The Just-World Fallacy
The Misconception: People who are losing at the game of life must have done something to deserve it.
The Truth: The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often get away with their actions without consequences.
A woman goes out to a club wearing stilettos and a miniskirt with no underwear.
She gets pretty drunk and stumbles home in the wrong direction.
She ends up lost in a bad neighborhood. She gets raped.
Is she to blame in some way? Was this her fault? Was she asking for it?
People often say yes to all three in studies asking similar questions after presenting similar scenarios.
It is common in fiction for the bad guys to lose and the good guys to win.
It’s how you would like to see the world- just and fair.
In psychology, the tendency to believe this is how the real world actually works is called the Just-World Fallacy.
More specifically, this is the tendency to react to horrible misfortune, like homelessness or drug addiction, by believing the people stuck in horrible situations must have done something to deserve it.
The key word there is deserve. This is not an observation bad choices lead to bad outcomes.
In a 1966 study by Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons, 72 women watched a woman solve problems and get electric shocks when she messed up.
The woman was actually pretending, but the people watching didn’t know this.
Lerner based these studies on the things he had seen working with the mentally ill. He noticed how he and other doctors, nurses and orderlies would sometimes insult people who were suffering or come up with assumptions about what kind of people they were, or joke about their illness.
Lerner thought this behavior might be an attempt to protect the psyche of people facing an abysmal, unrelenting amount of misery and despair.
In his study, when asked to describe the woman getting shocked, many of the observers devalued her. They berated her character and her appearance. They said she deserved it.
Lerner also taught a class on society and medicine, and he noticed many students thought poor people were just lazy people who wanted a handout.
So, he conducted another study where he had two men solve puzzles. At the end, one of them was randomly awarded a large sum of money. The observers were told the reward was completely random.
Still, when asked later to evaluate the two men, people said the one who got the award was smarter, more talented, better at solving puzzles and more productive.
A giant amount of research has been done since his studies, and most psychologists have come to the same conclusion: You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is.
“Zick Rubin of Harvard University and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA have conducted surveys to examine the characteristics of people with strong beliefs in a just world. They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups. To a lesser but still significant degree, the believers in a just world tend to ‘feel less of a need to engage in activities to change society or to alleviate plight of social victims.’”
- Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez from an essay at The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
You’ve heard “what goes around comes around” before, or maybe you’ve seen a person get what was coming to them and thought, “that’s karma for you.”
These are shades of the Just World Fallacy.
It sucks to think the world isn’t fair. It feels better to believe in karma and justice, in fairness and reward. A world with the righteous on one side of the scale, and evil on the other – that seems to make sense.
You want to believe those who work hard and sacrifice get ahead, and those who are lazy and cheat do not.
This, of course, is not always true. Success is often greatly influenced by when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family and random chance. All the hard work in the world can’t change those initial factors, which is not to say you should just give up if you were born poor.
The Just-World Fallacy can also lead to a false sense of security.
You want to feel in control, so you assume as long as you avoid bad behavior, you won’t be harmed. You feel safer when you believe those who engage in bad behavior end up on the street, or pregnant, or addicted, or raped.
It is infuriating when lazy cheats and con artists get ahead in the world while firemen and policemen put in long hours for little pay.
Deep down, you want to believe hard work and virtue will lead to success, and laziness, evil and manipulation will lead to ruin, so you go ahead and edit the world to match those expectations.
Yet, in reality, evil often prospers and never pays the price.
There are anecdotal accounts of people seeing the prisoners of concentration camps for the first time and assuming they must have been terrible criminals. The first place the mind goes is the place where the world is just.
Why do you do this?
Psychologists are unsure. Some say it is a need to be able to predict the outcome of your own behavior, or to feel secure in your past decisions. More research is needed.
To be sure, you would like to live in a world where people in white hats bring people in black hats to justice, but you don’t.
You Are Not So Smart – The Book
If you buy one book this year…well, I suppose you should get something you’ve had your eye on for a while. But, if you buy two or more books this year, might I recommend one of them be a celebration of self delusion? Give the gift of humility (to yourself or someone else you love). Watch the trailer.
Order now: Amazon - Barnes and Noble - iTunes - Books A Million
Links:
Ten Movies Where the Bad Guy Wins
Markkula center essay on Just-World Fallacy
Cognitive Biases in Blaming the Victim
Just-World Phenomenon at the Rape Crisis Encyclopedia
Responses to victimization and belief in a just world
Just-World Fallacy in Poker Players
Predicting perceptions of victimization
Just World post at Omniverse Blog (scroll down)
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“Yet, in reality, evil often prospers and never pays the price.”
How do beliefs in things like heaven/hell work into this? It seems like if you looked around and saw evil rewarded and good punished, you would want to believe in some kind of karmic retribution that would balance things, even if it took place after death.
Why would I believe that? I think the moral of the story here is life doesn’t work how you want to believe it does, it’s just a callous, uncaring, meaningless waste of time.
I think basically society has created this whole issue, and society is the one to change it, example if everyone who reads this blog and comments are good people we should unite rally against evil, start kicking out corrupt CEO’s and politicians, and install a just leadership..perhaps the next blog will start out as the world is now fair…but the reality is its just a blog and a topic of conversation, yet still our reality and all we do is sit here and talk about it….
Yet more propaganda.
Idealism is basically just propaganda for politicians to get more power.
And when someone gets power, he inevitably uses it for his own ends.
That’s just how the world works.
You can’t do anything about it because you have no power.
When we’re children, we’re taught with reward and punishment. One of the largest systems of reward and punishment is religion. When some people believes that there’s a creator god that cares about us, it’s like believing in an omniscient, loving sky-parent. (Heavenly Father.) A loving parent would never be arbitrary and cruel, and an omniscient god is in control of every little thing. Therefore, good fortune is reward, misfortune is punishment.
Maybe the reason people DO believe in religion and God and a higher authority figure is because of this Just-World Fallacy. In the end, even if it doesn’t happen on this world, people want to believe they will be rewarded for doing good and the bad will be punished. Everything has to be “fair” and people should get what they deserve. That’s what makes “Heaven” so enticing and easy for people to believe without question
Also, the rape scenario brings up some additional factors, because in addition to judging whether or not the victim is “blameworthy” most people also are judging the perpetrator as well. I think (without good evidence) that many people believe in a zero-sum blame game — if the victim is somehow partially to blame for the crime, then that makes the perpetrator somehow less blameworthy — but our justice system should (in my opinion, but it obviously does not) have the same punishment for the perpetrator in the above scenario, as one who commits the crime under other circumstances. If someone says “the victim is partially to blame because they did something that a reasonable person believes would be dangerous” then I don’t think this necessarily means that they believe that the perpetrator is less blameworthy, but I can see how someone with a zero-sum view of blame would think so.
Secondly, there is the issue of “are the actions of the victim something we should counsel others to not do?” And I think the answer is yes, in this case — getting drunk and walking home without assistance (see SuperFreakonomics discussion of drunk walking) is definitely a bad idea, and dangerous, and you probably should try to avoid it. There are bad results that may occur — you might trip and break your leg, or you may be criminally attacked. That a reasonable person would say “don’t do that, it’s verifiably unsafe, your actions may result in harm to yourself” does not change the guilt of the criminal who ends up being the actual embodiment of that harm.
If you change the story to be: “a person goes to the bar and gets pretty drunk, then stumbles home, but trips and breaks their leg” what would the responses be to your 3 questions? Does the likelihood of the event matter? If instead of “breaks their leg” it was “was hit by a meteor” does it change people’s estimation of blame?
“Success” in life is both a result of luck and chance, and of doing actions that contribute to that success — in various ratios for various people. Not only is it hard to determine the correct ratio of luck/deservedness, but they interact with each other: it may be luck to win the lottery, but some people invest the money wisely and others spend it foolishly and perhaps end up worse than before.
Amazingly good reply! Thank you.
Bullshit – and shame on Adam for backing you up.
When a rapist commits rape, he has no excuse, period.
Your examples consisting of falls and meteors conveniently sidestep anything pertinent to violent crime.
By your estimation, and using your own logic, if you passed out on the street (for whatever reason) and woke up without your watch, clothes and wallet, you’d be at least partly to blame. I’m sure the funny walk and gnawing pain in your nether-regions would also be mirrored back at you in the form of guilt.
I wont be so direct to say I agree or disagree with you, but if your a reasonable person and accept the truth of reality, that evil exist and people will take advantage of situations, then you know its pretty muc fact youll get raped in a bad neighborhood, drunk, attractive, with no panties, (if you dont believe so perhaps you should go live in the ghetto, because its alot cheaper)….but my point is there are just givens in this world, and thats why people create sterotypes and profiling, because enough people have agreed its true, so if you understand all of that, then one should know better not to walk down the bad neighborhood, making them accountable for what happens to them…it sounds messed up but thats the way i see it, and I happend to believe the harder it is to hear something more likely its the truth-hope anyone who reads this gets the gist and understands and doesnt offend anyone-
@Mark – Brian wrote: “but our justice system should (in my opinion, but it obviously does not) have the same punishment for the perpetrator in the above scenario, as one who commits the crime under other circumstances.”
So, I think you’re both on the same page…
In a legal sense, it’s true that it doesn’t matter what the victim was doing when they were raped. The fact of the matter is that the rapist committed the crime PERIOD. However, just for practical purposes, if it were ME, I would not walk through the ghetto on purpose in a short skirt with no panties, simply because I wouldn’t want to invite that kind of attention late at night. There were some occurrences like this in Brooklyn recently, and ALL of the ictims were wearing skirts, which made it easy for the offender to slip his hand up and grope them. Does that make it their fault for dressing to “provocatively?” Absolutely NOT, but it did make them more vulnerable. The analgoy is that it’s not your fault if you fly out of your convertible after that guy rear ended you, but if you had been wearing your sealtbelt maybe you would have been safer… Of course, on the other hand, even in a very conservative pants suit, I might have been mugged anyway. Would that have been my fault?
