Bit of both really.
Money is power. Power corrupts.
I think this is it, actually. Having a lot of money can lead to spending it on frivolous things, but I don’t think that’s what we mean by corruption. It’s when you have so much money that you can use that money to influence people in power that it gets bad. Suddenly, when getting your way is merely a question of bribery and you have plenty of means to do it, people start thinking they have a right to pull the strings in the way they see fit.
Yeah when people refer to money as power they’re not talking about the d-bag with the McMansion and a cybertruck. They’re talking about a level of wealth few people understand.
You don’t even need bribery. You can just throw money at something and make things happen.
If you think something is true, you can pay the world to prioritize things as if it were true.
If you think vaccines cause autism and you are rich, you can create massive “education” campaigns and the like to convince people its true. You can buy ads telling people its true. You can amass an enormous following of people who believe you and change policy without bribery.
Power makes existing tendencies for corruption obvious.
You want to pull passive aggressive or direct aggressive bullshit in a small group? Well, that’ll work a lot of times. People compensate, or they circumvent you to make things ok. But those same dynamics at scale cause inescapable problems.
Yes.
Both, I’d say.
Money doesn’t create corruption out of thin air - anyone who’s corrupted by it already had to have the potential. But money does undoubtedly lead people who otherwise would have resisted their baser nature to indulge it instead.
And it very definitely provides the means for people who are already psychologically and/or morally inclined to corruption, and so is very attractive to them.
I’d agree with that. If you use you’re vast wealth to do awful things then you’re an awful person. But I’ve defintely had moments when a moment of rage or lust or other bad intention has bubbled up inside, and I’ve wanted to buy a business just to fire the rude person I’ve argued with, or hire a team of sex workers just to fulfill some weird fantasy. But as a poor normal person those thoughts appear and pass because i can’t do anything about them. I’d hope that if I was a billionaire, I’d still take a moment and realise the gap between id urge and superego approved action, but who knows?
Yes
That’s kind of like, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” It seems to me that when you give a regular person a bunch of money, like winning the lottery, they tend to go kind of nuts with it. So in that way, it seems that money is corrupting them. If you have some kind of ultra-rich person who loves money and power, then they’re already corrupt because of power and money.
I say neither. Plenty of decent people find ways to make good money without selling themselves to the devil. Personal injury lawyers are a great example, they are real-life Robin Hoods.
Both. There is a study by Armin Falk and Nora Szech (2013) that experimentally shows that markets can erode moral behavior, as participants were more likely to not save a mouse’s life for money in market settings. This generally extends to the erosion of morality for monetary gain in market systems. Additionally, psychological research indicates that wealthy, successful individuals often score higher on traits associated with the “dark triad” of personality, i.e. narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, which supports the idea that selection plays a role as well.
Getting money activates the reward process in the brain.
Everyone handles that differently based on their life experience and current situation.
If you’re asking If money drives the moral compass that’s highly individual.
This tension is what causes the Bible to be suspicious of wealth
Does the Bible corrupt, or is the Bible attractive to questionable people?
Being questionable is a property of being human.
