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Comment by scandox | Hacker News Reader

> no matter what social position you may have happened to find yourself in

People don't "find themselves" in a social position. It isn't like they wandered into the wrong part of town. People suffering poverty are angry about wealth because it represents something withheld from them by an opaque and unfair system (how opaque and how unfair is the only thing under debate). Rich people who think poverty is a moral failing are afraid of losing what they have and in need of a feeling of intrinsic superiority because their greatest anxiety is that they don't deserve what they have.

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“Find themselves” is intentionally passive, without implying any cause... the alternatives would be “got themselves into” or “were placed by someone else”

The phrase was used to stay out of the debate about the cause, not to imply there was no cause.

But you can't separate the cause from the issue. It's like seeing some people admiring a trophy and saying "so what, I could make one myself in a few hours".

The trophy is a symbol for something more, and so is having hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think there is potentially merit in the idea of the idea that the cause and the issue are related; in that the same system makes some people rich and some poor. However, I don't think that's relevant to whether it is okay to hate an individual unless they actively wronged someone.

I'm not sure how this contradicts, or even has anything to do with the parent post. It seems like you're reading excessively far into a turn-of-phrase.

That turn of phrase is the key indicator in the original comment. It means they think of poverty and wealth as unrelated phenomena. Generally it is our most casual statements that say the most about our underlying assumptions.

I don't think it's fair to assume the worst interpretation of what someone says.

It is relevant to the parent post because there's legitimate reason for the poor to have animus against the rich, and not vice versa. The parent post is attempting to treat "poor" and "rich" as something like rival sports teams that are on equal footing, because that's required to criticize the poor mad at the rich in the same way you'd criticize the rich mad at the poor.

>It is relevant to the parent post because there's legitimate reason for the poor to have animus against the rich, and not vice versa

The parent poster is specifically referring to a specific type of unfounded animus. Namely: having no argument other than "they have more money than me" to justify said animus.

The parent poster wrote "poor people who have nothing more to hate on rich people about than that they have money", which sounds like well-founded animus to me.

Here's a way to think about it - what is the corresponding thing for the rich to hate on the poor for? Are the rich jealous of not having money? Are they envious of those who cannot pay more for housing simply because a building of questionable merit faces it (one of the examples given in the article)? How is that founded? The rich can easily get themselves into that position, should they be desirous of it.

There is an arguable parallel in the rich who see the poor as being a moral failure for merely not having money and the poor who see the rich as being a moral failure for merely having money, but a) I think the poor have a better claim to well-foundedness there, even if it is slight, in that the rich quite clearly have the ability to stop having money with a snap of their fingers where the poor do not obviously have the ability to start having money, and b) the article does not seem to say that merely having money is a moral failure - at best it says that misusing money is a moral failure.

>The parent poster wrote "poor people who have nothing more to hate on rich people about than that they have money", which sounds like well-founded animus to me.

Let me make sure I understand, because I fear we may be talking past each other.

Are you suggesting that the simple fact that one has more money than you is sufficient to justify animus?

(I'm happy to discuss the rest of your post once we clear up this particular point; it seems fundamental.)

> Are you suggesting that the simple fact that one has more money than you is sufficient to justify animus?

Not if the difference is trivial, but absolutely when it is as enormous and as unmotivated as it often is. Why would it be strange that obviously unfair inequality would be a source of animus?

Saying "I hate you for having more than me and I want your stuff" is just straight up jealousy, and it should be easy to understand why wealthy people respond with hostility to this, creating a negative feedback loop.

Your quote is a straw man, but what does it matter if jealousy is involved or not? You can disregard any animosity stemming from social injustices with that logic. Women are just straight up jealous because men are paid more. Blacks are just straight up jealous because whites have longer life expectancy. LGBTs are just straight up jealous because straight cis people don’t have to conceal a central part of who they are.

I think my interpretation of the thread was that anger towards people with money just for having money was legitimate. If your thought is that those people are actively retarding the ability of the poor to improve their situation, then I think you have some ground to stand on, but otherwise I don't think it is reasonable. I think it's ok to wish things were different; I think it's ok to be angry at a system; I think it's ok to be angry at people who have personally done you wrong; but I don't think it's ok to be angry at people who haven't personally done you wrong just because they have something you don't. I actually happen to fall into one of those minority groups that you mentioned, and I don't hate the other people that can do things that I can't; I hate the system and the people perpetuating the stupidity. That may predominantly be composed of people in that other group, but it is certainly not anywhere near all of them, and I have the ability to make that distinction and avoid prejudgements. That being said, all of that nuance went unstated in my original post, so my bad.