I just want to say, i think evil has just as much as a responsibility to be evil, as good to be good….they depend on each other…
As for Psychology, there are all kinds.
@Brian Moore That’s a very practical way of looking at it. I would quote from Bhagawad Gita in support of that view: “You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action; Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.”
Being a former believer in Santa Claus and former Christian, I can say that there is a strong desire to believe that God rewards the good and punishes the evil. The world must be just, because there’s somebody pulling the strings who makes sure it is so.
In fact, I’m kind of surprised you didn’t ventures this guess. It is the first correlation mentioned in your quote (acknowledging that it does not imply causation). But I recall a very strong inclination to believe that when bad things happened, God was punishing somebody or something.
I now understand the sage truism: Shit Happens.
This blog rocks! Awesome article.
Aptly put. We all have an innate need for security, that through following a set formula, we can protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm.
Lately, there’s been some pretty horrific crimes against teenage girls in Australia, and each time I read the news, I catch myself looking out for clues such as “the attacker was known to the victim”, when in reality there is little one could have done to prevent such an attack.
People often judge others who are too fat, or too sick in a similar way. Sometimes, the simple effort of learning to apportion blame can lead to a better appreciation of what people have to go through. One would often end up surprised how little control people actually have over their lives. Mark Menjivar http://beautifuldecay.com/2009/06/03/mark-menjivar/ has photos of fridges. If you wonder why some people eat badly, Mark explains the living circumstances. Some are old, and live alone after their spouses have died. Others work odd hours.
This is a poorly-reasoned post. It conflates the concept of good and evil with cause and effect. Good things don’t happen to people because they are good, and bad things don’t happen to bad people because they are evil. But things do happen to people because of what they choose to do.
If you have a test in school, studying for it will help your chances of getting a good grade. Getting enough good grades will help your chances of getting into a good college or getting a good job. Sure, someone else might succeed through luck or connections, and you might still fail through bad luck or pissing off an influential person. But working hard improves your chances.
People tend to associate success with good personal qualities like responsibility, intelligence, and being a hard worker because they know that those qualities are often — but not always — what lead to success. Just because someone got rich by inheriting a fortune or winning the lottery, doesn’t mean a lot of other people get rich by working hard or having brilliant ideas.
There isn’t an ironclad, 100% guaranteed cause-and-effect relationship between good personal qualities and success, or between bad personal qualities and failure. The world is more complex than that. But I’d bet there is a statistically significant correlation.
Similarly, bad people may not always be brought to justice by good people. But I wouldn’t suggest launching a new career as a bank robber or purse snatcher based on that observation. You will probably end up in prison.
I’m really glad that there were several people brave enough to call bullshit on this post.
That’s not to say that the reasoning and emotions of the author are bullshit, but rather that the conclusions reached are.
I’m not going to argue that life is fair or just. Fairness is a mater of perspective. Justice is a matter of consequence for one’s actions. And while life itself is neither fair nor just, we should try to make it so. Strive for fairness in your own personal way- donate to charity, help a stranger, etc. Justice is striven for by our Justice System- that is our court of laws which seeks to punish those who directly harm others.
Beyond that, you have to realize that life is NOT a zero sum game. Someone getting rich does not come at the expense of someone else getting poorer. If you believe that it is, then you have given up on objective reasoning (aka logic). Just look at where the world is today, and tell me that we’re worse or the same off as we were 100 or 200 years ago. At whose expense did all of mankind’s achievements come from?
The answer is nobody’s. Individuals made up their mind to live their lives, build, improve, learn, take risks, make money, and everything else involved in a free society.
Life. Try living it instead of bemoaning it.
As much as I agree with the concept that justice and fairness is not necessarily tied to cause and effect, I will take a stab though at your statement : “Just look at where the world is today, and tell me that we’re worse or the same off as we were 100 or 200 years ago. At whose expense did all of mankind’s achievements come from?”
It has been proposed that major achievements of the west were made possible at the expense of African slavery. Think about it– forced cheap and free labor while the locals concerned themselves with loftier pursuits.
The slavery idea is highly unlikely to have been true. On the contrary, as with the Romans, it can be argued that accesss to cheap labour removed the need for a number of inventions—thus, hampering progresss.
Further, most of the progress (in terms of ideas, technology, science) we saw during the last few hundred years appears to have come from countries with comparatively little access too slavery at the time. (Germany is a splendid example.)
Looking, in turn, within countries, many of the idea makers were upper-class people who had sufficient control over their time and life even without slavery—-while the major part of the population was still forced to work hard to survive. In other words, the amount of new brain-power made available by slavery was not very large.
@Michael Eriksson
“Looking, in turn, within countries, many of the idea makers were upper-class people who had sufficient control over their time and life even without slavery”
Slavery can be of varied forms. At present time we also live in the world of slavery. Children making Nike shoes are not slaves you deem?
“In other words, the amount of new brain-power made available by slavery was not very large.”
After 16 hours of hard phisical work, who would still retain some force and have the time to think or invent something? But was it not for their hard work, none of it would be possible.
@Mageia
Nothing you say here truly speaks against my comment. Notably, the existence of slavery is, it appears, a semantic disagreement with no effect on the underlying reasoning. Your statement concerning brain-power, OTOH, is actually supporting my comment, in as far as it could actually point to a reduction in the brain-power available. (Note that brain-power is far more critical to the development of society than physical work.)
Thanks for this. I couldn’t put it better. The feeling is a bit like the oversimplified view of just world should be replaced by (another oversimplified) view of absolutely chaotic world, where nothing really matters.
All of you people responding like this are pretty much attacking a strawman, and refuting something the article did not claim. He showed the psychological bias there, and that is what the argument is about.
I am not sure I can agree with this reply.
The same person starting life in, say, project housing, regardless of how smart, good, etc, they are, is going to have fewer opportunities to succeed than a person coming from an upper middle-class family in a wealthier neighborhood.
This is not the person’s fault or choice. But the same person can turn out very different depending on their circumstances.
I think I agree more that this “just-world” really is a fallacy, and that luck plays a larger role than most people will admit.
I have been extremely poor before, while working three jobs and trying to put myself through college. I have also never broken the law, or done anything to “deserve” that, but somehow, it was “my fault” that I didn’t have enough to eat, and I was “looking for a handout”?
Yes. This is the only point I was making with discussing this fallacy.
“Good” actions generally lead to improved results. That’s how we define what “good” means.
There’s a good point buried in there. What we “deserve” is at best an abstraction. It’s might faintly predict the future trendline of our circumstances, but it doesn’t say much about what’s going to happen _next_.
But nevertheless, it’s an even more dangerous fallacy to pretend that, just because no specific consequence of an action is _completely inevitable_ and _necessarily imminent_, the action in question has no _realistically foreseeable_ consequences.
No one, for example, “deserves” to be raped. A man who rapes women is a dangerous criminal who should be locked away as a hazard to public safety, at the first available opportunity. However, knowing as we do that not all such people have yet been locked away, it is entirely reasonable to describe the behavior of a woman who goes out alone in a short dress with no underwear and proceeds to get drunk before attempting to stumble home, as _immensely foolish_. Which does not negate the culpability of the rapist in the slightest, but does provide the potential for a useful lesson in reducing the risk of becoming a victim.
Some people are poor because they’ve spent their entire lives making bad choices. Some are broke because they’ve had some bad luck…or for that matter, are just starting out in life. The folks who say “I used to be poor, and it wasn’t my fault” are not a refutation of this distinction, but a confirmation of it. If your condition of poverty is not truly the result of your own poor capacity for making choices, the odds are it will be temporary.
The books eventually balance. Just not always on the timescale we’d like.
“If your condition of poverty is not truly the result of your own poor capacity for making choices, the odds are it will be temporary.”
Tell that to a kid born in the slums of Mexico City.
“The books eventually balance. Just not always on the timescale we’d like.”
The idea of a meritocracy is more entrenched than religion, and just as weird of a way of dealing with reality.
They don’t balance if you live in India and you are of the “un-touchable” or lower classes, nor if you are struck with a debilitating illness that drains your savings, or if you have one stroke of bad luck after another. While it is true that MOST of the time, traits that are considered advantageous to survival are associated with success, there is a small percentage of the time when this isn’t true. Life is very much like poker. You almost always have to have skill to win, but you can’t win without a good bit of luck.
ju2tin I think you hit the nail on the head. Life is not fair, bad guys do often win but preparing yourself to succeed will increase your chances of winning of just sitting back and letting life take over. You still may fail with preparation but the chances are diminished greatly and you at least have the knowledge that you tried.
Juztin (and Aaron) – that’s a straw man argument. David’s point is that people start with the OUTCOMES they observe and then work backwards (based on the Just World fallacy) to predict that the people who succeeded are the people who worked harder or were more deserving. Your “refutation” is that you believe that by working harder one increases one’s chances of success. If you’ll think about it for a moment, you’ll see that your assertion and David’s are not mutually exclusive; you haven’t even met his argument (much less “called bullshit”, Spencer). He never said that work is not correlated with success.
Spencer, I agree with you that life is not a zero-sum game and that we should strive to be fair in our own lives. But again, neither of these claims is in conflict with David’s post.
kid, David isn’t positing a world view of any kind, much less an oversimplified one. He’s pointing out that observable human biases create beliefs (such as “everyone gets what he deserves”) that are inconsistent with observed reality (many people obviously do not get what they deserve).
Yes. Exactly.
Lol, reading these arguments after reading your “Backfire effect” post.
Of course, I’m just getting my confirmation bias on!
well, that’s depressing…
Where in all of that did you get that he was advocating people to do bad things because they will go unpunished? He was merely discussing other people’s reactions to said bad things. On another note, it is this just-world thinking that gets people believing the crock that is the “American dream,” thinking that hard work is all one needs to be successful. This leads to the kind of thinking that downplays assistance to the needy of all kinds.
Wow this pretty much reflects my view.
I find myself to be almost a polar opposite to the person primarily described in this post. I’m curious what those studies say about people like me.
A very interesting read—and a bit of an eye-opener: I was aware of the phenomenon, but have always figured that most of us have had at least some period of undeserved (at least in our own perception) misfortune of our own, which should have provided a cure. Possibly, the cure was not as effective on the population as whole as I thought.
As an aside, you use the word “you” in a very unfortunate manner in some statements (at least towards the end). These will be taken as unfair by many and will actually be inaccurate for at least a few. Generally, I strongly advise against using “you” in texts of any generality, and to instead use formulations based on e.g. “we”, “one”, “someone”, or “people”.
“Success is often the result of when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family and random chance. All the hard work in the world can’t change those initial factors.”
No, Success is always influenced by those things, but it is not the -result- of them. “All the hard work in the world” -can- overcome those factors.
Yes, influenced is a better word. I will change it.
How does “fooling” people into thinking something specific about an experiment create plausible facts to what people think? For example, let’s say I’m in a game show and it’s rigged for me to win. No one else knows this but me. From your argument you are saying that studies show that people will refer to me as smart and the rest dumb. Well, of course they will. That’s because that’s what they see. How are we supposed to infer something upon someone that we don’t see. Another example is a homeless man asking for a handout, but it turns out this guy lives in a condo a few blocks down and drives a BMW. His outward appearance is what we see, not the underlying appearance. This is why people are repulsed by those who look dirty, are outwardly rude or stuck up. This is what we see. Later on someone might tell me “Oh that rude person is really nice if you get to know them”. But what difference does that make. If the person cannot make their first impression who they really are and rather display another persona then why should I feel any different. This is normal. For humanity to see the person underneath is asking just a bit too much from humanity at this point. It would be nice but that’s a fantasy land.
Also I know a few people who had nothing when they started and ended up with everything after a LOT of hard work. I also know people who have had opportunity after opportunity to make their life better and they squandered it. When I see homeless I cannot judge their situtation because I do not know the causes of how they got there, however I know for a fact that “most” people out there on the streets COULD make a better lives for themselves. The Just-World fallacy is not a fallacy. We have created the chemistry that exists today. We are more than capable of changing that chemistry into something else. To believe that the world can be better and just is not a fallacy, or to believe that certain people can succeed against all odds is not a fallacy. To believe that certain people are just victims who are 100% blameless. That’s the fallacy.
Yep, it’s these kids’ fault. If they really wanted to get ahead in life, they would stop starving to death, get a decent job, put in the hours, save up, and get a nice place to live. Instead, they just lay around dieing and waiting for hand outs from us hard working westerners. I worked hard to be born into a well off family in a first world country, and have my parents provide me with a good education. If I can do it, so can they. /s
http://www.google.com/images?oe=UTF-8&gfns=1&q=starving+african+child&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=875&bih=603
In normal economic conditions, most people on the streets, statistically speaking, are mentally incompetent OR struggling with some sort of substance addiction. Yes, there definitely are the battered women or teens escaping abuse, but most of those people generally get help, and at least are able to stay off the streets. The of course, there are those people who have suffered every stroke of bad luck imaginable, and still, through the force of their own merit, still survive to reproduce and create a life for themselves. Simply the laws of universal attraction I suppose…
I live in a country (Philippines) where a large part of the population is either below the poverty line or on it, and I kind of understand why people submit themselves to the Just-World fallacy.
For example, most of us are Catholics and our religion greatly affects how we live our day to day lives, poor people pray to God for a better future while better off ones blame him for certain misfortunes, and almost all of those prayers go unanswered. I’m not questioning religion here but isn’t it a bit ironic that a lot of successful people (rich, living comfortably) are the ones who sullied their hands with inexcusable actions?
People should accept that we don’t live in a world of Black and White, but rather life is a centillion shades of Grey.
Excellent.
Do you know of any experiments such as this performed with criminals? That is, anyone who doesn’t have a strong inclination and propensity to considering themselves a member of the “just” part of society. Damned, that felt as a bad attempt at being eloquent, but you get what I mean.
But I wonder, is this effect part of you wanting that people doing the same thing you do to be rewarded? That would make sense in my mind at least.
Also, awesome blog!
I’ll make sure to peruse the archive for more fascinating tidbits shortly.
The essay cited in the article uses some buzzwords like “underprivileged groups” and “social victims” which indicate that the authors may well make their living (or at least make some money) as consultants for the “welfare industry”. So I would expect some bias there: trying to prove an already predetermined result.
Generally, I like the site, but this article is, in my view, rather below the usual standard. Too many uncertain and unclear assertions. There is not that much “smart” or “dumb” about someone’s political views, which includes the view of the poor.
BTW I can speak a little about the poor, because I spent my childhood and teenage years in a 1990s post-communist blockhouse suburb in Eastern Europe (or Central, as you wish …. back then, it was definitely Eastern). Almost everyone there was hit by the economic transformation, but only a relatively small percentage of the people stayed poor for extended periods.
And these “consistently poor” people were notably similar: they demonstrated consistently bad judgment when it came to handling money. If you have some kind of income (either wage or, in those cases, mostly welfare payments), it matters a lot if you spend it on something useful, or on soccer betting & beer. Once, it may not make a difference, but 50 times… hey.
On the other hand, I never knew anyone with any economical common sense who consistently stayed on the social bottom, unless that person was a heavy alcoholic (quite frequent in Slavic countries, alas). Even in tanking economy, it took serious and chronic stupidity to sink entirely and stay there.
I think a lot of this depends on how you ask the question. There’s a difference between something being my fault and there being a reasonable opportunity for my actions to have changed the outcome. If I don’t lock my doors and my house is robbed it is not my fault. However, I could have easily prevented it. Feeling empowered and understanding that your decisions make a difference is not the same thing as absolving society/government or whatever at large of responsibility.
Presenting things in absolutes is also misleading. Yes, people who work hard don’t always get ahead. However, I’m certain that people who work harder get ahead far more often than people who don’t, and it has nothing to do with the world being fair or not. There are a finite amount of resources and opportunity on the planet and people who work harder get more of them.
that’s a really interesting article, yet i think the camps are a really poor illustration. people would think prisoners are criminals because that’s the only coherent reason -the whole extermination thing lacks logic in my (and i would hope not only in mine) opinion- that would be encaged: why need make them prisoners if not to protect the society? the whole reward/punishment thing does only apply as a warning to other potential criminals, but that requires prisoners to be guilty as well, as it’s a man-made reconstitution of the just-world thing.
s/benefactors/beneficiaries/
Yeah I saw that too. Learn your words before telling me I’m not so smart.
Ha, yes, I am not so smart indeed. I will repair it.
We feel this way because we are evolved to feel this way. Reciprocity and altruism, two of the hallmarks of our species, cannot evolve without an innate moral sense of fairness. Studies show that toddlers shown a puppet show of a puppet stealing from another will punish the cheater. We have dedicated neural circuitry to detecting cheating in a variety of contexts, and across all cultures cheating (violations of reciprocity) are condemned and punished.
Check out How the Mind Works by Steve Pinker for a much more complete explanation of our innate moral sense (as well as other legacies of our evolutionary heritage):
http://www.amazon.com/How-Mind-Works-Steven-Pinker/dp/0393334775/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276040446&sr=8-1
The findings about attitudes referenced are in conflict with observed actual behavior. For instance, from the block quote:
To a lesser but still significant degree, the believers in a just world tend to ‘feel less of a need to engage in activities to change society or to alleviate plight of social victims.’”
However, there is very well documented data (see for instance Arthur Brooks and the General Social Survey) that people who are more religious and more conservative give away far more money and volunteer far more time. They even donate blood more.
This holds true regardless of the “cause” examined. Specifically, these believers in a just world who are more religious and supposedly feel less need to engage in activities to change society or alleviate the plight of social victims give far more to social service and direct relief charities than their less conservative and less religious peers.
Which leads me to conclude that the authors of the quote, and ultimately the author of this post has a cognitive bias. This bias conflates “change society and alleviate the plight” with government action. Thus this is measuring political attitudes against those held by the authors rather than any actual behavior or feelings about underprivileged groups.
That’s not my intention. The bias here is about assuming random chance has no effect on people’s misfortune or their good fortune and that we are in more control than we really are.
But they give to charities like Salvation Army that judge the people who receive charity and don’t help gay people, so….. The money is almost dirty. And since the catholic church is the richest entity in the world, and has spent millions of dollars defending child rapists – a lot of this money went to opulent buildings and dilated rectums.
I can agree with the study’s findings, but using addiction as an example of something that “just happens” to blameless people is specious.
Everybody knows heroin and crack can be addictive, so if someone tries them and becomes addicted, it IS their fault, sorry. Easily avoided. I know I might become addicted to these things, so I don’t sample them.
I feel compassion for people addicted to drugs, but nobody forced them to shoot up; that was a bad decision. Having three children when you have no assets or skills or a partner to help is a bad decision. Walking home alone while impaired by alcohol is a bad decision.
Bad things can happen to anyone regardless of their decisions, but some of it can be avoided by using common sense and being aware of possible consequences.
Footnote: (I studied philosophy and now work in my profession: currently unemployed):
Leibnitz explained, in his “defense of God” or Theodicity, that it wasn’t God’s job to provide justice and equality. He just had to provide an equal amount of “goodness” somewhere else in the world, but it was man’s job to find this happiness.
Add this to the modernist approach (we can control nature through science, rationality, Descartes), and John Rawls’ “theory of justice” for capitalism and the State, and we can understand the mindframe that is behind occidental cultures and their perception of equality and justice.
Peace
David, I like this discussion.
And while it seems to have sparked a larger overall debate about fairness or justice in life, I would like to bring it back to your central argument:
That luck plays a great deal in where someone winds up in life, and “goodness” and “badness” do not often receive the proper outcome.
To myself and many others here, we disagree with this viewpoint. I certainly will grant that luck plays a part in life, and that bad things happen to good people and vice versa.
What I strongly protest is that because the world is SOMETIMES “unjust”, that we must change our outlook and behavior ON THE WHOLE. That smacks of unreasoned nihilism.
