The great cruelty of conservatism is the moralization and ownership of random happenstance...
<rant warning, you have been warned lol>
The thing about conservative thought that always gets my blood boiling are the bold faced lies they tell themselves about the nature of the human condition. One of the things conservatives are always foaming at the mouth about is the need to take on personal responsibility for ones place in life. In the conservative mind set we are all born context free. Indeed there is a strange sense of inverted racism, classicism, and sexism in how they claim to view the world. For if you choose to ignore reality and insist that we are all born with the same blank slate, the billionaire child is born with the same opportunities in life, the same chances, the same struggles, as the child born in the ghetto to a single mother working 2 jobs just to put food on the table.
If you can warp you mind enough to accept this view of the world, a sort of inverted fantasy communism of the mind, where we have all achieved total equality. Then yes everything they say starts to make sense. Of course those on food stamps are just lazy, of course saying black lives mater is racist, of course those who struggle just don't try hard enough.
They believe that context plays no role. That what separates the middle class white lawyer from the black gangster is fundamentally about strength of character. And sure we call this racist and of course it is plain as day that it IS, but I think it's important to dig deeper because racism kind of packages all of it up into a nice ball so we don't have to deal with these people. What we need to be considering is just what IS racism!? What does it mean to have a racist, sexist, mindset? Because I can tell you racist people don't think they themselves are racist. Yes of course they are, but writing them off as that doesn't solve the problem.
See the problem is that these people actually believe what I said above, they believe that what separates them from others is about character, morals. They wish to be blind to reality. And so the middle class white lawyer in their fantasy world of course faced the same struggles in getting to where they are as their middle class black lawyer counterparts. In their mind being born to a wealthy white family in a safe neighborhood where you were always given the benefit of the doubt, where you always had second changes, where your mistakes were never counted against you, none of that conferred any benefits upon them. But equally in their mind growing up with a single mother who worked 2 jobs and was never home, in a violent gun and gang ridden neighborhood (and no I'm not assuming that represents all black lives), where you were never given a first chance let alone a second, where everything was an uphill battle. That likewise confers no negative either. Neither does growing up with an emotional illness. Growing up discriminated against because you identify as LGBTQ. All of that can be neatly swept under the rug if it's all about moral strength of character.
They wash all of that away. Racism, sexism, and the like in this sense is actually about the opposite of what many people think they are about. The conservative mind set is about ignoring the differences that separate us, not highlighting them. Now of course discrimination operates upon the concept of highlighting what separates us, vilifying those who are "different". But that is only the visible tip of the iceberg. If that is all that we struggled with then the problem would be easy to deal with. The Whestboro Baptist Church members among us would be the only ones with a problem.
The bulk of the iceberg lies below the surface, it's roll is much more pervasive, much more sinister, and indeed operates on principals that are counter to those loudest of conservatives who live above the waterline. To deny the roll of socioeconomic forces, systemic inequalities, to wear blinders to history itself is every bit as if not more cruel.
The double think they partake in has ironic similarities to hard line communist modes of thought at work in the depths of the worst communist regimes like North Korea or the height of the cultural revolution in China, at least in terms of their mental landscape. I of course agree they don't want to even pretend to want economic equality. But as stated above there is a form of mental trickery at work here that is a kind of North Korea of the mind that would have you believe that if you just believe in the dear leader enough all your problems will be solved, like your starvation due to crop failures. Replace the dear leader here with a sort of self agrandised super ego. If you just tried hard enough like I did.
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