Here's what acquiring wealth (and status) can do to you, according to a recent study by psychologist Paul Piff and others at the University of California, Berkeley, who examine what happens to an individual's ethics as he or she acquires wealth and status:
1. It insulates you from others, so you begin to imagine your life is disconnected from those of others on whose labor you depend for your own livelihood.
2. It dulls your sense of the impact your own behavior makes on others.
3. It emboldens you to break the rules, which are, after all, made for the little people and not for the likes of you.
And, as Andrew Sullivan notes, at the Marginal Revolution site, Tyler Cowen reads the following additional lessons into this new study of the effects of the acquisition of wealth on personal ethics:
1. Obtaining money leads to obtaining higher social status, and elites are skilled at discerning the difference between the rules to which they must pay hypocritical lip service and those they may break with impunity.
2. And so they often do break with impunity rules that the rest of us assume apply to all of us.
I find this study very helpful to me in sorting out why it is that the 1% imagines it has rights and privileges that don't belong to the rest of us in democratic societies, and that in abusing the 99%, it doesn't run the risk of cutting off the very economic and social base on which its power and wealth rest--and thereby courting its own downfall.
This analysis helps me understand, too, the appalling behavior of priests who have abused their pastoral office through inappropriate sexual relationships with parishioners--like Father Christopher Wenthe of St. Paul, about whom I have blogged in the past. As a wonderful reader of Bilgrimage recently pointed out me, Father Wenthe was back in the news this past month, when he balked at the conditions of his probation, one of which prohibits him from engaging in counseling--since what landed him in jail was his abuse of a pastoral counseling relationship in which he seduced a parishioner!
District Judge Margaret Marrinan's response to Wenthe's refusal to cooperate with the rules laid down for his probation:
Throughout the case, it was painfully apparent, Mr. Wenthe, that you are a predator. I'm telling you this: You come back here one more time - you so much as step over the line one time - the consequences will be this: 48 months in prison.
And as I try to understand the astonishingly self-defeating nature of Father Wenthe's behavior as he's given probation, I have to conclude that a strong sense of entitlement blinds people. And I have to conclude (because this dynamic seems to run through clerical life) that something built into the Catholic clerical system provides precisely that strong sense of entitlement to Catholic priests.
And when it becomes pathologically warped in the case of those who abuse their pastoral office as Father Wenthe has done, it can lead the abuser to imagine that the rules simply don't apply to him. And that those he's abusing are objects that belong to him, playthings to be used for his good pleasure.
And until we Catholics deal with whatever it is in our system of training priests and in the clerical structures of the church as a whole that fosters such a sense of entitlement, of a right to power over and ownership of others, we won't begin to address the abuse crisis effectively. Insofar as it is built around this astonishing sense of entitlement (that is, around the fantasy that one obtains a new and higher ontological status via ordination), the clerical system desperately needs to be dismantled.
(Steve and I both also wondered as we read about the Piff study whether the researchers had studied one of our former bosses--since everything they have written about the way in which wealth and status warp a person's ethics reads as if they are describing the trajectory of her life, as she has acquired money and exalted professional and social status. The more money she has obtained, the less the rules that apply to little people apply to her, and the more regal her expectations--even to the extent of placing huge photographs of herself wreathed in flowers on stage when she speaks, or asking that people strew rose petals around the raised throne chair in which she is seated on stage.
I kid you not. I am making none of this up. This is the gospel truth. We actually do know someone who behaves this way, who shocked us by becoming this parody of faux entitlement as she attained wealth and status, and who now faces serious consequences for abuse of others in which she has felt a perfect entitlement to engage, due to her money and power. And we suspect this woman is legion in the corporate world or the leadership structures of academia, which is where we had the misfortune of meeting her.)
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