I keep coming back to the idea that extreme wealth creates not just distance, but ontological divergence. At some point you are no longer “ahead” on the same map. You are operating under a different physics. That is when comparison, empathy, and even shared moral intuitions start to break down.
One thing I would gently push on is whether this is best understood as an IQ versus EQ story at the individual level, or as a selection problem at the system level. In many environments we have built such markets, corporate ladders, and political systems, we end up rewarding a very narrow slice of intelligence. Abstraction, optimization, and dominance in zero-sum games. They actively discount the skills required to stay human at scale. Empathy, restraint, contextual judgment, and moral imagination. Over time, the system does not just elevate high IQ, low EQ individuals. It filters out those who hesitate, doubt, or internalize second-order consequences. That is why arrogance often looks like a personal flaw, but functions more like a survival trait. In certain incentive structures, the ability not to perceive others as fully human is an advantage. It reduces friction. It speeds execution. It insulates the actor from moral drag. Which makes your question, “How did we become such a low EQ society?”, especially uncomfortable. The answer may be that we did not become one accidentally. We engineered institutions, markets, and leadership pipelines that treat EQ as a soft nice-to-have while structurally rewarding its absence. The uncomfortable implication is that what we call leadership failure may actually be system success. This is where I think the Epstein or elite pathology you are pointing to becomes less about individual corruption and more about unbounded power without countervailing constraints. Past a certain point, there is no feedback loop strong enough to force self-correction. No cost to instrumentalizing people. No requirement to remain legible or accountable to the human consequences of one’s actions. Art like Altered Carbon lands because it exaggerates the mechanism just enough to make it visible. Immortality is a metaphor. What is actually corrosive is insulation from consequence, from reciprocity, and from the need to justify oneself to peers who can say no. The rare high IQ, high EQ leaders you are describing tend to share one trait. They operate inside constraints they respect. Not because they are saints, but because they remain embedded in systems that force encounters with others as moral equals. Maybe the deeper challenge is not cultivating more EQ in individuals, but rebuilding environments where EQ is not optional for legitimacy. Where authority degrades without it, rather than being insulated from it. On Thu, 5 Feb 2026 at 14:07, Venkatesh Hariharan via Silklist <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 12:18 PM Udhay Shankar N via Silklist > <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> The state of the world, and especially the Esptein files cesspool, has me >> thinking of _Altered carbon_ (the book, not the TV show). In my reading, the >> core point of the book is "past a certain level of wealth, you're not really >> human any more". >> >> The key reasons: >> >> * Access to wealth, opportunities, networks and bodily modifications far >> beyond what anyone at a lower socio-economic stratum can access. So much so >> that you're not really comparable any more. >> * Inability to perceive other people as even being of the same species, but >> only as exploitable resources. >> >> To be clear, this is not the only artistic work to advance this thesis - but >> it is the one that has made the core point in the most memorable way for me. >> >> At an even higher level of abstraction, one might argue that the point of >> all art is to examine the question of what it means to be human. Which could >> easily be also interpreted as what it means to be inhuman. >> >> Thoughts? >> >> Udhay >> > > It seems to me that many "successful" folks become so because of their IQ. > Once success goes to their heads, their EQ becomes inversely proportional to > their IQ. Or, perhaps, they never had much EQ in the first place. The number > of High IQ/Low EQ folks that are in leadership positions is perhaps the > biggest causal factor for the sad state of world affairs. My highest respect > is now reserved for the rare breed of folks who are High IQ/High EQ. As for > the High IQ/Low EQ folks, they have a certain stink of arrogance. Once you > learn to detect them, it becomes easy to avoid them! How did we become such a > low EQ society? > > Venky -- Silklist mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist
