What always strikes me as particularly nasty about rich fucks abusing people is that it would be trivial for the abusers to use their wealth and fame to get the experiences they ostensibly want with consenting adults.
Instead, they prey on vulnerable people, which suggests that transgression and power over others is the actual underlying feeling they're seeking and the sex or whatever is a secondary concern.
So given a choice between using privilege to seek novel experiences and using privilege to insulate themselves from the consequences of predatory experiences, many choose the latter.
Is this a particularly harmful instantiation of status games? It seems like largely the same dynamics at work.
This is a toot about Neil Gaiman, but also some very significant portion of the ruling classes more broadly. To wit, Epstein et al.
[#]neilgaiman #politics #uspol #psychology #economics
CC @bhalpin
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For a long time, I was caught off guard by these themes in sci-fi stories like Transmetropolitan and Banks' Player of Games.
Later, after Epstein and having spent more time in corporate America, I started to understand that this is a prevailing mode in a society like ours dominated by hierarchies and often predatory status seeking (two things that seem deeply intertwined.)
Transmet and other stories were trying to teach me a valuable, fundamental lesson - which is that people who are driven by seeking status through currencies of power (e.g., corporate executives, politicians, police) are exactly the same sort of people who will abuse women and children because it gives them the same feelings.
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In a much lower stakes context, I now wonder (belatedly, in my early 40s) if the reason I seem to piss people off in corporate settings is that I try (naively?) to focus on the content of a discussion or situation (e.g., how do we solve for this technical or organizational problem in an economically efficient way), rather than trying to focus on playing to the status fulfillment of the various players in the scene (e.g., how do I make the highest ranking people feel good about themselves and attribute those positive feelings to me).
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@ceresbzns people in e.g. tech behave like orgs are interchangeable, how ludicrous.
Orgs have strong personalities and one hangs in the wrong ones at their peril.
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@ceresbzns sorry, now my reply looks kind of off topic.
I am exploring whether one can build an effective org that does not embody hierarchies and predatory status seeking.
I have no idea if I will succeed.
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@ceresbzns Agreed. The domination and humiliation are the point. They don't want consent because that would ruin it for them
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