Majorities are almost always ruled by minorities, for example… You work in an office with 9 other people, you swear, you laugh, you fart, you discuss your sex lives, you tease co-workers, you’re irreverent, you cover for each other etc.. introduce a single individual, a religious person, or a prude, or somebody who is highly oversensitive, and suddenly the lot of you have to act differently. The minority wins.
You’re in with the lads drinking and smoking d’erb… Time comes to order the food. 9 want Chinese food, 1 doesn’t, so you don’t get Chinese food, 8 like Indian food, 2 don’t, so you don’t get that either. 5 like pizza, 3 aren’t bothered they’ll have cheesy wedges, 2 hate that stuff, so you don’t get that either. 3 of you love McDonalds, 4 don’t mind it, 3 will eat it but aren’t that fussed, just it’ll do. So that’s what you have. The minority wins.. Maximal utility is rarely realised in groups because it would marginalise a minority.
This happens in societies, the majority is ruled by the most vocal minority, and it seems somehow wrong and oppressive to ignore this small set of people who might be left out. It’s a fine and moral approach to consider those who need the will, or the mechanisms, of the built world (what we create, society and structure), to be made to suit them. I’m strongly in support of that impetus. If you need a ramp because you use a chair, or a noise at the crosswalk because you have limited vision, then that’s the way we should configure the world, in the most accommodating fashion. There is no rational argument that works against this, there is a financial one however.
What does not need accommodated is the minority of persons whose will it is to play the victim of what is (mostly) an imagined oppression. Nobody I know, and I know a lot of people, gives a shit if you are gay, black, ginger, trans, overweight, underweight, a goth, covered in tats, live in a yurt, vegan, a born again christian, or you mate with fir trees….they truly don’t. In fact, I’m pretty sure it might be the minority that wants to be oppressed for the purpose of being special in some way, impurities are always special, always given consideration, always gain traction, the anomaly in the cloud chamber catches the eye.
We don’t really realise that it’s a part of the moral self to give more attention to the non standard individual or the person in need, and there is utility in this in groups of course. This utility protects children, the disabled, the weak members of the tribe maybe. I don’t mean that so as to diminish anyone, in many ways each one of us is, at times, that weak member, depending on what the tribe happens to be doing. I’m not weak in a quiz, but I’m pretty sure I’d be a very weak member of a basketball team for example. Like all movements that have the support of the mainstream media, and these truly do, it simply must serve a narrative purpose to the interested parties that own and steer the methods of information within society.
I contend that the usefulness of centring around this or that minority is as a distraction from issues that should be more apparent to us. The greatest oppressive force in a society is the structure of that society, the ideology of the ruling group, who themselves are a minority of tremendous power and plenty, but supported in an abstract way by the mass adherence to laws that they create. Supposedly moral individuals follow out of a skewed sense of correct behaviour, never realising they are supporting what is immoral. The ideology is neoliberalism, a facet of capitalism and a bastard child of classical liberalism, itself an outgrowth of the changing structure of society from feudal to industrial.
We are distracted by causes, like we are distracted by the symptoms but we continue to deny the disease that causes them. Liberalism does not really liberate, it abandons, it liberates only one class of people, the gentry. Liberating them from the most important aspect of society and the built world, the reciprocity, assumed, and understood to be the social contract between the beneficiaries of a society and its structure. By persuading you, Joe blogged the plasterer or plumber, that you should pay less income tax, and by you agreeing because you think you’ll be better off, they get you to tacitly agree that they pay less too, and they win much bigger than you do..
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