Simple sociopaths, from what I see. A friend of mine refers to it as "survival mode" -- everyone and everything is sized up in what you can use, what you can get out of it.

Spend long enough in that mode, and you don't know how to get out of it. Even when you're not surviving on the edge, you idolize it.

One of the things that frustrate me about my university program is that I'm surrounded by bored, upper-middle-class kids, who've never been out of school, and who idolize that kind of desperate survival mode as "edgy" and "revolutionary." It makes me want to scream at them :/