[ExI] Effects of Money on personality

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sat, Jan 6, 2024 at 4:30 PM efc--- via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Hello Kelly,
>
> Based on personal experience looking at myself and people around me I
> agree with what you are saying 100%. I've seen the same thing.
>
> To add to that, I just finished reading my christmas present to myself,
> the capitalist manifesto by Johan Norberg
> (https://www.cato.org/books/capitalist-manifesto) and in the book Johan
> very convincingly shows that increased capitalism and democracy lead to
> richer countries which leads to generally happier people.
>

Note that the following story is only anecdotal... but I am very
familiar with it.

My ex-wife when she got more money (from our divorce, primarily)
became more of a hoarder, more selfish, harder to get along with by
everyone, lazier, and more demanding on the people around her. Now, to
be fair, she had BPD and NPD among her multiple personality disorders.
But she did become MORE of what she was before. She was never happier
than the day *after* she died of cancer. Nobody around her was happier
before that either, and I'm not speaking as a disgruntled ex-husband,
but as an objective observer of all the people who knew her. She never
improved the happiness of any person she met for more than a few days
at the most. Our only daughter agrees with these assessments as well,
so it's not just me.

So while I agree that IN GENERAL, people get happier with more money,
at least to a point... If they are bound and determined to be unhappy,
then money will make them more unhappy. The Happiness Hypothesis - or
any number of TED talks by Jonathan Haidt are instructional about the
"to a point" part.

In the bigger picture, most of the Middle Eastern countries that have
flirted with democracy have had less than great outcomes. There's
something seemingly deeply incompatible between Islam and democracy.
The current troubles in Gaza, you may recall, came out of a government
that was voted into power. That's not to say Israel doesn't perform
their part of the escalation dance... but Hamas was elected.

I would suspect, to stay on topic a little, that Islam is also deeply
incompatible with transhumanism and other things we value highly in
extropian thought.

-Kelly