I should add, an interesting game but you do work at a finance or consulting company or similar, with all that entails, so it is not truly abstract.
Not in and of its self but it tends to be a truism that in business nice guy finish if not last, at least not in the top ten. So that a person who tries to run their buisiness according to ethical principals is going to get their lunch eaten by the next guy who’s business practices are not so constrained. As a result you and up with those at the top by and large being made up of right bastards.
The CEO of US Steel once said his company was in the business of making profits, not steel.
Well I think even under the best circumstances, running a business requires making difficult decisions for the good of the business. Cost and profitability provide objective measurements on whether something is good for the business or it is not. As a business leader, you typically have to deal with all sorts of challenges, including:
- Competing firms with competing product lines
- Adjusting to changes in the market and potential obsolescence
- Government regulations and other interference (which may or may not actually make sense)
- Retaining good employees while identifying and releasing dead weight
- Dealing with vendors (who may or may not be acting ethically themselves)
- Media entities who may have ideological agendas of their own
Plus it’s not always a “fair” system. As you rise up the later, you have to constantly deal with nepotism, favoritism, people vying for your job and just general politics.
So I think that sure, once you have obtained some level of success, it’s easy to develop a very adversarial attitude towards all these things you view as a threat to your empire.
And there is the underlying problem. What is best for the buisness may be at direct odds with what is best for the community or best for the workers or best for the human race as a whole. Person who made decisions solely in terms of what is best for them would be seen as a narcissistic sociopathic asshole, but in buisiness it is seen as the epitome of best practices.
It should be noted also that this is something quite particular to American culture.
Not that hard work or wealth are not things respected everywhere. But the “job creators” thing, and someone who nowadays spends a lot of time on the golf course and pays his staff a pittance being in itself being worthy of respect…not so much.
Let alone billionaires…I think in a lot of the world, when we hear someone is a billionaire, immediately we’re thinking of ill-gotten gains or exploitation. It’s an absurd amount of money. Now, that kind of framing may also sometimes be unfair, but I’m just saying – when it comes to the way that the super wealthy are viewed, it’s not all like in the US.