Bit of both really.
Often socio-economic structures also incentivize different behaviour for different amounts of wealth, so very often it’s not just money and the person but all of society as well.
It’s those damn poors fault for making the billionaires be money hoarding assholes?
A consequence free environment (boatloads of money) simply let’s people be who they are. Unfortunately bad people come into money more often.
Money is power. Power corrupts.
I think this is it, actually. Having a lot of money can lead to spending it on frivolous things, but I don’t think that’s what we mean by corruption. It’s when you have so much money that you can use that money to influence people in power that it gets bad. Suddenly, when getting your way is merely a question of bribery and you have plenty of means to do it, people start thinking they have a right to pull the strings in the way they see fit.
The more money I get, the more I want to give it away, so I’m going to guess the latter.
Both, I’d say.
Money doesn’t create corruption out of thin air - anyone who’s corrupted by it already had to have the potential. But money does undoubtedly lead people who otherwise would have resisted their baser nature to indulge it instead.
And it very definitely provides the means for people who are already psychologically and/or morally inclined to corruption, and so is very attractive to them.
I’d agree with that. If you use you’re vast wealth to do awful things then you’re an awful person. But I’ve defintely had moments when a moment of rage or lust or other bad intention has bubbled up inside, and I’ve wanted to buy a business just to fire the rude person I’ve argued with, or hire a team of sex workers just to fulfill some weird fantasy. But as a poor normal person those thoughts appear and pass because i can’t do anything about them. I’d hope that if I was a billionaire, I’d still take a moment and realise the gap between id urge and superego approved action, but who knows?
Yes.
A lot of people have a limit where the effort of getting more money isn’t worth it. People without that limit keep trying to acquire money and power.
That’s kind of like, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” It seems to me that when you give a regular person a bunch of money, like winning the lottery, they tend to go kind of nuts with it. So in that way, it seems that money is corrupting them. If you have some kind of ultra-rich person who loves money and power, then they’re already corrupt because of power and money.
I think it’s enough of a mix of both to where it doesn’t really matter at the end which was the cause and which was the effect. I feel similarly about the vague concept of power, to which money is a manifestation of.
“money is the root of all evil & poverty is the fruit of all goodness”
