I think it's more than likely that they've spent their whole lives trying to accumulate power without ever having cultivated the sense of how to use it. Sort of how in so many places all around the world people of less means seem to be so happy. Obviously there are exceptions abound and I'm not trying to present a quantitative argument one way or another.
Just that the people who live well aren't always the ones who are living "well", if you take my meaning.
I obviously can't be the judge of them and say "all the people I know that are like _that_ are fundamentally unfulfilled", but I can say about myself that the times where I had acted in that way didn't make me any happier, if I were to be honest with myself.
Play the politics to get the things you need, by all means. But if life is a jungle then you're better off with a machete and your own skills (which can never be taken away from you) than a heavy bag of looted gold and a head full of fantasies about why you rightly own it.
If you go buy some wood and build a piece of furniture, you have created something of value that is more than what it was before, and the elite have nothing to say or benefit from it.
And if buying is a bridge too far, you can go into the woods, cut down a tree, and drag it home and fashion it into something.
Yes, entropy means everything will eventually slump into the heat-death of the universe, but here and now we can fight entropy and make our world, even if just the local world of where we live, a bit better.
Ethics mean an entirely thing when you are older and you have loved ones that need to be cared. A little dishonesty can mean the difference between opportunities for your children or sending your children to a community college.
I'm also sympathetic with the cheaters. Everyone knows that these leetcode interviews are pretty dumb. Most people probably pass by memorizing everything and forgetting the stuff right afterwards. It's testing willingness to grind rather than ad hoc problem solving capabilities. If someone is capable of doing the job and just figuring out a way to get through the gatekeeping, I don't care. I know many people that cheated on exams at some point but are pretty legit otherwise.
> Look at this "personality type" as you call it: People who bullshit their way through life, self-promote, swindle, grift, fake it til they make it, hustle, exploit people's good intentions, take credit for the work of others, and so on.
There are a lot of psychological and societal mechanism that tend to punish this behavior. I'd rather be financially well enough off but honest rather than a super rich asshole.
> I'm one of those naive suckers who thinks hard work in the trenches should be rewarded. At work I often sit there doing the dirty gritty work that needs to get done, while peers write bullshit presentations and get face-time with the execs, and schmooze their way to promotion after promotion, and it sucks.
For myself, I decided that the best way is to be competent and do the hard work, but also to set boundaries, to ensure that my work is visible, to communicate ideas and feedback with execs and to fight against the fakers. You won't get anything if you don't ask for it. Taking down obvious fakes can take a while if the execs are too gullible, but it's worth doing.
If your execs are idiot assholes rather than competent people with some integrity, you should probably look for a job elsewhere.
Right, but this is why ST:TNG is such a nice show to watch, because it's the kind of show that some of us, at least, want to live in. Whereas Star Trek Discovery is a terrible show to watch, because it's not. Who wants to watch a show about a bunch of unlikable characters that fight each other and backstab? (Apparently a fair number of people these days, or else the show would have died quickly.)
>Like it or not, we live in a zero-sum dog-eat-dog world
If you want to see the best depiction of the universe we live in, watch the Star Trek episodes about the Mirror Universe (esp. the "In a Mirror, Darkly" 2-parter in Enterprise). Those episodes show humans as they really are in our universe, unlike the moral and conscientious humans depicted in ST:TNG.
Look at this "personality type" as you call it: People who bullshit their way through life, self-promote, swindle, grift, fake it til they make it, hustle, exploit people's good intentions, take credit for the work of others, and so on... They aren't weirdo sociopaths who simply go get an MBA. They're CEOs, SVPs, business and political leaders, the ultrarich. They're Presidents and Senators. They are the elite, the few who our society is set up to most highly reward. Of course people who want to get ahead are going to emulate this behavior. It's practical. It works in the world that we have set up.
I'd love to live in the Star Trek world. I'm one of those naive suckers who thinks hard work in the trenches should be rewarded. At work I often sit there doing the dirty gritty work that needs to get done, while peers write bullshit presentations and get face-time with the execs, and schmooze their way to promotion after promotion, and it sucks. If I was younger and had a lot more ahead of me, I'd probably cheat and grift like the rest of em, and if I could send a message back decades to 20-year-old me it would probably be "lose the ethical spine and take whatever you can."