Something that a friend pointed out to me as a possible factor is the religious backdrop of US Christianity. I’ve forgotten the specific phrase (it was something like “prosperity Christianity”), but basically the idea that good fortune (from hard work) is vindication of God in this life. It’s pretty deeply tied to the Protestant work ethic, which is pretty pervasive in US culture, even in ostensibly secular institutions.
The original idea was more or less “as well as having faith, you should also work very hard, because that’s part of your duty. Then you will be blessed and will have good fortune”. However, that has been increasingly distorted and subject to a logical fallacy that means people get it backwards. For instance, let’s say we took this doctrine to be an absolute fact: that if you diligently do good work, then you will be blessed, and have good fortune. I.e
if good work, then blessed
If blessed, then good fortune
∴ If good work, then good fortune
However, under this doctrine, people often commit the fallacy of “affirming the consequent”. For instance, if the only lamp in a room breaks, then the room will be dark. However, the room being dark doesn’t necessarily mean that the lamp is broken (it could be off, or be stolen, or covered). So what people do is they go “I am wealthy. People who are blessed have good fortune, and I have good fortune, so therefore I must be blessed”. This logic has been used to justify all sorts of awful, awful crimes against humanity. For instance, enslaved people must be bad people because they clearly do not have good fortune. But the person who owns those slaves surely must be blessed, because he has good fortune.
This way of thinking is so deeply embedded into US culture that even devout atheists end up absorbing a lot of this logic. This is only one small part of the puzzle as to why billionaires are so dumb, but applying this lens really helped me to understand the self-validation cycle that a lot of billionaires and powerful people get into.
The way I imagine this cycle going is that someone who is quite successful under capitalism (often due to advantages like inherited wealth) has a brief moment of self reflection where they wonder “am I actually doing well here? Do I have anything of value to add? I was given a lot of opportunities to succeed (e.g. inherited wealth), but have I effectively utilised those opportunities? How would I know if I had actually done well? Sure, I’ve grown my wealth a heckton, but maybe a different person with these same opportunities would have done far better than I did?”
With those questions comes a heckton of dread. And like, I actually really sympathise with that dread, because it’s a fairly universal feeling, I suspect. For instance, I dropped out of university due to a heckton of external extenuating circumstances. When I’m feeling bad about this, people who knew me during this period often reassure me that it was not my fault, and that it’s a testament to my strength that I held out as long as I did. Certainly, that’s what I’d like to believe, but the terrifying question that I’ll never be able to answer is “what if those external circumstances didn’t exist? What if I would’ve dropped out even if not for all that, and if I’m actually just not smart enough to study what I wanted?”. We can’t see alternative timelines.
What’s different about billionaires though is that they have so much money that they can ignore the uncomfortable dread, rather than sitting with it and doing some useful self reflection, before setting it aside. They push it out of mind and distract themselves by throwing themselves into work or hedonism, or both (I have never known a billionaire, but I have known some very wealthy CEO types, and they worked themselves to the bone, potentially to avoid feeling this imposter syndrome dread. I’m inclined to view their hyper working habits as being irrational in this way because a lot of the excess work they did seemed to be bullshit work (in the sense of David Graeber’s “bullshit jobs” — that is, it was work done to make themselves feel useful)).
Another thing that I have that billionaires don’t is friends that I trust to guide me on my self reflection. I trust my friends when they tell me my university disaster wasn’t my fault because they have shown that they are more than willing to call me out when I make poor choices. Even in scenarios where I am clearly the victim of some fucked up thing, if I have made things worse for myself by making poor choices (something I’m prone to doing if I’m in a fatalistic depression spiral), they hold me accountable for my choices, in addition to sympathetically supporting me.
Instead, billionaires are surrounded by people who they can’t trust. Sycophants everywhere, who don’t care about who you are as a person, but what you can do for them. You’re less likely to have people calling you out for things, but you also won’t get much affirmation for the genuinely good things about your personality. Like, let’s imagine if Sam Altman had an aspect of his personality that was a really good quality that was distinctly him, and thus the kind of thing that would be productive to view as part of his self identity because it could help him focus on that as a direction of future growth. And let’s say he had a genuine, non-sycophantic friend who tried to highlight this to him — how would he be able to tell that this was a genuine compliment coming from a genuine friend, and not just another bullshit sycophant? You can’t, not really.
It’s tragic really. The ultra rich have basically gatekept themselves from genuine human connection. They burn out from being on guard all the time, and so they surround themselves with people in their own wealth class (people who are also extremely poorly adjusted). I find it quite sad, because this isolation seems to be an inevitable consequence of being mega-rich. This is why when I say things like “billionaires should not exist”, I’m not just speaking in favour of peons like us, but also out of compassion for the billionaires. I resent them like hell, but I also deeply pity them. I’d love to be financially comfortable enough to not worry about whether I’ll be having to be sleeping in my car next month, but I’d rather be in my position in theirs. If by some weird twist of fate, I suddenly became mega rich, I would do everything I possibly could to give away money until I was “merely” financially comfortable.
