Bit off-topic (it's the right subforum for it though), but I don't think it's just a matter of it breeding scary people, but also of it being a lifestyle that attracts such people as well. In my limited experience with powerful people: most scare the shit out of me once I've gotten to know them to any significant extent. I'm not talking about people born into it, but rather those that manage to "work their way to the top".Wafflewaffle wrote: I have a friend that is a psychologist and he once told me how mentally disturbed the majority of people on the upper classes can be. The idea of making lots and lots of money fast becomes an addiction, rewarded by society, reinforced by it actually, that breeds sociopaths and megalomaniacs, whose children are taught that their absent parents are their role models.
Considering money to be simply a symbolic representation of power (this applies to other forms of power as well), you have to ask yourself: why do people seek power over other people, especially to an extent that they are not satisfied even if they accumulate vast amounts of it, far beyond their own needs, or even beyond their ability to personally enjoy it? It also begs the question of, what did they have to do along the way to accumulate it, especially given that there must have been heavy competition from like minded individuals along the way.
We seem to have an inherent understanding of this in our day to day lives where if say you have a friend that starts trying to accumulate power within your circle, this is looked upon with suspicion, distrust, and potentially anger. However, when it's abstracted behind an economic or political system to the point where who exactly that power is being siphoned from becomes rather foggy, I think we tend to lose track of the potentially questionable motivations behind it.
I'm not saying this about Notch mind you, as I think all evidence tends to suggest all this money and fame essentially fell into his lap (not to diminish his achievements...Minecraft was/is amazing, but there's definitely a lunacy to what it's turned into), and he's probably more surprised than anyone else about it. I somehow suspect there's very few mounds of skulls he's had to claw over to get to where he is right now :)
