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