Moreover, how can you claim that we are so coldhearted and unreasonable to believe that a person who suffers must “deserve” it? Is it not possible to think that suffering is unfortunate and leave it at that? Why must blame always be assigned?
Different people start out at different places in life, and during their time on earth a lot of unforeseen and random events will beset them. But so long as we all agree that actions have consequences, that logic trumps emotion, and that people should be free to live their own lives, then things will get better. Good decisions and productive behavior will lead to vastly improved chances of happiness and well being.
Any tampering with that truth, attempts to mitigate the impacts of individuals’ decisions and shielding them from the results will only serve to worsen our situation, because it de-links actions with consequences. It also acts as a foundation upon which to implement some terrible ideas– “The world isn’t fair, but if you give ME the power I’ll MAKE it fair!”
I appreciate the chance for a rational argument such as this and hope we’ve all learned something.
That way we improve ourselves :)…
@Spencer:
“Moreover, how can you claim that we are so coldhearted and unreasonable to believe that a person who suffers must “deserve” it? Is it not possible to think that suffering is unfortunate and leave it at that? Why must blame always be assigned?”
It’s not David who is assigning blame. The whole point of his post is that research shows that people tend to assign blame irrationally to people who have experienced misfortune or failed to succeed. Look at the research described in the post. (Literally. Please read his post again, because you seem to have missed the post entirely.)
No one suggested that “we must change our outlook and behavior ON THE WHOLE.” David is pointing out that to assign blame — as research shows many, many people do — on this basis is irrational and should be avoided. Which is difficult, because we’re probably just wired to do that for some reason.
That’s what this whole blog is about, right? The irrational biases that are for some reason hard-wired by biology (or culture, or whatever mysterious force) into our brains.
For a brain, you seem pretty empty, stating things as:
“David isn’t positing a world view of any kind, much less an oversimplified one. He’s pointing out that observable human biases create beliefs (such as “everyone gets what he deserves”) that are inconsistent with observed reality (many people obviously do not get what they deserve)”.
And supposing this *isn’t a world view* (!)
Anyways, my point wasn’t arguing ad absurdum, I don’t come to forums with a smirk to try and steamroll over everyone.
I’ll leave you alone, don’t read any of the references, don’t learn anything, you win the debate.
Vinz,
“And supposing this *isn’t a world view*(!)”
I honestly don’t know what you mean. Maybe I’d understand you better if you wrote more clearly.
Are you saying that the incredibly narrow point David is making (“it’s wrong to assume that the unfortunate personally deserve their lot”) constitutes a “world view”? That’s truly bizarre. By that rationale pretty much any logical or moral statement must be a “world view,” which renders the term “world view” (which is already vague enough) completely useless.
At the very least, a “world view” is big. To change one’s “world view” would mean changing a substantial portion of all one’s beliefs and behaviors. That is why I made the distinction — because kid was taking David’s narrow argument, inflating it to “world view” status and then arguing that it was too simplistic to serve as a “world view.” Which seems to me to be a category error and a straw man and probably some other things. (I have no philosophical training, which means that I’m a little unsteady with the terminology, and also that I don’t tend to engage in argumentation-by-irrelevant-name-dropping, which you seem to have mastered.)
Correction:
I wrote “By that rationale pretty much any logical or moral statement must be a ‘world view,’” … when really we’re not even talking about an argument but just a scientific observation. It’s just data: People make incorrect assumptions about the causation of certain types of events. I have no idea how that could meet any definition of a world view.
And to point out a flaw in one world view is obviously not the same as positing a competing world view.
For some strange reason this post reminds me of this video.
The Empathic Civilization.
You may also be interested in this PDF about all sorts of
cognitive biases
Great blog post. Sums up an issue I’ve long tried to summarize myself.
I think our current culture wars are largely defined by where you fall on the spectrum of belief in a Just World.
I expect that it would be equally true to say that there’s a corresponding Unjust-World fallacy, where you could select anecdotal evidence and conduct experiments to disprove the exact opposite thesis.
At the end of the day the “world” is what it is – and you can dig up or manufacture whatever evidence is necessary to justify or discredit whatever mind-set you choose to espouse.
Jim,
If you suffered from the Unjust-World fallacy, you would tend to believe that NO ONE who was unsuccessful deserved it. That would indeed be the exact opposite of the Just World fallacy. It would also be totally different from David’s argument, which is at neither extreme.
Oh, Jim — Sorry. I missed your “disprove” there.
On disproving an “Unjust World” fallacy:
(1) I doubt if more than an extreme minority of people actually think ALL outcomes are governed by chance;
(2) For those that do believe in that level of randomness or determinism, you could hardly disprove it, since they would presumably reject free will. Thus, it would do no good to say “This experimental subject intentionally got all the answers wrong,” because the believer in the Unjust World Fallacy would say “his intent was predetermined (even if randomly).”
I think that these explanations are both overspecialized. I’ve been trying to pare down a 2000-word monster of a post about simplicity and complexity and I believe that the reason our brains want to believe this is because the brain wants to believe in a logical chain of cause and effect. We want to believe that everything has a clear explanation that we can understand. That’s the way that we teach every human to think from day one. But that’s not always the case and we don’t like it when something doesn’t fit our model so we “edit our world.”
You may be right. I am not so smart, but I know humans desire closure. Cause without effect, or effect without cause is a deeply unnerving experience.
what you just said right there = perfect.
I think instead of just saying that the world is horrible and bad, we should think about building the energy to do something about it. There’s a quote from Albert Einstein that says: “The world is a dangerous place not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it”
Sure, you can complain all you want and say that the world sucks… and then just sit around and be depressed since “that’s how it is” but that won’t do any good. It’s because of people who decided they DIDN’T want the world like that and so they started non-profits, NGOs, rehabilitation, etc. Along with that, there’s usually only one bad guy and one “victim” but 1000 bystanders who could do something about a bad event. How come those 1000 bystanders don’t do anything???
Although I generally agree with this post, David, I’m disappointed that, despite your generally sound reasoning, you are still referring to good and evil as if they are any more real than notions of justice and injustice.
In fact, you seem to believe in injustice too. It bothers you that many people fool themselves into imagining a just world, but it doesn’t bother you (or perhaps you don’t see) that others fool themselves into imagining an unjust world, i.e. a world in which things should be different than they are.
I tried to remain neutral in this post and only imagine the line of thinking generated from the Just-World Fallacy, though I don’t dispute I may have fallen short of that goal.
This blog is, in some ways, about how important self-delusion is in keeping us from becoming something other than human beings, something cold and robotic. Happiness is only in our heads, and I’d like to be happy.
Personally, I don’t want to live in a world of pure rationality. I’d rather laugh at squirrels and get pissed off when they guy in front of me is driving too slow.
Does injustice exist? Should life be better for the innocent? There are plenty of cognitive biases which would lead one to think things should be different from the way they are, and I’m afraid I fall prey to those biases.
It doesn’t have to be one way or the other. At the end of the day, we’ll all still be emotional beings, no matter how clearly we see our own biases. Acknowledging the arbitrariness of ideas like “justice” doesn’t mean that you have to live in a world of pure rationality.
Some people will read your post, shrug, and say that they don’t want to live in an unjust world. You are okay with living in an unjust world, but only one in which the absence of justice is inherently tragic.
In the words of Junior Soprano: “I want to fuck Angie Dickinson. Let’s see who gets lucky.”
Well put and 100 percent correct.
Thanks for adding to the conversation here.
all of the naysayers here are exactly proving his points. You all say i know good and evil isn’t the way everything works but… The truth is your trying to hold on to this false idea and sense of security and are letting this desire obscure reason actuality.
A girl gets drunk enough to get lost…. how is that not her own fault? As far as deserving that, well you’d have to have a fucked up karma system to believe that. Possibly no one deserves rape.
But to say it’s not her own fault? Poor decisions led to actions that could be avoided.
So she deserves to have a hangover the next day. Or to be late to work because she stayed out too late. At worst. Rape is not an acceptable effect to her cause.
“Possibly no one deserves rape.”? There is a scenario you can imagine where someone might deserve it?
The truth is, we’re so scared of the most obvious fact – namely, that there is no great “plan” to make sense of life’s randomness – that we must constantly try to make up irrational explanations for unfortunate phenomenons.
And speaking of irrational explanations, may I introduce you to “God.”
I’m saying that you take responsibility for your actions. If you impair yourself enough that you can’t avoid a “bad neighborhood” (and lets be honest statistically rapes are more likely to happen by someone you know, not a random scary minority), then the cause and effect is, you got too drunk to handle you’re own shit. Case closed.
Um, case re-opened.
None of that excuses the rapist in any way whatsoever.
If I forget to lock my car, I have done something stupid. It doesn’t excuse the person who enters my car and steals my stuff. They are still a thief. That I was stupid does not lessen their crime. They are a still a person who upon seeing unguarded property, steals it.
Even if a girl is drunk and lost in a bad neighborhood, she is still not forcing anyone to rape her. Not even remotely. The rapist is still someone who, upon seeing a helpless girl, chooses to rape rather than help or even just ignore her. It is entirely his decision to rape her.
If I’m too drunk to defend myself, that doesn’t make it OK to mug me, rape me or kill me. Sorry, but it doesn’t matter how stupid I might be, if you commit a crime against me, it is still your fault. I didn’t make you decide to commit a crime. You decided.
It’s not OK, or ‘kind of okay’ or even ‘a little bit OK’ to commit a crime against someone just because they are stupid. Stupidity of the victim does not excuse crime. Sorry, it just doesn’t. Criminals are criminals no matter how stupid their victims are.
I know this is an old post, but this sort of mindless victim blaming really ought to be have been addressed when it was posted. Its particularly ridiculous because you are ALL ABOUT how SHE is responsible for HER actions but you make no mention of the rapist being responsible for HIS. That is just plain stupid. Why is she responsible but not he? She did something stupid, but he committed a crime.
I can think of a few Catholic priests who deserve to be raped.
