I found Ayn Rand's books to be somewhat interesting when I read them back in the day. I was kind of shocked when the far right began to hold them up as biblical, so I had to go back and skim through them again... and I find that people are able to read into these stories whatever they want. There are certainly characters that speak to the "pull yourself up by your own bootsraps" crowd. And, it seems that Ayn was personally a less than compassionate character. But just like Orwell is interesting outside of the political readings of 1984 and Animal Farm... so too are The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged interesting merely as fiction.

I for one hold a wide variety of opinions on things that don't neatly fit into our current binary political schism. Liberals and Libertarians both have some good points...

BUT... in today's world where people who have more money than they can ever spend are squashing people who have nothing and simultaneously complaining about being victimized... where corporations and wealthy people game the system and get caught in scandal after scandal without anyone of note ever seeing the inside of a jail cell... where poor people go to jail for stealing a candy bar to feed their hungry kids and live under bridges without any access to healthcare... where 1 billion human beings have no clean drinking water access and companies like Nestle and Bechtel want to fully commodify all the water on the globe for their personal profit... where companies like Monsanto are willfully poisoning people to make a profit while crushing small farmers and people who want to grow natural crops... where each banking scandal is more egregious than the last, and the bankers laugh in our faces and spend our bailout moneys on lavish trips and bonuses for the very execs who got us into the giant hole we are in... where even modern 1st world nations are falling apart at the seams due to austerity measures that the rich necessitated but the poor must pay for...

I think we can all agree that things are messed up and that we can not rely on those benefiting from the current system to fix it. Debt based currency, corporate personhood, "too big to fail", fractional reserve banking etc. etc. are clearly to blame for a host of our ills.

The fact is that Democracy is an illusion and may never work even if it was real. Capitalism is not interested in wellbeing or freedom. If you have faith in corporations, banks or politicians... you have not been paying attention.

So, does money make people psychopathic... perhaps. Sociopathic... even more likely. It doesn't take any studies (flawed or not) to see that people who have it good tend to lose compassion in proportion to how wealthy they are. It is so obvious to anyone with eyes that no one ever recoils at characters like Mr. Burns on the Simpsons. He may be overblown, but he is certainly not counter to our concept of the über wealthy. As was mentioned before, the Koch brothers are the worst tippers in their building. Now we can point to people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates who seem to be more generous, but this compassion tends to come apart a bit when looked at more carefully.

It would take too long to get into here, but lets just say that they manage to help awfully few people with the amounts of money they give to "charity" and spend a huge amount of money for social engineering things that wind up not necessarily being in the interest of the people who are suffering. For 5% of the money those two guys say they spend helping people, every single homeless person in America could be housed. For a paltry 15 to 20 billion dollars the entire world water crisis could be ended and every single human being on the planet have clean drinking water. So where are these guys actually spending all this money then? Sure a handful of mosquito nets is better than nothing, but come on.

I agree wholeheartedly that wealth itself brings with it a scenario that is often predictably negative. I think sociopath or psychopath is a fairly strong claim. This study is much more basic and cannot/should not make this claim.

Money is a contributing factor, but without knowing someone's actual socioeconomic status and personality traits you can't make any concrete claims. What you can say is that with money comes a changed point of view. As your annual income increases you change. Don't have a link but there was a study done that showed as income increased quality of life increased, up until around the $75,000 mark and then it leveled out.

I personally have experienced such a thing. When I was making $13,000 a year or less (often more like $1000) I had basically no options and could barely afford to pay bills. I never had the opportunity during that time to buy myself anything. It was very difficult but for the most part I was happy, even though the stress was sometimes very difficult to bear. Speed up time and eventually I started getting better wages as I climbed the ladder by applying for higher wages jobs. Eventually I got to where I am now. Over this period I experienced a change in how I view the world. I don't complain about the same things. My complaints are less but only due to the fact that I personally have been working on being more optimistic. I'm not rich by any means nor do I wish to be. I make enough to pay bills without ever worrying, and can save money to accomplish goals or enjoy.

I care about the world and everyone's suffering that are unable to make a change. But I am not overwhelmingly burdened by it anymore. It does not throw me into bouts of depression any longer because I'm not experiencing it so much. I think anything beyond this is up to how someone was brought up, moral values, so on. If I were to win the lottery I wouldn't change into a monster that so many believe rich people are.

I see them mostly as lost, uninformed, ignorant, and yes some corrupt.

Excellent post MrPeabody.
I find that nearly all the critics of Ayn Rand have never actually read any of her books.


Hyperspace Fool,
The far right using Ayn Rand's writing is humorous. They are only pulling a few quotes from her work, and it is all out of context to suit their own purpose. For the most part her writing would be VERY anti Right Wing, she would have considered them "looters" of modern society. This is no different then someone reading the bible and clearly not understanding what they read. The Nazi's did the same thing with Friedrich Nietzsche's writing.

yesssssssssssssssssss and thanks for saying it HF

there is much i would like to add yet i think HF has already written what must be said , things are pretty messed up and they can be a whole lot better , humanity needs to clean up its act

i don't know if humanity will be able to yet i don't really care , the human drama is just too silly , since i am not in control of the whole human race there is no way i'll be able to change the whole system in an instant , perhaps if i can be then i can do something about it otherwise what is the use of caring and suffering with the pain of the whole planet

man is suffering , animals are suffering , plants are suffering , nature is suffering , i can't really do $#!~ about it , humans are trapped within their own dreams and that is that , i hope we all wake up

peace everyone

Well, i would agree, but ND claims a scientific backing for the theory that money turns you into a psychopath, and i scientifically disagree, but offer a philosophical/metaphorical response. Thats why i started a new thread, since it wasn't really scientific per se.

Not to say i think in any way the studies done on this topic more importantly the original monopoly based study are legitimate scientific evidence. But i thought it appropriate to place the discussion here.

And i too like the idea of a resource based economy. The problem is, its difficult to find buyers/sellers with goods in demand to trade on a local scale, ultimately. Not that that cannot be achieved to some end.

Thus the concept of money becomes a necessity to connect buyers/sellers of resources across vast distances. This is good/bad, depending on how those goods are transported, but thats getting off topic.

Money made all this progress we made in science, and all most every aspect of society possible in some sense. It was the corruption of money, or the concept of currency that's the issue. Forming a currency is tricky business, and there's alot of room for thieves to weasel their way in, as was done with the federal reserve and banking cartels in the last two centuries in America.

My point, at its simplest, was to blame the free market, libertarian philosophy, for the mess were in, or say it would cause more problems than what we have now is ignoring the reality that kind of policy in economics no longer exists in America and most parts of the world. By and large, currency is not backed by tangible assets, and can be inflated/deflated at will by a group of private banks.

But thats not money, thats a perversion of the concept. Libertarianism/free market economics (not trickle down bullshit Reaganomics) would only serve to better society and weed out the thieves, imho.