But that isn't at all what the quote says, that's what you attributed to it.
Personally I think both extremes are terrible, but leaning on the side of cynicism seems safer.
"soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful"
In other words, how they are different from others. Not that they are fundamentally soft, cynicalm or bad.
Having different values from "you and me" doesn't make people evil.
For most of history, it (mostly erroneously) did. In 2019, this also applies. It's just applied much faster over global distances through the Internet.
Perhaps that's what the HN audience really thinks of rich people and thus skipped that point? Someone thinking they are better than others based on wealth alone is an unmistakable negative in my book.
It is more like they think they are better than us, and "but really they think they are better than us".
This studies are not even about the super-rich, people with like $50k cars are showing less consideration toward people that they fell are poorer.
Which is nonetheless both pertinent and important to keep in mind.
Only one claim per comment?
The rich man’s mentality can also work for middle class people if every purchase they make is a long-term well-informed decision, rather than flying with the pop culture of what everyone else is currently buying, wearing or visiting. For example, buy timeless durable unfashionable clothing, buy a used but durable car from which you can extract the best value in the long run, buy products which can be utilised for many purposes, etc.
With enough money, you can afford to wait for a good deal because you don't need the money right now to live. When you're wealthy, you can brave health issues, accidents, sudden crossings with the law, etc. without ever truly touching the money-in-wait for a good deal. When you're middle-class you definitely don't have as much cushion.
This is similar to the logic of "the best time to buy is a recession", except its difficult to buy during a recession purely because it's more likely that a middle class person's cushion is gone due to economic conditions and thus has no money to buy good deals.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” ― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms