Are egoists getting wealthy, or does wealth make you egoistic?
This seems to be some sort of conundrum, but in fact it is like we all thought for millenia: money makes you immoral. Every religion has to say something about this topic, and what they say is: greed is bad.
But it is not only the greed, just having money seems to make you less moral. Rich people cheat more often. And while that could mean that cheating people just makes you richer than not-cheating people, this cannot be said in other cases.
Not only do rich people give less often than poor people, people in expensive cars often don’t stop at pedestrian crossings, while the cheapest car drivers always do.
Maybe this is some sort of opportunity cost, neoliberals could ask. The rich people lose more money by waiting that 20 seconds?
No. Rich people take more free sweets. Not much money to gain here, right? And it shows in games, too.
Especially interesting is for example a rigged monopoly. People who randomly get favorable conditions compared to the rest of the players end up like this:
But the privileged players weren’t graceful at all, instead, they routinely bragged about their wealth and became fairly insufferable throughout the game. Worse than that – after the game when they were asked why they think they won, most of them spoke of their brilliant tactics, their finesse at the game of monopoly and their daring moves.
Sounds familiar? That is the “I earned it all with my hard work, they can do the same” and “if you give money to poor people, they just stop working” type of person at the start of the metamorphosis.
Why did just came an old man with orange hair into my mind? Whatever…
This fact, shown in countless studies, is a huge problem for politics, but also for the society itself. So far all tested remedies for this have failed. Maybe we as a species are just doomed?
