What is interesting about that place is that the pace and expense of life turns people into assholes, into functional psychotics, and this is happening at the same time as the relative influence of the people who work there is increasing drastically.
Look at the influence Google and Facebook, specifically, wield.
Look at the influence the words compassion and justice wield, even when denuded of functional content, even when driven into being their very opposites.
I went to Berkeley. I found the people there cold, rude and unfriendly. There are too many people in the Bay Area, too much traffic, homes are much too expensive, work is too stressful, taxes are too high, and by the time many people get home at night, all they want to do is hide.
These are the people who want to rule our lives. As groveling as most of the peasants are, there are kings and queens, dukes and earls, and a landed aristocracy. And their sense of purpose in life seems to derive in no small measure from plans to lighten the load of plebians they do not understand, do not interact with on a regular basis, and whose relative failures and successes affect them in no important way.