(no subject)
I can't personally abide populism, but I am intrigued how it can share such similar sentiments across the left/right spectrum. This but from John Haidt (author of "The Happiness Hypothesis") really teases out something that's been on the tip of my tongue for a while:
We really hate cheaters, slackers, and exploiters. By far the most common message I saw at OWS was that the rich (“the 1 percent”) got rich by taking without giving. They cheated and exploited their way to the top. As if that wasn’t bad enough, we the taxpayers then had to bail them out after they crashed the economy, and so now they really owe us for saving their necks. It’s high time that they started giving back, paying what they owe.
As a point of comparison, a similar look at signs found at the Tea Party rallies suggests that protesters there are also chiefly concerned with fairness. The key to understanding Tea Partiers' morality, though, is that they want to restore the law of karma. They want laziness and cheating to be punished, and they see liberalism and liberal government as an assault on that project. The liberal fairness of OWS diverges from conservative and libertarian fairness in that liberals often think that equality of outcomes is evidence of fairness.
I think the final conclusion is somewhat unfair, something tells me most liberals can accept a level of outcome difference, but the current one feels a bit on the high side. However, the economic focus on outcomes, versus the focus on process generally is probably correct. I don't think these goals mesh together well, but it does explain why the desire to change is so strong (fairness issues are kind of the bread and butter of our social being).
We really hate cheaters, slackers, and exploiters. By far the most common message I saw at OWS was that the rich (“the 1 percent”) got rich by taking without giving. They cheated and exploited their way to the top. As if that wasn’t bad enough, we the taxpayers then had to bail them out after they crashed the economy, and so now they really owe us for saving their necks. It’s high time that they started giving back, paying what they owe.
As a point of comparison, a similar look at signs found at the Tea Party rallies suggests that protesters there are also chiefly concerned with fairness. The key to understanding Tea Partiers' morality, though, is that they want to restore the law of karma. They want laziness and cheating to be punished, and they see liberalism and liberal government as an assault on that project. The liberal fairness of OWS diverges from conservative and libertarian fairness in that liberals often think that equality of outcomes is evidence of fairness.
I think the final conclusion is somewhat unfair, something tells me most liberals can accept a level of outcome difference, but the current one feels a bit on the high side. However, the economic focus on outcomes, versus the focus on process generally is probably correct. I don't think these goals mesh together well, but it does explain why the desire to change is so strong (fairness issues are kind of the bread and butter of our social being).