When (enough of) the people who benefit most from a system that's already biased in their favor unironically tell the folks on the far end of that benefit curve that they just need to work harder, they had the same opportunities as anyone else, it's their own fault, or whatever, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable for the people on the receiving end of that "wisdom" to develop a general sort of resentment for their "betters."

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed." — Herman Melville

EDIT: Phrasing.

> I don't think it's ok to be angry at people who haven't personally done you wrong just because they have something you don't

The difference with wealth is that you can choose to become unwealthy on a moment's notice. So each day you remain wealthy is, itself, a choice. And the process of becoming unwealthy itself has direct benefits for the poor.

A white person cannot choose to become black and thereby remove oppression. A straight person who does not marry does not thereby yield the ability to marry to a gay couple. Even someone assigned male at birth who decides to present as female does not get to transfer her former male privilege to anyone in the process.

But someone who can afford a $10M condo that is as functional as (being generous) a $1M condo could directly transfer that $9M to people who don't have a place to live at all. So their choice not to do that—their choice to merely have money—is a decision we can justly evaluate morally, in a way we cannot evaluate merely having white skin or male presentation morally.

In my religious tradition, in our ritual confession of our faults, we apologize "for what I have done and for what I have failed to do." There is a story of a rich man who dutifully kept the ancient laws but refused to sell his possessions to the poor, and chose his possessions over the way of the religion. To remain rich (at least beyond one's needs and beyond the needs of one's credible plans to help the world) is an active choice, and can be criticized as any other choice.

I think the difference is this:

It is right for oppressed groups to want to not be oppressed, it is not right for them to hate other groups because they are not oppressed.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that.

The saying would be closer to:

"I hate you for having ∞x more than me and actively preventing me from having a decent life, just to milk a little bit more from me. I want my stuff"

I think it counts as logically reasoned animus, certainly much more so than animus towards fans of an opposing sports team. Whether it's justified is a question of one's particular moral worldview, but there are coherent ways to justify it, especially if you change it from merely having more money than the opinion-haver to having money past a certain point, usually correlated in some way to one's practical needs. It gets even stronger if you change it to those who keep money for the sake of keeping money or spend it in vain ways instead of putting it to good use, where there are lots of possible definitions of "good."

(I'm not totally sure where my own worldview lies, for what it's worth. Almost certainly the strongest form, and almost certainly not the one you stated. But I think it is defensible that some worldviews believe all of these and they are not the worldviews of people too irrational to be worth understanding.)

I've noticed that a lot of the animus that the more-fortunate of us humans have against the less-fortunate is based in a very deeply-hidden, but very present understanding that it could have easily been you. Like, you have to distance yourself from unfortunate circumstances, lest you become victim to them.

This is just a denial of the reality that no one is really given a choice about the circumstances of their lives. That goes for abilities and outcomes. It should be self-evident, that all men are created equal - not in ability or outcome, but in the fact that no one has a choice in the hand they are dealt.

The less-fortunate you are, the more grievances you have - legitimate grievances. My original post wasn't meant to de-legitimize anyone's founded grievances. I'm just starting to see this in these types of discussions, both online and irl, that the more we rail against members of difference classes, the more rigid those class structures become. Of course this is a slippery slope to telling people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. That's not what I mean either.

edit: I got a little (ok, a lot) carried away with the language, and it definitely detracted from my point, and added nothing to the conversation.

Whatever point you were trying to make could perfectly well have been made without "some graduate student bourgeoisie cunt".

Seriously, what does that add here? It was already perfectly unambiguous you find her and her perspective abhorrent. Such hateful vulgarity actually detracts from your argument, IMO; you come across as rageful, not rational.

EDIT: Parent comment was edited to remove the quoted bit, and also significantly for tone, before being flagged to death.

Yeah, it was incredibly uncalled for on my part, terrible way to think.

> Plenty of underprivileged people in the world would literally kill for the chance to live in a mcmansion. I wouldn't, but that's me. I won't begrudge someone who does.

So this gets complicated. Plenty of underprivileged people would kill for the change to have a decent and fair shot at life with a reliable roof over their heads, and certainly I wouldn't begrudge them that. But there are also plenty of people who are stably renting a small apartment or own a small one-family house in the suburbs who would also kill for a McMansion, and I think the unfortunate but fair judgment of those people is that, were they rich, they'd behave in the ways we stereotypically dislike the rich for. The fact that they do not because they cannot is not, I think, itself a reason to avoid making that judgment.

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