| HN Mirror

That’s fair, it’s definitely plausible that the process of becoming a billionaire does select for sociopathy or similar traits. Still, this is far from scientific, but any time I read in-depth about bad (in my view) people, I’ve always been struck by the seemingly low incidence of true sociopathy among them. Corrupt politicians, robber barons, mobsters, warlords, lackeys of authoritarian regimes—you see some who read like a list of sociopathy markers[0], but seemingly more who do not, who had people in their lives who they clearly loved, activities that brought them joy, and so on.

It’s a very different and more extreme example, but I remember being really struck by this when I first visited the US Holocaust Museum: even if some at the top were true sociopaths, many of the major perpetrators who were profiled at the museum were seemingly psychologically “normal” people who committed unthinkable acts (often because that was the way to climb the ladder in the hierarchy) and rationalized them somehow so they could sleep at night. To me that was just terrifying: I’d always sort of thought that the people who did these things must have been so abnormal as to be barely recognizable as human, but if they weren’t, what then? Then it could happen anywhere and to anybody if we don’t get serious about teaching moral courage. The Germans today know this very well, but I’m not sure Americans (and presumably others) absorbed the lesson.

I think it’s tempting to try to explain terrible people as being fundamentally different from oneself, because then we don’t have to worry about how not to become like them. It’s rather scary to think that they’re not so different, but if they’re not, we have to ask ourselves what we’d do different if we found ourselves in their position, whether that’s running a little startup that turned into a big corporation or serving in the Dutch state bureaucracy in 1940.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disor...