[Enter long winded speech that no-one will read because no-one honestly cares about your personal opinion. ]
Actually, there has been a number of very interesting takes on the subject. Some may have been unnecessarily long-winded, true, but not quite the waste of time that you seem to imply.
Most of us want to believe, deep down, that nothing terrible will happen to us. If we can find “valid reasons” for the bad things that happen to others, and tell ourselves that those reasons could never apply to us, because we’re too wise, cautious, well-loved, etc, or because we’re in a different category than they are (eg “I’m too old for that to happen to me”), then, somehow, magically, that means that we’re “safe.”
The simplest way to make the mental leap to “that couldn’t happen to me” is to assume that the victim is seriously flawed (unlike ourselves), with those flaws providing both a “valid reason” for their victimhood and a justifiable (in our minds) reason for looking down on them.
The fact that we’ve seen plenty of instances where bad events did happen to people as a clear, logical consequence of wrong or foolish actions seems to “prove” that our assumptions about a just world are correct; and, there’s something in us that balks at seeing the exceptions to the “rules” and wants to tar everyone with the same brush.
I don’t think that this is something everyone does all the time, but I’ve sure seen plenty of people doing it at least some of the time. The Just-World Fallacy does seem to be the best explanation for some of the behaviors I’ve personally witnessed.
I agree.
Further, there is an extremely common delusion that no matter how far down the ladder of life you start (compared to those of us here typing on our computers), a person ought to be able to make reasoned “good” judgements like WE make. Such repeated good judgements would naturally lead to betterment. If there is no betterment, clearly the lack of judgement and the person is to blame.
Yet how exactly is someone born into an extremely deprived situation supposed to develop this sort of judgement and then exercise it? We all learn the rules for the world we inhabit. It is easier to point to someone else’s bad judgement – “you became a crack whore” – than acknowledge how limited their choices were compared to yours and what life is like for the desperate.
It’s not a just world or a level playing field we’re born into – it’s a swimming pool with deep and shallow ends that looks level from the top.
Ultimately I think this is the same thing as the fan-boy article, people buy into the “just world” brand, they are actually indoctrinated into by the media and society.
Civilization might just crumble to nothingness without it. And the law of the jungle would rule without any delusions clouding our perceptions.
This post is poorly reasoned indeed, and little by little the title of this website is becoming more ironic. Except for a pathetic line at the very end of the article, not once do they even broach the question at hand — why people expect justice, and still practice it. This article, this website in general, barely falls into the realm of real science. There is no Just-World fallacy. Since people are two years old you are told “life’s not fair.” We know the world isn’t just. For thousands of years people have known this. It is ancient writings older than the Bible, it is in the Bible itself (written beautifully in Ecclesiastes in particular) and it is everywhere ever since. Yet people still work hard, people still play fair and try to do our best in the “ruthless furnace of this world.” Not because we are so stupid as to expect a just world, but maybe we are so honorable to expect the best from our brothers and sisters. What a dumb, dumb post.
I’m interested in hearing what you, Dave, and the other commenters think about this:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1yi/the_scourge_of_perversemindedness/
Brett, I, the chemical mixture known as “Logan”, agree with conclusions of the chemical mixture known as “simplicio” in the article “The scourge of perverse-mindedness”.
But, I’m new here, so maybe you aren’t interested in what I think just yet? :o)
What do you think about it?
Logan, I’m interested in what anyone who reads this has to say.
I thought that this would add an extra dimension to the idea presented in this post. The commenters argue about whether the idea is true or not or whether it is a bad thing or a good thing, but the post I linked to says that it just is, which is the way a rationalist would speak about an idea. It’s is either believed to be true or believed to be untrue- and in the LessWrong post the author writes about using the words “just” that or “merely” to describe something – which is in a sense infusing emotion in to the argument. Feeling some sort of emotion towards an idea or statement runs counter to the ideals of rationality.
I was surprised to hear David say that he wants to leave emotion in his life to a certain extent – I can understand why, but I feel like rationality has this pull – that once you’ve been exposed to that way of thinking, it’s hard to look for anything other than more of it.
Thoughts? Comments?
I think the aesthetic sense is how we put meaning into our lives. It is a reflection of our values which generates an emotional response to our experiences. Although I too can understand the desire to not be ruled by my emotions, I do not think it is wise to eliminate it altogether from our lives.
It’s been so long, I cannot remember a time when I actually believed in the supernatural. I remember vaguely going to Sunday School, and being told to be quiet with my questions. Then there was a moment in teen when in the midst of a major angst episode when I really needed someone something to provide me with some answers, some solace to the misery of my existence. I really wanted to believe in something then, but faith eluded me. I think that’s when I realized my atheism. Then there was a time in college when I tried again, and came out of that failed attempt to find faith as what I call being a born-again atheist. Upon reflection I think I found my emotional center when I rejected the pursuit of the irrational in favor of the rational. A few years back I contemplated the notion that faith and atheism are matters of choice. I’ve had association with people on both sides of the spectrum argue that their position was a matter of choice, of free-will. And I contend it is not a choice to believe or not believe, I think our understanding of the world is based on our experiences of it, and once we leave faith behind as erroneous it would take a major feat of cognitive dissonance to go back to regaining that faith by choice alone. This is not to say a path does not exist between the ends of the spectrum, damage to enough brain cells could leave someone to erase the memory of evolution into a rational being for example.
So either I’m “lesswrong” about this or I’m somehow defective and lack this on-off switch people “normal” people claim to have. I don’t think I am defective though, at least not in this regard.
Interesting enough, I was reading this stuff last night while watching a new show Morgan Freeman was hosting on the science channel last night, in one segment they looked at an experiment when a subject puts on a helmet with a magnet located over the right temporal lobe, and when turning on the magnet in an isolation chamber the subject would experience an “supernatural” like affect.
i do not agree with the rape victim part at all..otherwise you do make a point at times..
>She gets pretty drunk and stumbles home in the wrong direction. She ends up lost in a bad neighborhood. She gets raped.
So getting drunk enough to not even find your way home any more is not a stupid mistake? There is no such thing as karma at work here. If you do not study, you might fail at tests. If you walk in front of cars, you might get hurt. If you do not work hard, you might get fired. If you smoke, you die early. If you cut yourself with a knife, you bleed.
Sure, getting raped is an overly harsh consequence, but she could have reduced her chances of getting raped significantly by not drinking too much. Victim of a crime? Yes. Rapists should get thrown into prison? Yes. Girl was stupid? Yes.
Rape is not a consequence of getting drunk. Rape happens when a rapist rapes. Two year infants get raped. 98 year olds get raped. A Congo woman is getting raped right now. How is it their faults. Fuck your victim blaming.
The Just World Fallacy concerns itself with higher forces, usually. You are miss-interpreting it. If a tsunami hits your coast, someone who follows the JWF would argue that god punished the heathens. It has nothing to do with “if you shoot yourself in the foot with a gun, it hurts.”
This issue seems to come up a lot more in America than anywhere else; I’ve noticed many times Americans insulting us Europeans for when something we do goes wrong and how we deserve it because of our ‘socialism’.
This is only peripheral to the article but…
If you check the occupational hazard and pay rates you will find that law enforcement pays significantly above median and mean while not even being in the top 10 for danger – TV and other propaganda not withstanding.
Farming is more dangerous and pays much less.
The point of examining the just-world fallacy is to realize that bad things happen even if you are a “perfect victim”.
You can do everything right, and you can still end up assaulted, raped or murdered (or whatever else).
Sure, we all try to lessen our risks, but the point is, even if we were to act “perfectly” – bad things can still happen to us.
I can be perfectly sober, and take the “proper” precautions (walk home in a well lit area, or take a cab home, be aware of my surroundings), and someone can still overpower and rape me. It’s not simply a matter of being drunk. So maybe that hypothetical rapist wouldn’t have been able to overpower that hypothetical victim if she was sober – but I highly doubt it. Being aware helps. But it certainly isn’t a fail-safe solution.
Bad things happen. Many times people aren’t “perfect victims”. It would be better if we offered our support for these people, instead of our judgment, after the fact.
Obviously, we should all try to be as responsible as possible, and encourage others to be do as well, but stating that a victims actions were “stupid” after all is said and done is pretty cruel and heartless.
Hey, youre the goto expret. Thanks for hanging out here.
Wow. It amazes me how an article that uses examples of homelessness and winning a game show as examples of a Just-World Fallacy can lead to a *blame the victim* conversation about rape in the comments.
Having been raped, I can say with certainty that when a woman clearly does not want to have sex, but is then *forced* into sex against her will, she doesn’t, under *any* circumstances, “deserve” to be raped. You’re making a wrong assumptionm Rape is *NOT* about sex. Rape is an act of violence.
It doesn’t matter if a rape victim was dead drunk passed out in the worst possible neighborhood. If there is *no consent* to have sex, it’s rape, an act of violence perpetrated by the rapist who decided to proceed. It’s *that* decision that makes it rape, for which the victim is not responsible.
As for the Just-World Fallacy, I have, unfortunately, also run into many people who *blame the victim* attitude about people who are homeless. Again, assumptions are being made about whether or not homeless people are *capable* of changing their circumstances or not.
Our economy is in such poor shape that people with Masters degrees are accepting positions for which they are overqualified, leaving people with Bachelors degrees flipping burgers, pushing people with High School diplomas and GED’s or without an education unemployed. Unemployment benefits don’t continue endlessly. When they run out, they simply run out.
Cuts to Medicare and Medicaid budgets have meant coverage is limited for people with mental illnesses, and that facilities whose payments have been reduced can no longer afford to keep their doors open. Patients who should be closely monitored in 24-hour facilities and group homes are left with nowhere to live because their families aren’t equipped to manage their illnesses. These patients can’t hold jobs, yet many don’t qualify for Social Security Disability or can’t receive benefits because they have no permanent address.
