Rich people can’t justify their lives of extreme privilege without rationalizing extreme deprivation as a justified and positive good.

They got where they are because of narcissism and psychopathy. I think the bigger question is why does our society worship people with these types of mental illnesses?

Because the way you get and stay obscenely wealthy is twofold:

• Generational wealth
• Being ruthlessly unscrupulous

Edit: And if you acquire generational wealth, you were raised by ruthlessly unscrupulous people. This raises the likelihood that you are similar.

Why do the richest have to be the craziest?!?

Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats, says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society:

You don’t do this in a kind of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way. You do it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else. So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be cut so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn’t go up. And what I really worry about is, there is so much money and so much power at the very top, and the gap between those people at the very top and everybody else is so great, that we are going to see social mobility choked off and society transformed.

Lot of this is their revenge for COVID. Office workers getting to work from home, factories and warehouse operations shut down. They hated that so much they decided to destroy every institution and relationships that enabled it

Should be paints face orange and starts to dry hump daughter

Why?!? Why do the richest have to be the craziest?!?

It’s deliberate, all documented over a decade ago:

“In the twenty-first century the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox Christian fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying Jesus crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.” ― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, year 2014

Introduction to the Kremlin media techniques of year 2014

1. Peter Pomerantsev September 9, 2014: Russia and the Menace of Unreality. How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare

2. Adam Curtis, BBC, December 31, 2014: On The “Contradictory Vaudeville” Of Post-Modern Politics - “What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin’s advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.”

3. Book reading from December 5, 2014 on the subject by Peter Pomerantsev

When you are rich, you don’t have to answer to anybody. You can be your true insane self.

Because they can afford it.

If you grow your hair long but then can’t find a job, then you cut your hair. If you didn’t need money, you wouldn’t cut your hair. You couldn’t afford to be eccentric so you had to conform.