by robertsloan2

Created on: June 27, 2009

I chose "Intelligent" because I am. I have known a number of people in my life in many different social classes. The rich have some serious problems in life.

Let's broaden "intelligent" here to include Common Sense, which is uncommon and can come at any economic level.

The extremely wealthy, especially those born wealthy, are often rigidly controlled. Their education may be expensive but narrow and they are expected to adhere to their families' values without question. Their families have enormous resources to threaten, harass and control their children if they deviate at all from the lives planned for them.

Even the moderately wealthy often have this influence in how they're raised. It's not universal, some wealthy families are also healthy, warm and loving. But one ugly, bitterly common pattern is wealthy parents who emotionally abandon their kids. Throw a lot of money at them, spoil them with physical excess and don't pay any attention to them at all - or only pay attention to them in order to control them. I see a lot of "all or nothing" child rearing.

Either the kids run wild with no morals at all trying to get in enough trouble to get their parents' attention, but the parents always buy them out of the trouble, or they are subject to brutal restrictions far in excess of anyone else's childhood. Whether it's the kid or the parent that goes to the bad, when there's a lot of money the consequences are mitigated and sometimes nonexistent. Wealthy abusers have little to stop them from carrying out anything they want.

Common, or rather uncommon sense, is a type of intelligence that stands back from all the obvious cultural patterns of behavior, be those ghetto or mansion, and looks at things the way they really are. A person with common sense will have a good set of ethics that makes sense and is self consistent, then not act in ways that go against what they believe to be right.

So many wealthy people wind up miserable in part because they feel guilty over their good fortune. There are a host of mind games going on for people who grew up in rich families and led privileged lives. People are jealous, whether or not they had a good situation growing up. The parents could be coke-snorting high finance frauds robbing left and right and beating the kids on weekends, but the average person seeing the kid keep up appearances thinks of that kid as a snotty brat.

Even when they don't act like snotty brats.

I think it's hard for people who are limited by

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