United States | News & Politics

I grew up around the wealthy. They are all insane, the wealthier they are the crazier they get.

I believe that the correlation has to do with a sort of mental miscalibration. I think that the human brain uses feedback from its community to calibrate it's judgment of what's real and what's not and what's right and what's wrong. The rich don't get honest feedback from their community. The people they spend the most time with either work for them or want something from them, so no one is honest to their faces. Not really. They say crazy shit and get feedback that it's wisdom, from people who fully know that it's crazy. They act in inappropriate ways and everyone behaves like it's fine. They lose the ability to judge their own behavior, beliefs and self-awareness, and because they're constantly treated like the smartest person in the room, they start to believe that they are, even if they know consciously that they're not.

Meanwhile, their peer group is undergoing the same thing, so they are all insane too. My experience is that they mostly don't actually like each other that much, because another known fact about the human brain is that it's able to detect delusions in others, but not itself. The rich are fully aware that the other wealthy people around them are delusional, and on top of that that many of those delusional people are in competition with each other. And yet they will socialize with each other and act like everything is hunky-dory and friendly (just like the drama drama drama in every other community). I've watched wealthy people, more than once, socialize with other wealthy people and just be totally cool and friendly, only to just spew the most venomous crap as soon as the other person is gone. Also, there's a pecking order. The dude who's worth $20 million usually want something from the guy who's worth $120 million, and that guy usually wants something from the lady who's sitting on $3.2 billion. So it's not like they can even get honest (but crazy) feedback from each other.

If it sounds like "hey, that would make people paranoid and isolated" it DOES! Being wealthy is super toxic for the mental health of the wealthy person, we are living in the consequences.

Honestly, most of his turn to the far right had felt like he's largely LARPing and sort of just trying it out (not that it doesn't have real consequences, of course, but it's felt more like someone trying to join a clique than a serious ideological conviction).

I don't know how to describe why but it has a certain trying-out-a-new-hobby approach to it. Maybe it's the way he goes to the very extreme, immediately. His endorsement of the Alternative for Germany party felt like pushing boundaries or, "Let me see how far I can get (in terms of influencing things, like he did with America)." His Nazi salute felt like he'd been rehearsing it because he thought it'd look so cool or he wanted to try it out for the first time (again, to test boundaries).

I could be wrong but it's all felt…unserious (in terms of his intentions; definitely not the consequences).