Even with having physical medical conditions that obviously mean I cannot work a standard, full-time job–and with tests indicating I cannot be retrained for another job type–it took *two years* for me to be approved for disability. In the interim, I drained my savings and cashed in my supplemental retirement plan, which ran out after the first year. If I’d not had family and friends willing to take me in, I would have been homeless myself.
Those out on the street who are addicts or alcoholics need treatment, about which they are in denial because of the nature of their *diseases* (as defined by both the medical community and the federal government’s ADA program of 1996). They cannot pull themselves together and suddenly become capable of employment any more than a parapalegic can.
Are these people–who have been pushed out of the job market by the economy, are mentally ill, physically disabled, and/or in the midst of the illnesses of addiction/alcoholism–somehow “responsible” for their circumstances? Are they supposed to somehow *magically* be “able to change” and become employable?
The sad part of all this Just-World Fallacy for me is that most people have *no clue* who the homeless really are or the circumstances that have caused them to be on the street in the first place. People prefer to remain ignorant so they can *continue* to blame these victims of circumstances instead of seeing real human beings without a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, or clothes on their backs.
If people chose to become aware, they’d have to deal with their *own* feelings of guilt for not helping out their fellow human beings who are incapable of helping themselves, while they sit comfortably in their own homes, clothes in their closets and food in their pantries.
You are kidding aren’t you? Are there really retards in this world who believe that rubbish “misconception”? !
alright, there are a bunch of long comments which i really don’t feel like reading, but in regards to the last section:
“There are anecdotal accounts of people seeing the prisoners of concentration camps for the first time and assuming they must have been terrible criminals. The first place the mind goes is the place where the world is just.”
IMO, the first place the mind goes here is to assume not that the world is just, but that other human beings aren’t so messed up as to torture each other. Concentration camps weren’t an act of random chance.. there were a bunch of people behind it. Anyway, i just think this particular case has less to do with the just-world fallacy, and more to do with our inherent faith in humanity.
I think in this world that a lot of successful people who got there by luck and chance, can be pretty bad people as they do not appreciate life with the shoe on the other foot. A poor person is more likely to give their last pound to charity than a rich person. I think that the less fortunate people deffinately dont deserve it (in a lot of cases), i think they deserve better as they have to work so much harder to get by. I think they become better people (again, in a lot of cases) because they do appreciate the small things in life more, and also are more understanding and less judgemental towards other people.
So basically good gets punished, and bad gets rewarded…maybe?
Being European, I would like to know if there are differences concerning this way of seeing the world in different countries. Would you know any studies on this?
My perception is that over here the majority of people thinks along the following lines: “Well, the bad guys get most of the profit. Too bad my conscience is to strong too allow me to become one of them. Having no conscience would be pretty convenient. But ultimately, I don’t want to be an asshole, so I guess it’s okay.”
very informative..
> Why do you do this?
More informative question: what if you don’t do this? If you don’t think your actions really have consequences in the absolute sense, nor that they should, aren’t you a sociopath?
The article suggests that people believe God will punish evildoers and reward the just and the kind. This is true. What I think needs to be corrected is that this act of justice will not necessarily happen here on earth, but in the afterlife, when all will be judged.
Thank you! I agree wholeheartedly! :)
sheesh, thank the gods for enlightened humanism, and sometimes that doens’t even work.
This is an article about science and psychology, not imaginary sky fairy friends.
“It sucks to think the world isn’t fair. It feels better to believe in karma and justice, in fairness and reward. A world with the righteous on one side of the scale, and evil on the other – that seems to make sense.”
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your point. However, how do you prove that something like karma either exists or doesn’t? Your argument is that bad behavior isn’t always reprimanded in a sense. But how are you making that observation? You’d have to chart the entire life of a person, all their accomplishments, emotions, ups, downs, what not. That’s an impossible task, especially when ups and downs are a subjective experience, or because negative consequences don’t always have to be seen on the surface (IE, living with a lifetime of guilt). We seem to want *immediate* and visible gratification and, if we don’t get it, believe they get away with it.
And that’s only assuming that negative and positive repercussions are based at an individual level in their own existing lifetimes. I’m sure everyone here has felt that at one time or another, out of anger or what not, that someone’s actions would affect someone else/a group/a nation down the line. Heck, today in the World Cup, people are saying England are getting what they deserved by Germany because of a bad call in 1966.
Are they right to say that there’s some cosmic balance out there? Are others right to say there isn’t? There isn’t any real way to justify either end, especially since we’re very set on looking for very concrete, immediate cause & effect scenarios, as in how our judicial systems are set up (IE, X action will get Y punishment).
Personally I’m a bit more weighted to the ‘karma’ argument. Not because of any force that’s saying “You did this, you deserve this” (which would be entirely subjective anyways), but rather that the general idea of the system is, in effect, telling us that our actions do affect not only ourselves, but everything around us (which I think, is a very beautiful, if not divine, system). The problem is that we take that, mix in our own feelings of anger, justice, what not, and use it as a medium to display our own (or our a group/culture’s) beliefs (again, expecting X action will result in Y every time). We use it to uplift our egos at the detriment of others.
As far as people deserving to be born poor or what not, it’s not their fault they’re there, nor do they deserve it. But I think it’s safe to say that their predicament is because it’s the end result of the actions of others that have come before them and their environment. If we want to believe in systems like karma then, we shouldn’t do so out of hoping to see people get hurt for their actions, but rather that we can use it to do positive actions and see those actions become rewards for everyone around us and everyone still yet to come in the future.
In other words, use our good work today to make sure people in the future feel the rewards.
I’m not saying karma does or does not exist, only that believing in it feels good.
@ Arun: Thank you for addressing the karma question. I think the author has a commonly held misperception of what karma actually **is** versus what it is **not**. Karma, to a buddhist, at least, does not mean someone “deserves” what they get: it means they earned it. Karma is the effect of cause. One’s circumstances of birth, health, parents, etc. are all the result of karma. Karma is accrued within one’s lifetime and from lifetime to lifetime. As a buddhist, I experience a lot of frustration trying to get westerners to understand this. In buddhist thought, there is NO SUCH THING as a victim; the concept of innocence is irrelevant; there are no victims.
So, no, David. Karma is not a way to “feel good” about things; karma is part of a system of belief that seeks to rationally understand, and then rationally work to improve/change, one’s circumstances. In that respect, it goes a heckuvalot further than the theistic notions of “innocence” and who “deserves” this punishment or the other. And, I would argue, it goes a long way to resolving what you see as a fallacy: the world is neither just nor unjust; similarly, people are neither just nor just, good nor evil. If anything, the world and its inhabitants are capable of both great good and great evil–it’s a choice. And our choices define us; our choices create our karma.
Please get it right the next time you discuss karma. It’s one thing if you’re talking about how people–particularly westerners–misunderstand it, but please don’t present the misunderstood version of karma as a standin for what it actually is.
Cheers,
ZNM
Sorry, I misspelled my own name! What an unjust world!!!
Life is certainly not fair and I for one am grateful. If it was I’d either be dead by now or serving a life sentence.
Re homelessness: I work with the poor, many of whom have serious mental illnesses that they certainly don’t desrve. They often too, come from horrible backgrounds that were inflicted upon them when young, something they had no control over either. My sense of this is that life is meant to be unjust so that we can strive to make it fair and in the process become much better human beings. The way we treat and characterize our poor is a direct measure of how we are doing as people and as nations.
Life isn’t fair, everyone who’s done well for themselves didn’t do so by fucking someone over, and not every0ne who’s failed got fucked over. Blaming everyone for your shortcomings but yourself isn’t fair either.
Where has personal accountability gone? I live in a city where, I watched all the people who screwed around at my high school fail because they were to cool for school and responsibility, but now I’m suppose to have sympathy for those people who I watched destroy their lives? Should me and the people who actually did the work, took the student loans and paid them off now take care of the people who were to busy going to keggers and making babies in high school because they didn’t care?
I can’t care about a persons life MORE then they care about their own. Yeah good people get screwed, and bad people sometimes win, but that’s life. The way you frame this article removes personal responsibility, and makes blanket statements which in itself is a fallacy.
you missed his point entirely
I agree with some of the assessment here, but I take issue with your misusage and misunderstanding of the term “karma” or “kamma.” It’s an easy thing to do, because we immediately all think of of the grossly oversimplified western connotation of the word. However, the shallow interpretation of it as meaning literally “what goes around comes around” just isn’t an accurate definition.
A more apt description of karma is that it is the causes and conditions that create and shape a human being and then in turn, he or she further creates and shapes karma through that person’s further actions and reactions. It isn’t some moral apparatus mean to reward the good and punish the bad, but it is precisely an observation about making choices and the outcomes they create.
Where the disconnect comes is that we assign the value of “just” arbitrarily, and we think that we deserve anything. The world isn’t just, it just is, and it is on the larger scale pretty much neutral. We designate from this baseline of neutrality gradations of “good” vs. “bad,” and expect that we’re entitled to having the universe conform to them.
Furthermore, I believe that just because we the public aren’t privy to seeing “bad” people suffer for their “bad” actions, does not mean that they aren’t. Most “bad” people suffer from personality disorders such as narcissism, being sociopaths, histrionics, or borderlines. They do not lead very successful or happy internal lives within their own heads, and the negative thoughts and emotions that exist within their mental conditions are what drives their personalities and the harm that they cause to the rest of us. Flatly put, they’re not happy people, no matter how strong of an illusion they create making it seem as though they are. They may not have “deserved” whatever happened to make them like this, and in turn, we may not “deserve” the suffering they pass onto us, but it’s part of the causes and conditions that make up all our collective experience, and it’s always up to us as individuals to choose how to react.
Thank you, Melissa. Very well said.
FYI, karma translates best as “action.” Does that change your idea of what “karma” is?
Annie Stith said everything that needed to be said. Thank you, Annie.
Just, unjust, fair, unfair, all questions can be answered with the same question:
How can I help you?
I think you should’ve elaborated on the Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons story, and pointed out that some of the people were told that the woman would instead receive monetary gains for getting the answers right during the next scheduled session, while getting no punishment whenever she messed up – those subjects had a far less negative view of the woman as a result. I found this INSANELY interesting and noteworthy.