I got a bit off track with my ranting because I am procrastinating getting food, so I’ll bring it back to your question. Basically, billionaires get dumb because they are emotionally maladjusted and often deeply insecure. Wealth becomes a thing by which they measure their own self worth, but no amount of wealth can fill the vacuous chasm in their hearts caused by a deep isolation and lack of genuine fulfillment. Occasionally they do get slices of this fulfillment — see Mark Zuckerberg getting heavily into MMA.
But if they ever have moments of self reflection where they experience that normal and healthy self doubt, they are so socially isolated and maladjusted to actually reflect. Their wealth means they can afford to never be uncomfortable, and that applies here too. So to escape their dread, they build a narrative of how they deserve it. They’re not just lucky — they are actually very smart and good and they deserve their wealth. And the sycophants around them will tell them they’re absolutely right. Meanwhile, the people they respect as their peers (other billionaires) are also prone to spouting psuedointellectual bullshit whilst pretending to be smart, so this validates their own dumbassery.
The psuedointellectual stuff is another reason I pity them. I was a Gifted Kid™, and because I didn’t have friends in school, my intelligence was basically my entire identity. This meant I was so desperately scared of losing that that I would bullshit about what I knew or not. Nowadays, I’m a lot better at being open about when people ask me about something I either haven’t heard of, don’t understand, or can’t quite remember. I often say “I got a hell of a lot smarter when I let myself be more dumb”, because learning to be more vulnerable meant I had the opportunity to learn a heckton from loads of cool people (rather than being preoccupied with appearing smart).
Billionaires are dumb because they’re cosplaying smart people, and they’re so deep in the role that they forget they’re cosplaying. They’re also surrounded by other dumbasses spouting psuedointellectual bullshit, but they will never call them out on this, because they’re so pathetically insecure that they fear that this will out them as being an imposter — they don’t realise that their peers are also cosplaying. It’s an absurd echo chamber of the worst kind.
WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 16 hours ago
I don’t understand how people see this kind of thing and think, “this guy is dumb.”
For a decade the world has been seeing constant evidence that when you lie brazenly and repeatedly enough you become untouchable. This guy isn’t an idiot- he just knows (probably rightly) that he has everything to gain and nothing to lose by pretending to be.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
There’s a big difference between intelligence and low cunning.
Donald Trump has constantly lied and failed upwards. He is not a smart man.
WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
Okay, so what does that say about everyone who’s failed to outsmart him?
Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 2 hours ago
They’re not as rich as him. If you have shit tons of money you can be a braindead moron and still fail upwards.
5too@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I’m remembering the old duelist’s adage, that the worst opponent to have is an amateur - because you have no idea what kind of idiocy they’ll try
Soup@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
No one truly intelligent is seeking their own personal profit over everyone else. The simple fact is that these people are just lucky and have never had to ever consider the consequences of their actions. They aren’t happy, their lives don’t change between a few hundred million dollars and a billion dollars, they just chase a bigger number because the highest level their brains function at is like a monkey that wants all the fruit to itself.
I think about it this way: Neurodivergent are usually considered bad at communicating, except the worst communicators I’ve ever met have been neurotypical people. They live in a world built for them, where anyone not following the script must be broken so it not their fault. You look at these billionaires and they aren’t behaving like this because they’re smart, because there’s a plan, it’s because they refuse to admit they’re lucky and any failure was someone who just didn’t listen to the enough. It’s not their awful planning, it’s the employee who was unable to follow their bullshit.
These people are not intelligent, they just have enough money to be wrong a thousand times and only think about how smart they were that thousand and oneth time. They throw a million darts at the board and claim the single bullseye was all their raw skill.
WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
My point is that they aren’t making mistakes. They’re not attempting A but doing B because they don’t know any better. What they are doing is intentional and very often successful.
Soup@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
That doesn’t make them intelligent, and you need to re-read my comment until you understand just how many failures these people experience that they can simply ignore. In many ways you could even argue that what they’re doing isn’t intentional, they’re just reacting in the moment and we can all see how the furthest they can really look ahead is about a couple days.
Look at Musk, there have literally been whole teams of people who made it their job to distract the stupid child so he couldn’t fuck up their company. Jeff Bezos is making terrible decisions and his creativity was “bookstore but online”, yet it looks like success the same way a toddler with a shotgun will get all the cookies they want.
“Intentional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. These are some of the dumbest, most over-confident people alive right now and they are nothing without their ability to ignore major financial failures.