understand the emotions and feelings of others, but it's a lot harder to be a bad person when you can share those emotions and feelings yourself.

You aren't arguably human if you have no empathy.

Perfectly said. My ex was a legit psychopath and they are not like us.

We were adopting a cat. On the form it says "reasons you would get rid of the cat" shit you not this dude starts writing biting, clawing, yelling like genuinely asnwering what he would do.

Had to stop him and say but not say "act like a human".

Tolerance of intolerance is contradictory.

There is no defense for intolerance.

Even those leaders are just avatars of the shared humanity they lead and represent, they persist only as a creation of a shared culture and by permission of those people whether or everyone involved is cognizant of the fact.

The masses create everything, even those leaders because nothing exists in a vacuum

I love the African philosophy of ubuntu: 'I am who I am, because of who we all are'

It’s a lot of people

It's all powerful people. Many studies show that social power affects the brain, suppressing empathy centers.

As you get more wealth, status or fame, your brain becomes less capable of empathy and closer to the brain of a psychopath.

As long as we have hierarchies, we will be ruled by villains.

I remember talking to a coworker at a tech startup once. He was leaving to go work for some like military intelligence spy company. I was like, "But what if they have you work on something fucked up, like spying on innocent people, or sending drones to kill people?" He was like, big shrug, the pay is good.

Some people just don't care about other people. He was nice to people he knew, when it didn't really cost him anything.

Our society isn't really set up to discourage that kind of worldview. That kind of selfish person typically thrives.