That particular nit-pick aside, I love your writing to no end.
All the people who disagree with this post seem to have a very limited, Western view of the individual as a distinct rational unit based on free will. In order for an individual to “get what they deserve” for making “bad choices” we have to establish that they can even make independent rational choices in the first place. I am not so sure we can separate the individual from society, and I think that we all ought to be taking some *collective* responsibility in addition to this “personal responsibility” that always seems to turn out to be a judgement inflicted against the socially marginalized even when socially dominant groups get away with the same behavior.
Take the example of the drug addict – someone said it was their choice to take the drug so they are responsible for their addiction. Yet, why might a person use a drug like heroin? Perhaps it is because they just lost everything and it’s the only thing that gives them a brief escape from the painful reality that no one will help them, or because neighborhood economics forced them to work for a dealer and they tried it since it was around all the time, or because they were abused as a child and can’t afford therapy/it isn’t working, or because their loved ones are getting shot all around them, or because it’s a socially acceptable coping mechanism in their community, etc… Sure, one of the reasons will inevitably be “because they wanted to get high” but we have to ask – why do they want to get high in the first place, especially on a substance that’s so dangerously addictive? And even if they’ve had a perfect life (highly unlikely since none of us have perfect lives – even privileged rich kids sometimes lack the emotional/family support they need to grow into healthy people), once they’ve become addicted they certainly aren’t making rational choices anymore. So to say it’s “their fault” is merely a justification for refusing to help someone who has lost touch with reality to the point that they do not act as independent rational selves, instead accepting all kinds of abuse just to get another hit. These people do not deserve condemnation, but respect, empathy, and aid.
Similarly, take the example of the people saying the woman deserved to get raped. In this case, people are expecting a woman to abide by social restrictions designated as “reasonable” by everyone else, with the penalty of getting blamed for getting raped if she doesn’t obey these norms. First of all, this concept is absurd on it’s face – definitionally, a rape cannot be the victim’s fault, because rape is done against the will of the victim. It’s a way of getting power over them by disregarding their choices, desires, and thoughts in order to violate the victim’s body. Rapists pick easy targets because they’re scumbags who know which kinds of women society doesn’t care much to protect – surely one reason that walking home drunk and alone at night isn’t safe is because the jury will blame you, increasing the chances your rapist won’t get convicted. Second, the norms that are supposed to protect us from rape are either totally irrational or engineered to maintain the subjugation of women. People assume walking home alone is actually more likely to get us raped than walking home with a male friend – in fact, it’s the other way around. Guess what, the majority of rapes aren’t strangers-in-the-bushes-with-a-knife types of rape, they’re committed largely by our friends, family, and acquaintances. The best way to statistically reduce your chance of getting raped is to never drink, never date, and avoid men as much as possible. But if women follow all these expectations, we’re effectively excluded from much of public life that men are allowed to safely enjoy. Women have as much of a right to drink and go out at night as men do, and it’s wholly unfair to discourage this behavior by making women responsible for the looming threat of violence against them. Instead of discouraging women’s drinking, we should discourage people committing violent acts against women! Judging both the woman and her rapist as guilty (even to varying degrees) means creating a society where acceptable behavior by women is policed by the threat of social vulnerability and the lack of protection from violence. This violent exclusion of women who enjoy the full range of public life constitutes perpetuating the patriarchy and justifying its abhorrent means.
So, to all you naysayers: start considering context. Start thinking of the individual as embedded in social structures, because society constructs individuals just as much as individuals construct society. Stop pretending we make choices because we’re rational, and realize that we’re all an assemblage of competing drives/desires/wills. We can retroactively explain ourselves, but to assume any decision is made purely rationally disregards that we must at least have an emotional reaction to the desirability of any given outcome before we can go through that rational decisionmaking process. Which means, at best, we desire to be rational so we construct rational decisionmaking processes towards that end.
None of that’s to say that I am against logic or anything…I just think these discussions tend too strongly towards a faulty, overly formalized understanding of how people operate derived from long-criticized aspects of Western philosophical thought, and that incorporating a better understanding of irrationality as inevitable and not inherently evil leads to more perceptive analysis of our society and the individuals within/outside it.
I think the fallacy holds on a material level. Certain physical actions or physical circumstances (race, financial background, drug abuse) can lead to positive or negative outcomes. Yet any imaginable spiritual outcome transcends the physical ramifications of the corresponding action. A swindler may make a fortune for himself by cheating other people, but morally, do people view him similarly as a fireman who works tirelessly for the safety of his district?
The Just-World Fallacy is designed to help explain our relationships with the physical world and, superficially, with our neighbors in that world, yet the emotional connections in which we invest are more dictated by our moral conclusions. Certain characteristics with positive directions (generosity, caring, honor) and with negative directions (mendaciousness, cruelness) have been seen in the field of psychology to have a greater significance in the way we judge a person. So a swindler may accrue more money than a fireman, but which one is viewed more positively by those who attain an emotional relationship with them? The ethical characteristics of different people cannot be ignored when ethics and morality are an important part of our own cognition. Even in this article, it is addressed that some of us wonder why the good guy doesn’t always win. We establish that a good guy does exist, but the Just-World Fallacy says he does always win; however, winning in the material world, as the Just-World Fallacy addresses, may not mean being ranked above others in the mind of an observer.
The reason that ordinary Germans encountering concentration camp prisoners would assume they’re dangerous criminals, and not innocent victims, is because it challenges your entire worldview, the basis for all your beliefs up to that point, to consider the fact that the government might just be imprisoning people for no reason. If you believe (as everyone is conditioned to) that only criminals belong in prison, then naturally you’ll assume that people sent to prison are dangerous criminals. It’s a lot harder to even entertain the notion that people in prison might not be criminals, and in a functioning and just country, it’s incorrect. In the US, at least, most prisoners are there because they committed crimes*, so it’s a safe assumption to make that all prisoners are criminals.
The Just-World fallacy is really just a subset of the larger impulse to have a consistent belief system and to make sense of the world. We’ve been conditioned to believe that apples fall from trees, so when an apple doesn’t fall from a tree, we assume something must beholding it up, not that gravity has suddenly stopped working. That’s a good assumption. We’ve been conditioned to believe that only criminals go to jail, so when someone goes to jail, we assume that they’re a dangerous criminal. That might be a reasonable assumption in most cases, but it’s important to remember it’s just an assumption. At the point when you’re assuming people on welfare made bad choices, or those who oppose government action are deliberately screwing over the poor, you’re making dangerously simplistic assumptions. But of course, you are not so smart.
Basically, your post can be extrapolated and applied to any kind of faith. There is no reason to believe that wrong actions result in wrong consequences, that right actions result in right ones.
Where is the proof that it doesn’t?
For every example you come up with, I can come up with a subjective interpretation of how the consequences were bad (or good) for the person involved. Everything is perception, and unfortunately, perception is subjective. Somehow, your post doesn’t add much value or write about anything particularly clever. It gives no answers, just asks a few questions. However, I suppose it’s true that it’s more important to ask the questions than to find the answers?
@Paul
I am bit uncertain on how to interpret your comment. In particular, your claim “In the US, at least, most
prisoners are there because they committed crimes*, so it’s a safe assumption to make that all prisoners are criminals.” is sufficently (first part) respectively so horrendously (second part) incorrect that I am torn between your being (deliberately) ironic and your stumbling into the very same trap that you describe in the following paragraph.
Excellent post. I personally believe that humans have this tendency so that we can feel right about doing the “right” thing in instances where the “right decision” wont be instantly rewarded. Or when the individual is wronged and is tortured by the event; they will feel less pain if they believe that the person who hurt them will get their comeuppance. People are fragile. This is a way to protect ourselves from pain and to sway us to do good, just as a belief in an afterlife is.
Gee, this article certainly describes Republicans to a “T”
“tend to be more religious…” Hmm.
I would like to see the raw data which went in to that study.
The self-justifying, prosperity-gospel fundamentalist conservatives battling against the “my ends justify your loss” self-righteous liberals are so loud that neither side notices the quiet contemplatives within most religions (my, but that felt good to write!). Deeply-spiritual religious sorts tend to be contemplative and withdrawn from the world– alienated precisely because of its unjust character. You just don’t hear them, but they are probably more typical.
I wonder if Andre and Velásquez considered such a distinction.
I think that this fallacy is the source of many of the problems with American society (and I’m sure others as well, but I live in America so I wouldn’t know). The GOP uses the fact that a huge portion of the country believes in a Just World to convince them that the rich are the most productive, intelligent, ambitious members of society. This leads to a bunch of people voting against their own interests and supporting tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of large corporations. Support of a deregulated market in general results from this – people believe that if you’re not succeeding, you’re not trying hard enough. If a business does something wrong, then people will notice and the business will be punished!
To be honest, I don’t think anything can really be done. Most people are unable to acknowledge their own irrationality. You could show someone this post and they would react by condemning people who make the fallacy, despite being that sort of person his/herself.
I strongly believe that logic should be required in primary and secondary education, with a comprehensive explanation of the various cognitive biases.
This is the best explanation of what a USA Republican think and believe in!
I just would like to add that although I don’t believe life is fair, I do see that those who are proud of their actions tend to be happier and more satisfied with themselves and with life as they age. It has nothing to do with fairness, it has all to do with attitude and perception.
Also, there are those who were born happy campers, and those who never learn to be happy. I do not know if “joi de vivre” can be acquired or is innate but some have it and others don’t.
Could this be a good subject for another post?
I just linked to here from a computer game (Team Fortress 2) forum (4th page, currently last post) :
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1506135 .
In the game item trading has recently been introduced, and there seems to be a fair bit of scamming going on.
A popular response to people reporting on having been scammed is “you deserved it”, or “you only have yourself to blame”, or “it’s your fault.” I knew this was wrong but lacked the words and fancy references to properly explain how. After some googling of “logical fallacies” and “victim blame” this link was the best I found to explain.
