It's not that they view them as arbitrary signs of power to aspire to, it's that those things really do work well to manipulate others into doing what you want. Detaching a victim from reality - making them instead blindly believe what you say - turns them into a very useful tool. Usually people have a conscious and don't want to manipulate others to get ahead, but there will always be some who simply don't care, and they end up being the ones to amass more power and influence than their peers as a result.