this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Only way to make people change their ways, if it hurts the bottom line then action is usually taken.
This is why government regulation should be harsher, and fines should be proportional to company income.
If the fine is too low it just becomes the cost of doing business.
Most people will stop doing something if you show them how it hurts others. Not so the wealthy and powerful.
Being rich actually causes neurological changes, reducing your capacity for empathy and making your brain look more like someone born with psychopathy. 'Power Corrupts' is a biological fact. To be powerful is to be more capable of evil.
Does being rich cause neurological changes, or do those with those neurological traits by and large try to become wealthy?
Just curious the actual science there. I agree to be that rich shows a lack of empathy one way or another.
I've though about this a lot. I suspect evolution tilts a little towards psycopathy when wealthy.
Hard to say if theres a mechanism for that encoded in DNA, but if there is, Im betting it would get naturally selected for.
If an individual is in a position of power, then being a self-entitled asshole rapist will reduce competition and increase the spread of genes... Especially if the individual is a male
Assuming this has a negative effect of society, cultural evolution would hopefully respond with counters to this... Which I think is what we see time and again all over the world.
Society gets living situations relatively reliable. Assholes rise making things worse, society either crumbles into weakness or rejects new situation and removes assholes, encodes new ethics into societal norms and works towards gettingliiving situations reliable, repeat.
When more people are fed abd housed, theres more resources to devote towards economic and war engines, so I think this makes asshole removal naturally selected for on a cultural level.
This loop seems to be getting more frequent and I'd love if we could skip the parts where folks are miserable and dying.