this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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It is kind of strange how much more of a visceral reaction people have to the idea of poor people cheating the system, compared to rich people cheating the system. Logically, it seems like the latter should get people a lot more riled up, which I guess speaks to the power of their propaganda.
See there's this idea that when rich people cheat the system, they are being intelligent and finding proper loopholes, and by showcasing enough diligence and intellect to find these loopholes they are proving why they deserve to be rich in the first place.
Poor people who cheat the system, often so that they can stay alive. They are seen as inhuman and the idea is that if they weren't cretins they wouldn't be so poor as to need to cheat to begin with.
Admittedly, this seems to be changing as the gap between the rich and the poor grows wider and wider and wider, with the temporarily embarrassed millionaires now becoming Furious and hungry.
I think you're very right. But there's also something that makes one change how they see rich doing "tax optimisation", that I know because I now see it as something amoral, which I didn't before.
But also, the difference between poor and middle was bigger thatln middle and rich at some point in time. Now that is the opposite, any one from the middle class is closer to being poor than to being rich, that also may affect opinion shift
I think your 100% right, and it's a cognitive bias referred to as the Halo Effect.
Oh but you see, the rich guys are resourceful and clever while the poor are lazy criminals.
It's because people have strange hang ups about how "a victim" is supposed to be, I think. That is why many people who start helping drug addicts and the homeless are often disillusioned at first, when they find out that many of these people can be quite the assholes.
The same goes for those who are rather at the short end of the stick themselves and actually have to live in poor neighborhoods. It's easier to be virtue signalling about how you supposedly care for poor people than actually living with them.
People need to separate "being good" from deserving help. That would make a lot of problems much easier to work on.