James Cameron & the Human Animal

=Power Causes Brain Damage= How leaders lose mental capacities—most notably for reading other people—that were essential to their rise

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

...The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” But that’s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/ =How Wealth Reduces Compassion= As riches grow, empathy for others seems to decline

Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/ =6 studies on how money affects the mind= How does being rich affect the way we behave? In today’s talk, social psychologist Paul Piff provides a convincing case for the answer: not well.

Paul Piff: Does money make you mean?“As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases,” he says in his talk from TEDxMarin. Through surveys and studies, Piff and his colleagues have found that wealthier individuals are more likely to moralize greed and self-interest as favorable, less likely to be prosocial, and more likely to cheat and break laws if it behooves them.

https://blog.ted.com/6-studies-of-money-and-the-mind/ =Power Physically Damages the Brain, New Research Reveals=

Well, that explains a lot.
We all know from experience that some pretty terrible people end up in power. But if they're so nasty and incompetent how did they get there?

In the short-term, delusional overconfidence can definitely aid a leader's rise, as can unpleasant behavior. But you'd think that, at some stage at least, merit would matter and the most egregious offenders would be weeded out. Sadly, all too often that doesn't seem to be the case.

New science suggests an intriguing explanation -- it's not that abysmal people rise, it's that once you get power, you tend to become kind of abysmal.

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/power-physically-damages-the-brain-new-research-reveals.html