[Quotes and Insights #9]
From Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, by Daniel Dorling
The five tenets of injustice are that: elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and despair is inevitable.
Because of widespread and growing opposition to the five key unjust beliefs, including the belief that so many should now be ‘losers’, most of those advocating injustice are careful with their words.
And those who believe in these tenets are the majority in power across almost all rich countries.
Although many of those who are powerful may want to make the conditions of life a little less painful for others, they do not believe that there is a cure for modern social ills, or even that a few inequalities can be much alleviated.
Rather, they believe that just a few children are sufficiently able to be fully educated and only a few of those are then able to govern; the rest must be led.
They believe that the poor will always be with us no matter how rich we are.
They have also come to believe that most others are naturally, perhaps genetically, inferior to them.
And many of this small group believe that their friends’ and their own greed is helping the rest of humanity as much as humanity can be helped; they are convinced that to argue against such a counsel of despair is foolhardy.
It is their beliefs that uphold injustice.
I hear you, Mulga Mumblebrain.
However, by labeling ‘rightists’ as psychopathic does the same trick. By trick, I mean ‘others’ people as dangerous, demonic, etc.
It is less the people [who, yes, are at great un-ease in ecosystem] than the economic system.
But, yeah, I hear you.
Yes, these tenets are true, along with others, but what motivates an individual to see the world in such a fashion,and to do everything in his or her power, including the indiscriminate use of murderous violence,to ensure that it will be so? That motivational force, is, I believe, hatred, hatred of all that is other to oneself. This hatred is psychopathic,is manifested in racism,sectarian hatred,xenophobia, class hatred,misogyny, inter-generational hatred (a new obsession of the Right) and hatred of the natural world in which our human life and society are rooted. The Rightist hates everything different from himself, whereas the other general ideological tendency tends to find diversity and difference rewarding and fascinating. The Rightists, with their generalised outward focussed antipathy,is,moreover, I believe,simply projecting their own intense self-loathing and hatred of the intolerable burden of mortal life, onto the rest of existence. They seem to me to exhibit a perverted form of the ‘Golden Rule’-‘Feel about and regard others as you feel about yourself’. And, unless some miracle intervenes, they are driving us all, with ferocious intent and ‘passionate intensity ‘to destruction.
i like the summary of these tenets (rationalisations) so much that i’ve copied them into my gmail signature footer. along with the demand they be rejected and rejected now by all of us.