Would anyone be surprised by this observation? Wealth and privilege mess up your head.

In 2011, a Berkeley grad student named Paul Piff conducted an experiment that has since become famous in the world of social psychology. Over the course of several weekends, Piff and his research team crouched behind bushes at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway in Berkeley, California. When a vehicle passed, they would catalog it — “five” for a brand-new BMW, for instance; “one” for a beat-up Honda. Then the researchers would observe the behavior of the car’s driver.

For centuries, humans have studied and tried to understand our own hierarchies — how and why we arrange ourselves into tribes and nations and by what means certain groups and individuals rise to the top. But Piff had realized that we had little data on how wealth — a prime marker of power in our current times — affects the psychology of those who hold it. “In the U.S., we spend a lot of time pathologizing poverty and valorizing aspects of the rich,” he tells me. “I was really interested in the flip side of poverty: If poverty has these effects, then wealth must also, and let’s start to try to uncover what those are. There must be some pathologies there too, right?”

What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.

At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver’s perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data.

When someone from the research team posed as a pedestrian heading into the crosswalk, almost half of the grade-five cars failed to stop, as if they didn’t even see the person.

I’ve been doing a sloppy, half-assed version of this experiment for a while now — Morris only has two traffic lights on the main street, but all of the corners have crosswalks, and by law cars are expected to stop for pedestrians standing there. They don’t. I’ll step out into the street, not far enough that I’m in danger but far enough that drivers will have to notice my intent to cross, and then I count how many cars zip by before someone stops. Usually it’s not too many, but the ones who pretend I don’t exist are usually driving a monstrous huge shiny pickup truck, of the sort that MAGA like to buy to pretend they’re tough working class guys.

Even better is the corner with a traffic light, and a pedestrian signal to tell you when to cross. When I get the message to cross Atlantic avenue, the oncoming traffic gets a yellow light for a left turn. Many times I’ve started my legal crossing only to have someone in a big SUV decide to rush to make their left and turn right into me. A few times those drivers have been so annoyingly privileged that they honk at me to get out of their way.

You know this kind of behavior is going to have consequences…no, I take that back: it already has terrible consequences. Look at the people at the top of our government — all of them sociopaths. Not a single one I would object to seeing mowed down on main street by an oblivious Ford Super Duty F-450 driver.

…wealth-­related disengagement seems to not be so great for a species for which pro-social cooperation is programmed into our hunter-gatherer DNA. Clay Cockrell, a psychotherapist who caters to ultra-high-net-worth individuals, tells me he thinks of great wealth as subtractive: It doesn’t really add to one’s happiness, but it does take away struggles that can make someone unhappy. Yet it’s subtractive in a different sense, too — contributing to isolation, paranoia, grandiosity, and risk-taking behavior, as well as a pronounced lack of empathy. “As your wealth increases, your empathy decreases. Your ability to relate to other people who are not like you decreases.… It can be very toxic.”

Then in the middle of this article they bring up Darwin, only not Darwin, the bastardized version of evolution promoted by Herbert Spencer. Spencer is high on my long list of 19th century deplorables who invented various rationalizations for treating human beings horribly, justifying Gilded Age excesses and encouraging colonialism and various other kinds of exploitation.

Some of these men found such a justification in social Darwinism and the ideas of Herbert Spencer, a 19th-century psychologist and anthropologist who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” not to explain biological evolution but rather to legitimize social hierarchies: Rich and powerful people are rich and powerful because they have innate traits that make them superior. Never mind the effects of systemic oppression (Spencer was an unapologetic racist) or the fact that, in a functioning democracy, no billionaire is entirely “self-made” (where would Bezos be without taxpayers paving the roads his Amazon trucks clog?) — historians today see a direct line from the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age to DOGE. “[With] tech leadership nowadays, I think the arguments are a little different: They don’t make explicit appeals to survival of the fittest,” says Luke Winslow, author of Oligarchy in America. “But you get phrases like ‘make the world a better place’ and ‘move fast and break things.’ Well, that’s very Darwinian, because if you break things, if you have disruption, catastrophe, the hope is that the strong will survive. You don’t have this crutch of a government allowing the losers and the weaklings to survive; you’ll weed them out. And this idea is really big in Silicon Valley, this justification of the concentration of wealth and power based on this idea that they deserve it. How do you know they deserved it? Well, geez, look at how rich Elon Musk is.”

They aren’t worthy. They’re opportunistic parasites who have latched on to the capitalist system and are taking advantage of its weaknesses. They’re spoiled twits living in a fantasy land that panders to their delusion that they are the best, the smartest, the greatest people who deserve billions of dollars in their pockets, and that the little people are all there to serve them.

There is no clearer example of their stupid ideas than the tech broligarchy’s dream of colonizing Mars, which is not going to happen.

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

Then again, you don’t have to do a cursory examination of the facts of Mars if you believe tech is close to inventing a machine that can change the physical properties of the universe. In 2023, billionaire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman conceded that climate change was a huge problem, but brushed off its hugeness with the contention that super intelligent AI would soon be able to tell us how to make a lot of clean-energy facilities, how to amp up carbon capture, and how to do both of those things quickly and at scale. “What he said was, ‘A good way to solve global warming is to build a kind of machine without a clear definition that no one knows how to build, and then ask it for three wishes,’ ” Becker says with a sigh.

Sam Altman is notorious for his vapid echoing of the preconceptions of whoever he is talking to at the time. It would restore my faith in humanity a tiny bit if he were openly grifting, lying to get his next bolus of VC money, than that he actually believes in that nonsense about AI. I’m afraid I’m leaning more and more to the idea that these people are simply moronically stupid. And massively greedy and selfish.

The next edition of the DSM is going to have to include a long section on Billionaire Brain, the pathology of people given near unlimited access to everything they can dream of. It’s an ugly disease and it seems to be spreading to people who aren’t billionaires, but just dream of becoming billionaires.