We are in the final days of “spooky season,” but luckily for us, we don’t get scared by all the ghosts, witches, vampires, and black cats that make a big appearance this time of year. But what we are spooked by is the inner workings of the minds of broligarchs.
Two weeks ago, Patriotic Millionaire Abigail Disney spoke on a panel about the dangers of extreme wealth at the Annual Meetings of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund. Drawing on her personal life experiences, Abigail warned the audience about what wealth does to your psyche: It decreases your ability to feel empathy for others while increasing your sense of entitlement and superiority. She closed by urging society to come to terms with the idea that there is a “level of wealth beyond which only madness lies” and that it’s dangerous to give the keys to our democracy to mad billionaires.
Watch a portion of Abigail’s remarks below:
The psychology of wealth is such an important, yet often overlooked, part of the story of rising inequality, which is why we’re devoting an entire Closer Look to it. We’ll start by highlighting some research findings that back up what Abigail said at the Annual Meetings. Then we’ll spotlight the (in our opinion) severely warped minds of a few of America’s top broligarchs, and close by laying out what we need to do to stop them from trampling over our democracy.
Money literally makes you mean
Professor Paul Piff from the University of California, Irvine is one of the world’s foremost scholars on the subject of the psychology of wealth. A few weeks back, we told you about his famous rigged Monopoly game experiment. Now, we’d like to share Piff’s findings from another classic study he conducted with cars. He analyzed the behavior of cars at an intersection in California, and found that drivers of more expensive cars were four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop when a member of his research team posed as a pedestrian trying to cross the street.
You might think that Piff’s study could just be chalked up to something specific about California drivers being aggressive, but other research supports his findings. Studies have found the wealthy to be less generous and less compassionate than their lower-income counterparts. They also spend less time looking at others and exhibit less pronounced physiological responses when faced with another person’s suffering.
It’s also tempting to think that being entitled and selfish might just be problems for those born into wealth, but that’s not the case either. In another of Piff’s studies, subjects who were merely made to feel wealthier took more candies out of a jar that was ostensibly for children in a nearby lab. And in his famous Monopoly experiment, subjects who received advantages in the game by way of a random coin toss became ruder and ultimately attributed their inevitable victory not to their obvious benefit but to their own skills and strategies.
Of course we don’t think, nor do these psychological studies imply, that all wealthy people are necessarily mean, entitled, or selfish. However, when we say we care about reducing inequality because it’s in our own self-interest, we’re referring to this kind of troubling behavior. The fact is, it’s enough of a trend we see amongst our peers—and an increasing one, at that, as inequality has exploded—that we are concerned about it.
Broligarch-level wealth makes you off-the-charts mean
In a June essay for The New Republic, Abigail Disney touched again on this idea of how wealth makes you more entitled, isolated, and narcissistic, but added an important caveat: her belief that “the greater the wealth, the bigger the difference.”
To our knowledge, there isn’t any scientific research to date that backs this up. But we have no doubt that Abigail is right judging by the dangerously self-seeking beliefs and behaviors we have observed from some of America’s wealthiest broligarchs.
To be sure, some of the beliefs and behaviors of the ultra-rich are not so much “mean” as they are, shall we say…out of touch. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to make humans an interplanetary species. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, may or may not have received blood transfusions from a younger person to reverse aging. Bryan Johnson, “the internet celebrity and centimillionaire tech founder turned longevity guru,” is another tech bro who has done this. He even has fans who wear shirts with the slogan “Don’t Die” on them. (Talk about vampires!) And lastly, they shell out pretty pennies for oddities like 10,000-year clocks, preserved sharks, and bananas taped on walls.
Meanwhile, the other things that the broligarchs believe and the other fetishes they have are off-the-charts “mean.” So much so, in fact, that they have the scary potential to kill our democracy.
Take Elon Musk. Last year, he signaled support on his social media platform, X, for the idea that only high T (testosterone) alpha males are capable of thinking for themselves and that, therefore, they should be the only ones to vote. In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in March, Musk said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” You’d think that empathy for other human beings would be the first guiding principle for someone who supposedly wants to “save humanity” with his companies, but what do we know.
Now consider Peter Thiel. In a 2009 essay, Thiel famously said “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In other words, to Thiel, people using the democratic system to vote for things like social safety net benefits, financial regulations, and, in his words, “confiscatory taxes” was antithetical to the freedom inherent in unfettered capital markets. And after he got specifically knocked for grumbling about extending the right to vote to women, he responded, “While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.”
More recently, Thiel has made headlines for his series of off-the-record lectures about the “antichrist.” In some Christian teachings, the antichrist is the evil opponent of Jesus Christ who appears before the end of the world. Thiel has shied away from identifying a specific individual as the antichrist—although he referred to Greta Thunberg as “sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist”—but he has often equated it with the world becoming one global state. That said, he rails against international bodies like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, along with international financial bodies that, in his words, make it “…quite difficult to hide one’s money.”
Perhaps most dangerous of all though is the broligarchs’ views on how they can best contribute to society. It’s not through giving your fortune away to finance things like building a library or starting a global vaccine campaign. In the minds of people like Peter Thiel, Google founder Larry Page, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, the most generous thing they can do for society is to make their fortunes. They believe technological innovation is the be-all and end-all for improving society, and that tech leaders like themselves should not be restricted by regulations, laws, or institutions in advancing it. Andreessen went so far as to outline his full thinking in this regard in a 5,000-word manifesto in 2023.
Dartmouth Professor Brooke Harrington spoke at length about the broligarchs’ inflated egos at our April event, How to Beat the Broligarchs. Harrington made clear that, as crazy and insane as it may sound, broligarchs quite literally believe that they are genetically superior to other human beings. This is why they believe that laws and institutions should not constrain them, and why they are so openly hostile to democracy and governments. In essence, it’s a new form of colonialism, where “innately superior” broligarchs rule the world and answer to no one.
Watch Harrington’s remarks below, beginning at the 2:04 mark:
Conclusion
It’s mean to cut someone off with your car or not stop for a pedestrian crossing the street. But “mean” doesn’t even come close to describing the wrongs involved with actively trying to kill democracy because you believe that you should be the king of the world.
We don’t want to make your Halloween any scarier than it needs to be. But we feel a responsibility to get the word out about this very real and very frightening stuff.
The broligarchs may think that they have free rein to cast a spell on the world and convince everyone that they really do deserve their awesome power and privileges (and more of them). But we have the ability to stop them in their tracks by casting three stronger and more effective counterspells: taxing the rich, paying the people, and spreading the power. As was made clear by the millions of Americans who attended “No Kings” protests around the country earlier this month, we think this is a counterspell most democracy-loving Americans can get behind.
The inner workings of the minds of the rich, and particularly the broligarch rich, are scary. But not doing anything to stop them from acting on their inner machinations is far scarier. We need to act before it’s too late.