What You’ve Suspected is True: Or Is It? Rethinking the Billionaire Pathology
Are the Ultra-Rich Broken — or Are They Just Grown-Up Toddlers in Suits?
The Rolling Stone article, “What You’ve Suspected is True: The Billionaires Are Not Like Us,” argues forcefully that extreme wealth reshapes the human mind, creating a kind of moral pathology among the ultra-rich. From Paul Piff’s famous Berkeley car study to the Monopoly experiment where “rich” players grow boastful and domineering, the piece marshals a range of evidence to support a disturbing conclusion: wealth makes people worse — less empathetic, more narcissistic, and increasingly detached from basic decency. In the author’s telling, billionaires become so unmoored from ordinary social feedback that they drift into a fantastical techno-feudal mindset, indifferent to humanity’s real needs while plotting interplanetary utopias.
But is it really true that money itself is the root cause of this alleged moral decay? Or could the article — and some of the research it quotes — be confusing correlation with causation, mistaking wealth for the underlying driver of antisocial behavior? An alternative reading is that these billionaires are not so much a separate species whose brains are “hardwired” differently, but rather the logical product of a wider societal trend: the decline of mature socialization in a postmodern world that rewards perpetual adolescence.
The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once observed that modern consumer society encourages us to remain “perpetual adolescents.” We are taught to endlessly pursue new desires while avoiding the discomforts of self-restraint, compromise, or dependence on others. This is not a pathology exclusive to billionaires; it is a pathology that cuts across the social spectrum, but it is most visible — and most damaging — at the top. Billionaires simply have the resources to indulge their infantile whims on a cosmic scale: whether it’s launching vanity rockets into space, buying social media platforms for ego gratification, or fantasizing about breeding colonies to seed the galaxy with their genes.
In this light, the so-called “pathology of wealth” that Rolling Stone exposes could more accurately be described as a pathology of arrested social maturity. Money is not inherently corrupting — it merely removes the normal constraints that force most people to grow up. For the poor, daily survival demands maintaining close ties, reciprocity, and shared responsibility. Poverty can be brutal, but it can also bind people together in webs of interdependence that train empathy and cooperation. The affluent, meanwhile, can insulate themselves from the need for such social skills. Their lives become an echo chamber, where no one calls them out, no one says “no,” and the childish ego is free to imagine itself a demigod.
This perspective also casts Piff’s experiments in a different light. Yes, drivers of luxury cars were more likely to run stop signs or fail to yield to pedestrians. Yes, Monopoly players rigged to win grew boastful. But are these experiments proof that wealth rewires the brain? Or do they suggest that, when shielded from accountability, people regress to more egocentric, childlike behaviors? After all, every toddler starts out self-centered; empathy and moral limits are cultivated through years of lived social negotiation. The more isolated someone becomes from these checks, the more their inner child runs the show.
Ironically, the Rolling Stone piece itself offers hints that wealth is not destiny. Warren Buffett, the so-called “conscience of capitalism,” famously lives in a modest house and maintains local ties that limit his detachment. MacKenzie Scott gives away billions with none of the public egoism that marks her ex-husband’s exploits. If wealth were the universal poison, such exceptions would not exist. What sets these outliers apart may not be how much money they have, but the extent to which they were shaped by stronger formative norms — ones that anchored their maturity before wealth could erode it.
Seen this way, “What You’ve Suspected is True: The Billionaires Are Not Like Us” may be true in a superficial sense, but misleading at a deeper level. The ultra-rich are indeed different — not because their neurons are uniquely rewired by money, but because our culture enables their immaturity to metastasize. Money is the amplifier, not the root cause. The real culprit is a society that no longer reliably turns children into grown-ups.
Postmodern culture, for all its creativity and pluralism, has atomized the social structures that once shaped moral adults. By celebrating irony, individual preference, and endless choice, it leaves people increasingly unable — or unwilling — to internalize the constraints that make stable community life possible. And when the privileged can buy total insulation from the consequences of their worst instincts, they become the most grotesque expression of this immaturity.
Framed this way, the “billionaire pathology” is not an economic oddity but a cautionary tale about what happens when unchecked egos meet unlimited resources. If the problem is that power magnifies immaturity, then the solution is not just economic redistribution but a cultural reinvestment in the conditions that build social maturity for everyone. This means revitalizing communities, reestablishing norms that reward moral restraint, and creating shared narratives that transcend the solipsism of postmodern consumer identity.
Yes, the billionaires are not like us — but maybe they are exactly like us, just with more toys, more isolation, and far fewer limits. Their excesses should be a warning, not just about inequality but about what happens to any society that forgets how to grow its people up. If we truly want to check the dangers that come with extreme wealth, we need to ask harder questions about what kind of culture allows childish egos to run the world.
