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Bill Gates is a horrible person.
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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I read about that, yeah. All hail Mammon; money above all. Sometimes I think wealth changes something in a person's brain, like psychologically or neurologically. It's as if they get so detached from reality that they lose all empathy and sense of community. I've heard the term 'affluenza' used as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense as a legitimate thing.
It takes a certain kind of personality to even become a billionaire. You don't become a billionaire by being kind and ethical
I think there's research to that effect.
Well, it would make sense. Rich people have always creeped me out, just instinctively.
I'm sure the threshold varies, but I would back research that attempts to pinpoint or at least narrow down what amount of wealth starts to change your brain chemistry for the worse.
Its any position of power in my experience. People get power, justifying in their mind that they and people like them should be in power. Even games about being in charge run into that problem. Maintaining power becomes a major part of the game at some part.
That's a good point, as illustrated by things like the Stanford Prison Experiment.
That experiment was massively flawed to the point of uselessness.
That's exactly what a rich and powerful squirrel would say.
Also the issue of you need to be a deranged psychopath to get wealthy in the first place.
There’s plenty of wealthy people who aren’t psychopaths, but they are all broken in some way. Usually it’s because capitalism has completely alienated them from our natural communal instincts and taught them that the individual is god. Many are capable of empathy, they just choose to do the selfish thing because they’ve been told their entire lives that “taking care of number one” is a virtue.
Of course, the impacts of their behavior are the same as if they were psychopaths, so this isn’t me excusing them. But it’s important to know what capitalism does to people and how it requires us to ignore our natural instincts, because the wealthy (the ones capable of empathy, anyways) are the same as the rest of us, only luckier.
as someone who recently escaped the labor trap (that is what capitalists call it...wages are suppressed for a reason...), the shift from needing to work and not is...profound.
no wonder so many rich cunts are batshit psychopaths, nobody born into $ can ever truly know this feeling of relief (and the resulting stress, just from your brain leaving "survival mode"...hierarchy of needs stuff, then realizing just how fucked everything is, how powerless you still are even as new-rich to change anything...)