Richard Conniff, the author of The Natural History of the Rich recently wrote an article in The New York Times entitled, "The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me." There he presents a case for why there are so many headlines about “Rich and Famous People Acting Like Total Idiots.” He marshalls support for his argument from what he calls the "Cookie Monster Experiment”:

"Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table."

I"t reminded the researchers of powerful people they had known in real life. One of them, for instance, had attended meetings with a magazine mogul who ate raw onions and slugged vodka from the bottle, but failed to share these amuse-bouches with his guests. Another had been through an oral exam for his doctorate at which one faculty member not only picked his ear wax, but held it up to dandle lovingly in the light."

"As stupid behaviors go, none of this is in a class with slamming somebody else’s Ferrari into a concrete wall. But science advances by tiny steps." [See Griffin, Eddie]

"The researchers went on to theorize that getting power causes people to focus so keenly on the potential rewards, like money, sex, public acclaim or an extra chocolate-chip cookie — not necessarily in that order, or frankly, any order at all, but preferably all at once — that they become oblivious to the people around them."

"Indeed, the people around them may abet this process, since they are often subordinates intent on keeping the boss happy. So for the boss, it starts to look like a world in which the traffic lights are always green (and damn the pedestrians)."

Reading this article in the context of Holy Week reminded me of the inverse/paradoxical claims of Christianity that sharing power leads to true, deep, grounded power -- a type power that makes you fully present to each moment, not rich and oblivious. Theologians call this power kenosis. Paul described it in Philippians 2:

"5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8 he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God also highly exalted him."