The Most Dangerous Belief in the World
And one of the most popular across all nations and religions
I’ll cut right to the chase. The most dangerous belief in the world — and probably the most widespread — is the belief that life is fair.
In spite of the appalling lack of evidence supporting such a notion, people are determined to believe that everybody ends up getting just what they deserve.
It’s a comforting idea. It suggests the world somehow makes sense. It even has some plausibility, as long as you don’t think too hard about it. Actions have consequences. Crime doesn’t pay. Hard work is rewarded by success.
Except some crime does pay quite well, in fact much better than an honest job. And as for hard work, truly grueling work like picking strawberries (ever tried it? just imagine spending every day bent to the ground beneath the late-spring sun.) seldom pays a living wage. Tennessee Ernie Ford, a singer popular a couple generations back, described coal mining in pre-union days: “You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.” Think how many jobs fit that description now.
No, the surest path to affluence is to be born White and male to wealthy parents in the USA. In other words, luck.
The modern upper class will take offense at that. They’ll be quick to tell you how luck played no part in their success. How they worked hard in business school or law school or whatever university their parents could afford to send them to. Whatever their career may be, they’ll assure you it’s no picnic. They can make a million bucks a year and still believe they’re earning every penny of it. Even if their job is managing a fortune they inherited, they’ll promise you it’s not as easy as it looks.
For the rest of us, not born into that lucky situation, the odds are getting longer every day against our ever reaching upper middle class status, regardless of how hard or long we work.
The belief that wealth accrues to those who earn it and deserve it is just one of several dangerous myths that stem from what psychologists call the “Just World Hypothesis.”
Another is the myth of karma.
What most Americans call karma, I should hasten to point out, bears scant resemblance to Buddhist and Hindu teachings, wherein karma is related to destiny and reincarnation. In this country, people use the word to mean something like divine justice, manifested in a person’s luck. Give a dollar to a panhandler today, next week find a twenty on the sidewalk. Come down with appendicitis, it’s because you kicked your dog. Good karma, bad karma.
We love this term because it smacks of Eastern mystic wisdom, and because it sounds like it affirms the world makes sense, that good and bad behavior lead to good and bad outcomes. Without that reassuring sense of justice, we would have to face a world of random destiny, a world wherein the best among us could be terribly afflicted for no reason, even killed by illness, accident, or violence through no fault of their own. A world wherein a man bereft of virtue could through lies and evil luck become immensely rich and powerful.
In other words, a world like Planet Earth.
Despite the evidence that fate is in most cases random — and in many cases worse, actually favoring the least deserving — many of us stay committed to that fantasy of fairness.
Some make it a tenet of religious faith, trusting God to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. If pressed on why there is so little evidence of that kind of justice, they say reward and retribution are delivered in the afterlife. Which would be fine — a perfectly consistent and defensible position — if they just stuck to that. But they don’t. The minute you turn your back on them, they go back to reassuring one another that God really does reward and punish right here in this life.
They chatter on, nodding in self-righteous satisfaction, all about the folks they know whose lotto wins and pratfalls line up perfectly with their good deeds and sinful ones. Don’t tell them it’s coincidence — they “know” that everything must happen in accord with their god’s perfect plan. Confirmation bias? Never heard of it.
Why do I call such thinking dangerous? If people find some comfort in believing they can win a better life through hard work and virtuous behavior, what could be the harm in that?
Danger #1: Believing in a just world blinds us to the real injustice all around us.
Victim blaming. Since we can’t accept the fact that bad things happen to innocent people, we have to look for some excuse to justify their injuries or losses. Yes, it was a shame that man got shot by a policeman, but he had to have been doing something, right? A shame the child died, but her mother shouldn’t have allowed her to be playing near a busy street.
My most unfavorite of obscene religious platitudes is the one that goes, “God will never give you burdens more than you can bear.” Bullshit is not nearly strong enough a word. With numbing regularity, everywhere I look, ordinary innocent hard-working people are getting absolutely crushed, squished like bugs beneath a system that has no regard for their needs or their pain.
Adulation of the rich. Money, in most people’s eyes, is the way the game of life is scored. If that game is fair, then those who have the most must be the ones who are the best at it. It doesn’t really matter how they got it; if they have it, they are winners, and we want to be like them.
So we watch those housewives who are only real on Bravo, and we keep up with the Ks, the royals, the heiresses, the stars, the billionaires, as if their money made them relevant to our lives. As if their money made their lives worth watching. As if their money made them more important than real folks like us who live in the real world where people struggle to take care of kids and pay the cable bill.
Abdicating our responsibility to look out for one another. If God is going to make sure that the poor will be provided for, then the rest of us are off the hook. If God is watching to be sure that justice will prevail, then we are free to look the other way while immigrants are being screwed by merchants and employers, oppressed by law enforcement, and ignored by courts and politicians.
Which brings us to the most insidious of dangers in this myth:
Danger #2: Believing life is fair makes us supporters of the status quo.
If life is fair, then the way things are must be the way they are supposed to be.
If billions in the world lack means to feed their children . . .
If billionaires pay lower tax rates than their janitors . . .
If women do more work, earn less money, get less respect, and are sexually victimized more frequently than men . . .
If immigrants, Asian, Islamic, Hispanic, LGBTQIA, and other minorities are harassed and persecuted . . .
If female genital mutilation, abortion of female fetuses, dowry killings, “honor” killings, child marriage, and sex trafficking are still practiced openly . . .
If the poor are forced into substandard schools . . .
If Black family wealth now stands at 16 cents per dollar of White family wealth in the US . . .
If opportunity for economic advancement has all but disappeared . . .
. . . what has that to do with you or me? It’s not our fault the world works that way, and it’s not our job to fix it. We may not understand it. We may refuse to believe it. But it’s what it is, and we know in our hearts — as long as our own lives are reasonably comfortable — that on some level it makes sense.
Does anybody honestly believe that life is fair?
Most people, if you ask them, will respond with some version of “not exactly.” They’ll say only fools expect fair treatment in this world.
But in the next breath, they will tell you that they do believe what goes around will come around, that the universe (or God) keeps score, that good will be rewarded in the end and no one really gets away with anything forever.
If you ask them why, the Christians mostly say it’s in their Bible (though I’ve read that book and found far more to indicate the opposite) or that there will be justice in the afterlife. The rest will say they just cannot accept the notion of a world where chaos rules and fate is utterly indifferent to how good or bad we are.
So they don’t believe that life is actually fair, but they’re scared to think about the possibility that it might not be.
What is the alternative?
The alternative to the just-world delusion is to face the dark truth: shit just happens to us all. Which means, if there is ever to be justice in the world, it’s our job to create it. Likewise kindness and compassion.
The alternative is to admit the system’s rigged in favor of the lucky few. As Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said in 1970, “The haves have declared war on the have-nots, and the fix is in. Prospects for peace are awful.” That means it’s up to us to stand up for the poor and powerless — the casualties of that never-ending war — and for the victims of our racist-sexist institutions and traditions.
The alternative is to give up our faith in money as the measure of a person’s worth or worthiness. To turn off the TV, pull our eyes out of the smartphone, and begin to get acquainted with our actual neighbors. Learn from one another. Learn to help each other. Start to build a new economy in which we help each other thrive, since God’s gone AWOL and the caring’s up to us.
The alternative is to learn humility, to realize that other far-less-lucky lives are as important as our own, and to recognize how much that’s happening, not just in far-off countries but around us and in front of us, simply isn’t fair.
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