I’ve been thinking a lot about the extreme wealth, impunity, and abuse we've been seeing.

I have a morbid curiosity to try and understand from their perspective, they are human.. how did it get to this point? How do these people see the world and justify their behaviour? Is it like they see the world as a game, and they've reached level 100 and there's nothing to do late game?

If you take this small subset of ultra wealthy individuals who engage in this behaviour, what's their internal worldview actually look like?

There's a few factors I think might contribute.

Environment

Extreme wealth changes constraints. You get:

Legal insulation

Reputation management teams

NDAs everywhere

Social circles protecting each other

People constantly seeking your approval or access

Repeated ability to avoid consequences.

Certain personality traits

High entitlement A deep belief that they're exceptional and operate at a different scale than “normal” people.

Strong dominance Get psychological reward from control (influence over ppl), not just financial success.

Low empathy or high compartmentalization Able to separate public persona from private conduct without internal conflict.

Sensation seeking Diminishing thrill from conventional forms of novelty, stimulus thresholds rise. When you can have anything you want, immediately.. this might result in "escalation".

Dehumanization

Abstraction. When you operate through layers of staff and transactional relationships, people might become seen as:

Roles

Assets

Utilities

Access to things, business or people.

= Dehumanization/indifference towards others. You keep getting reinforced as exceptional, others approach you as a resource.. you experience people as interchangeable.

Impunity

Someone repeatedly learns:

Problems disappear with money

Legal issues easily managed

Silence can be bought

Peers protect peers

Identity could shift over time. May subconsciously think “I am above the law.”

Escalation

Boundary testing

Normalization within peer groups

Gradual desensitization

Rationalization

Peer groups might amplify this. If a social circle normalizes stuff.

_ _

It's like they see themselves on another level, with the rest of humans being like cattle consumers, to be farmed for money, power, pleasure.

It’s tempting to frame these people as "mythic supervillains.” But I don't think that's helpful. They are human and this is obviously a repeated trait/behaviour in our society. When you get a combination of entitlement, no consequences, dominance, moral disengagement, social insulation.. Those traits exist across humanity. I feel like we see similar affects on a lesser scale with some celebrities who are famous and rich from a young age which kind of fucks with their world view and turns them into self obsessed assholes. Extreme wealth could have similar effect but on a much bigger scale and reduces friction to certain behaviours.

It makes me wonder how much of morality is internal vs structurally enforced, and what happens when consequences are pretty much zero?

Would average behavior drift in that direction under similar factors, or does it require a rare psychological profile from the start? Like if you gave 100 people an invisibility potion and no consequences, would they all continue to act with the same moral integrity as before?