If your life expectancy is 80 and you are 60 then nothing past 20 years matters. If you are wealthy enough to be shielded from your actions then nothing matters at all.

Yeah but like. Why would you care about what happens in your own life, you know? You only have 20 years left, what's the point in life? The self exists beyond just the id, beyond the animal instinct, is what I'm saying.

My point is that broadly, you can kind of assume hedonism as the default, I suppose, but I'm not sure that's really true. Even so, after a certain point of economic security and ability to spend money, you've fulfilled and then completely burnt out all pure hedonistic desires. You're going to start inventing things that you want, or, more realistically, you're going to start consuming other stuff, that tells you what it is that you "really" want, and you're going to start living by just sort of being this shitty consumer of other people's virulent memes that are marketed at you. You see this all the time with "upper middle class" techbros, accountants, managers. The same is true of the people at the very top, they just tend to have values that are shaped more by the political climate of 20 or 30 years ago because that's generally how long it's taken them to worm into their positions.

So once you move past hedonism (if we ever even had that in the first place, for people, which I generally find not to be the case), you kind of find yourself in a vacuum as to what your meaning is, what the point of everything is, and that's when it starts getting filled by actual frameworks of how reality is. This is why rich people unironically believe that poor people just spend their money irresponsibly. It's because power is magnetic to the corruptible, you know, there's a selection bias for that strain of thought as you move up the ladder, but it's also that power corrupts, people in those positions of power get that strain of thought marketed to them much more stringently.

It is very rare that you find the total encompassing sociopath that's only capable of seeing everything from a materialistic egocentric perspective, where they only live 20 years, so they might as well do everything they can get away with and die on a big pile of money that has ceased to mean anything for them. That's a caricature of the ruling class, it's a caricature of humanity. People are capable of longer term thinking than that, and of much more complicated thoughts, and so there are much more complicated systems of propaganda and incentive structures that are set up in order to manage people's ability to rationalize the world.