Many thanks!
Maybe you should make changes to the page subject title The Just-World Fallacy You Are Not So Smart to something more catching for your content you make. I enjoyed the post even sononetheless.
As far as I can see there is no such thing as good or evil, just the people too stupid to believe in it and the people who dont believe in it who can take advantage of those who do.
The latter needs the former, and there is no shortage of stupid people.
perhaps more ignorance than stupidity
This article is arguing that people believe that justice will ultimately prevail over injustice, and that such a belief is misguided, claiming that ‘often’ injustice goes unnoticed and unresolved. This is just as much of an assumption as those critiqued by the article of unreasonably believing all things will karmically balance.
People will either believe that justice will prevail, or they won’t. The belief that justice will, and should, prevail will influence their behavior in such a way that they will do whatever they think is necessary to make it so. The belief that chaos and injustice will prevail will have an equally influential effect on reality.
I think this article is misguided in that it attempts to convince people that the world in not just, when it should really be focusing on the fact that our beliefs about the world shape our behavior, which vicariously affects how things turn out.
If a person believes that someone is responsible for a specific outcome in their life, they will most likely take steps to avoid that outcome occurring in their own life, which I think is healthy and beneficial.
If a person believes that life is ultimately chaotic and that their choices and behavior ultimately won’t have much bearing on whether life will turn out how they wish, they’re more likely to make stupid choices based on little fact because they’ve lost hope that things will turn out in at all positively.
Though belief and expectation does not directly affect reality itself, it does affect our behavior, and collectively, I think a belief in justice and balance is an overall beneficial and vital part of our lives.
Belief is crap, and makes people decide stupid things, too.
I really liked the article. Although, he does not support the claim “evil prevails over good”, with any sort of evidence.
This article is sort of a half baked idea, but with a a lot of potential.
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Yes I believe “Success is often the result of when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family and random chance. All the hard work in the world can’t change those initial factors.”
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This post might have well been called the “Rand-world fallacy”. Have you ever read “Atlas Shrugged”?
She makes her premise (that the rich are “self-made”, that their wealth is the product of their own hard work and ingenuity, and that they are deserving of their wealth,) by portraying her wealthy protagonists as moral and intellectual supermen.
There’s just one problem: Not one of her protagonists is actually self-made. They’re all heirs and heiresses. Apparently even in a fictional context, Ayn Rand couldn’t conceive a truly self-made man.
“Atlas Shrugged” is an example of the just-world fallacy taken to the point of delusion.
If bad people can get away from doing bad, then I hope I can get away from doing good.
This contradicts The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy…
and now that I believe that this contradicts Texas Sharpshooter, which I agreed with before I read the article. I am more likely to believe that Texas Sharpshooter is accurate and that this is a load of crap.
Backfire Effect is a bitch
I don’t see why this contradicts the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
The TSF focuses on how bad we are to interpret random events. This is exactly the case here, we misinterpret random events such as poorness to be caused by laziness.
This fallacy is only a good exemple of the TSF.
why do i get the feeling that this was an “inside” joke?
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Being a crook is like building a pyramid with poker cards. It can be a beautiful pyramid but all I have to do is pull one card out and there goes your pyramid. In movies (I know not the best example), you see these gangsters and crooks make it big, buy the nice mansions, life is great, they are getting ahead but rarely is it a happy ending for them.
This is the game of chance. Chances are if you are a crook 3 times, the reward may not be as great but the risk of you getting caught is low. If you are a cook 10 times, the rewards increase just like the risks (high risk high reward). Problem is, you can be successful 9 times out of 10 but that 1 time you don’t get away is the one time that bites you and taints your legacy, it puts the asterisk on your success (which fades).
We see it in sports, programs recruit players illegally and the dirty way, at the end they get theirs. Chance is unbiased, the more you play with it the more rewards you can potentially get yet the higher risk still stares at you.
Your hardworking guy will probably not live in a mansion, your hardworking guy will probably not be in a pool surrounded by models, your hard working guy will probably not drive 10 different exotic cars, but the one thing your hardworking guy will have the basic necessities to live life and the chance to enjoy it without having to worry about revenge from those who he has wronged. Sure it sounds like a story which inflates a man’s ego and makes him want to be that guy but in many ways those crooks are deprived of a lot of things other than material happiness (which if they don’t keep their guard up goes away).
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What is evil? You can’t really use evil until you define it. You use it as more of an idea than a solid notion.
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I find this whole article one sided and patronising. Maybe there should be an upto date article on current view and attitudes from the wider world and not just based on a small number of american who took part in these small. To begin generalising human nature from such small, narrow studies done such a long time ago is rediculous and outdated. Amazing how information can be used to present information about fallacy that ironicly is itself its own fallacy.
I don’t think “sample set as large as reader wants” constitutes a logical fallacy.
“Bad neighborhood” – what’s that? Why is it that she “ends up in” instead of “goes to”?
It’s like that time I took a wrong exit and ended up in Anacostia, DC. I followed the first cop I saw until he left. That’s how. Except on foot.
bernie madoff comes to mind
Bernie Madoff is a perfect example of how “good” and “evil” are a result of societal constructs. He was ohhhh so good so long as he kept up the eppearance of wealth and power, donated to charity with stolen money, and gave his investors big returns. The minute people realized that that nice guy facade was a smokescreen that he hid behind to do his dirty work, people began treating him like the viper that he is. In our society today (just as it has been always,) if you have lots of money and power, you are “good” even if you are pretty mediocre in the grand scheme of things. And of course, everyone aspires to be the same, since it is satisfying, so there’s what I like to call the flies on c**p effect, followed by maggots (if you’ll excuse my french)
In other societies, what is held in esteem is the ideal of the “golden rule,” “turn the other cheek,” and the kindness to lepers and Samaritans ideas (the Samaritans were actually as despised as untouchables, just FYI) These of course, are antiquated practices from the middle ages, which have fallen out of favor.
Then there is the idea of “karma” which actually is inherited from a previous life. You cannot change your karma, in the true meaning of the hindu word. Karma is just a life cycle, in the same way that ice turns into water, then steam, and then back into water and ice again, depending upon conditions, your karma determines your path in life. In this sense, if you are meant to be rich, you will be rich. If it is your destiny to be poor, then so be it. I think an idea that is somewhat related to this might be the idea of Mendelian genetics and evolutionary force. Conditions always select for fitness, no matter what. When the conditions change, those that survive also change, and are selected by universal law to either survive (in this sense “survival” has nothing to do with “survival economics” but with reproduction–in other words, the genes that survive for future generations) In other words, you could be the most filthy rich ba***** on earth, but if you don’t have any kids, you are not a “survivor” in the grand sense of things. Your genes will expire with your lifeless flesh.
correction: when I said Mendelian, I actually meant to say “Darwinian.” sorry about that
I’m simueltaneously disgusted, weary and completed unsurprised by the amount of rape apologism and victim-blaming going on here. What did I expect, all of you being priveliged upper cklass white dudes? Because obviously, the ONLY women who are EVER EVER raped are “sluts” who DARE to go out and have a good time without accompaniment( i.e. a big strong dude to protect her) and wear skimpy clothing and drink. She’s a stupid whore who deserved it obviously. Statistics say women are most likely to be raped by someone they know and trust? They usually aren’t dressed “like a slut?” Pffffttt, whatever, that’s obviously propaganda by a buncha feminazis.
Wow. This crap just never ends does it? Even after the Slut Walks(that have been very prominently featured in every media ever) and DECADES of feminism, and you guys STILL DON’T GET IT.
Ughh, kill me now.
Hmmm…a little hard on the poor guys there, Ms. Christy.
I am not totally sure about this, but I believe jury studies show that women judge rape victims more harshly than men do. If a woman is raped she wants men on the jury because they feel more sympathetic while it is the women who are thinking, ‘Skanky ho out with no panties? What did she think would happen to her? She was asking for it.’
And when it comes to “sluts,” I find that men like them while women want to tear their eyes out because they see them as sexual competition. Most pretty women with nice shapes I have known find it hard to keep female friends because of the “my BF/husband might start to like her” issue while less attractive gals have no problem finding buddies.
After decades of feminism, it seems like many of my gender STILL DON’T GET IT.
hm…the first post i disagree with (backfire effect?! haha). evil often prospers and doesn’t pay the price? the world wouldn’t freaking work if that was true!! well ok, the world is in some chaos, but at the end of the day, we know what is true. the only thing we can believe in is that life continues and will continue…and we must do as such to ensure that.. and life couldn’t continue if evil things were rewarded..right? but this sort of thinking creates fear, and we need fear to move forward. sorry, getting philosophical here, but ok ok, good post! you scared me.
another thought: evil does not prosper in a material sense, in a sense you can touch or see…ALL the time. crime and punishment anyone?!
not to mention first world economies and developing world economies right now?! camon!
Evil is more powerful than good. How long does it take to create a teacher? Love, birth, childhood, education. How long does it take to destroy a teacher? One bullet that costs a penny. Simply put, entropy means it’s easier to destroy than to create, easier to kill than to birth, easier to take than to give (especially when everybody else has everything).
There are a couple of things not considered here by those promoting the idea that hard work and karma and scales balanceing evens things out.
One, you’re forgetting that our society, among others, often selects for negative qualities; promoting the incompetent, sociopathic, family-connected boss to prominence beyond his abilities. Bush, anyone?
So, sure, evil is rewarded.
Two, the acquisition of money itself– greed–is held up as the highest measure of success.
Very. Bad. Idea.
Three, when millions of people are suddenly made unemployed or homeless or dead because of economic warfare, NAFTA or exploitation, what in the world does that have to do with hard work or merit? They didn’t all wake up in October 2008 and simultaneously decide to go on the dole.
Anecdote: In America, we blame people’s medical problems on smoking, obesity and drinking; they deserve to die rather than take my money for medical care.
Japan and Europe have consistently better patient outcomes and longevity, even though they drink and smoke more than Americans. Why? Because they have access to better medical care.
We are not islands.