And we are being conditioned to think of niceness in the personal level, and even worse judge with superficial BS like nice clothes, clean appereance, etc.
A well behaved rich person will immediately strike as "nicer" (with the meaning of "good" too) than a poor guy on the street or a homeless person, even if the latter has a heart of gold and the first is a huge negative for society. If the rich person is also famous, it's as if people lose their mind to its "aura".
This is probably because as a species we were "evolved" to look for immediate personal threat (attack etc), which looks more probable with a homeless person than with a well dressed oil baron or ruthless businessman. But the glitch is that we use that to also judge for "goodness" and morality.
Our entire economy is predicated on the notion that people get money by doing good things for society and the money is their reward. In that sense more money should correlate with more service to society. (Whether it does....)
We're also selfish, "good" is subjective. A homeless person can be as kind as they want but how much can they do for you? A rich person can benefit you in many ways and it may not cost them very much.
>Our entire economy is predicated on the notion that people get money by doing good things for society and the money is their reward.
Yeah. It's an idea of protestant origins (initially: wealth is a kind of reward for the fair from God), and one that, as someone from a non-protestant country, abhor.
>A homeless person can be as kind as they want but how much can they do for you? A rich person can benefit you in many ways and it may not cost them very much.
People are more often screwed in the large by rich persons than by homeless persons. For starters, homeless persons don't start many wars, nor do they get trillion dollar bailouts for collapsing the economy...
And we are being conditioned to think of niceness in the personal level, and even worse judge with superficial BS like nice clothes, clean appereance, etc.
A well behaved rich person will immediately strike as "nicer" (with the meaning of "good" too) than a poor guy on the street or a homeless person, even if the latter has a heart of gold and the first is a huge negative for society. If the rich person is also famous, it's as if people lose their mind to its "aura".
This is probably because as a species we were "evolved" to look for immediate personal threat (attack etc), which looks more probable with a homeless person than with a well dressed oil baron or ruthless businessman. But the glitch is that we use that to also judge for "goodness" and morality.