Mental disorder is very, very tricky to define, as something maladaptive in one context may work in another. One example is how in individualistic cultures, people hearing voices more often experience them as intrusive and malevolant, and we call it schizophrenia, while people on collectivist cultures may experience the voices as friendly and comforting. Is that a disease, then, if it benefits a person? Psychologists tend to go with a working definition based on how adaptive a condition is for the person and their society.
But in what context does it benefit a person to be unable to ever have “enough” of anything, never able to be satiated, compulsively adding to an enormous pile of wealth far, far beyond anything that they could ever use? Further, when the condition drives them to use the power attendant to that wealth to actively harm their society in myriad ways, how is that adaptive? It seems that they harbor a deep anxiety about the possibility that their accumulated wealth might be reduced, in a way completely imperceptible to them, and even being consciously aware that this is so, still suffer from a mania that compels them to hurt other people to keep that from happening.
Hardly sounds like what most of us would define as “successful in life.”
compulsively adding to an enormous pile of wealth far, far beyond anything that they could ever use
Meh. It’s just work, vision and lots of luck that leads to exponential growth. And when you start getting exponential growth to your investment, stopping the process of getting richer and richer would require active work to stop it from happening.
Only in fiction do people become rich by being compulsive about it.
Earning money from having money flies in the face of OC’s implication that being a billionaire is the result of virtuous effort. And, it sounds like a major flaw in the system all by itself.
But, even though they could passively rake in the income, so many billionaires actively try to increase their wealth, for no particular apparent purpose, and at the expense of harm to others, which does seem pathological.
Mental disorder is very, very tricky to define, as something maladaptive in one context may work in another. One example is how in individualistic cultures, people hearing voices more often experience them as intrusive and malevolant, and we call it schizophrenia, while people on collectivist cultures may experience the voices as friendly and comforting. Is that a disease, then, if it benefits a person? Psychologists tend to go with a working definition based on how adaptive a condition is for the person and their society.
But in what context does it benefit a person to be unable to ever have “enough” of anything, never able to be satiated, compulsively adding to an enormous pile of wealth far, far beyond anything that they could ever use? Further, when the condition drives them to use the power attendant to that wealth to actively harm their society in myriad ways, how is that adaptive? It seems that they harbor a deep anxiety about the possibility that their accumulated wealth might be reduced, in a way completely imperceptible to them, and even being consciously aware that this is so, still suffer from a mania that compels them to hurt other people to keep that from happening.
Hardly sounds like what most of us would define as “successful in life.”
Meh. It’s just work, vision and lots of luck that leads to exponential growth. And when you start getting exponential growth to your investment, stopping the process of getting richer and richer would require active work to stop it from happening.
Only in fiction do people become rich by being compulsive about it.
Earning money from having money flies in the face of OC’s implication that being a billionaire is the result of virtuous effort. And, it sounds like a major flaw in the system all by itself.
But, even though they could passively rake in the income, so many billionaires actively try to increase their wealth, for no particular apparent purpose, and at the expense of harm to others, which does seem pathological.