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What bothers me is not that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. That's pretty much the history of the world, and it's unlikely to change any time soon.[1] What bothers me is how people rationalize the very imperfect world we live in.A very poignant observation. This is exactly where the root of improving the human condition lies. The HN crowd doesn't seem to care much for ideas and critiques from a Marxist perspective, but there's some seriously important truth about this state of affairs that are always under the Marxist microscope, so to speak. To quote from a recent article on "Karl Marx's Guiding Idea"[1]:
> "One of the strangest features of human existence is that we are oppressed by things that we have created; but anything that is created by humans can ultimately be transformed by us, once we see through its apparently alien character and recognize it as a human creation, so as to be liberating rather than oppressive."
Marx followed and extended a rather lengthy philosophical tradition that was directly critiquing the bizarre notion--which seems to always remain near-universal across different societies--that the material conditions in which people live and either thrive or wither are the product of socioeconomic laws that most believe and argue are as immutable as the laws of nature. Social notions before and since Marx's time have remained replete with this widespread assumption that things are the way they are for reasons that are not our fault and, ultimately, beyond our ability to control--as if we're all just born into material conditions that are like those which govern the entire universe. It's what makes revolutions in history such lightning rod events--until they settle down and back into a new veneer that's just a bit different from that which came before. It's what leads people to resign themselves to the notion that, generation after generation, "the poor will always be with us".
Yeah, for as long as we allow them to be.
We create much of our material conditions and surroundings, and all of the socioeconomic systems we build around them. Then we treat them as if they are unchangeable. We persist in this regard for generations, relegating the greatest number of the masses to increasingly inferior conditions, while a tinier majority increases their material conditions exponentially. When we recognize this, we tell ourselves that it's unavoidable, natural, unalterable, etc. That a bit more hard work from everybody, a killer idea for a new startup and some successful pitches to VCs later, and you're gonna be on your way up, too, free of the need to worry about the problematic shit around you ever again.
This is unjustifiable foolishness.
You and I likely don't agree on perspectives (so please forgive the intrusion and know I'm not trying to convert you or trigger a philosophical debate that completely loses sight of the target here), but we do agree at least on your core point--this is not rational. We made everything around us. We can recognize it as a human creation, and then change it. And I don't mean sitting around waiting for the next election. That's not going to change a thing. All the hope and change so many voters expected to see in the last 6 years has gone ... where? Incremental alterations to things that, sure, matter in some way, but do nothing toward fixing what is fundamentally broken. We are closer than ever to equalizing marriage for all adults; we sit idly by as people continue to slide into deeper poverty and fewer real opportunities for improving their material lives. Such progress. Such hope. Such change.
In the meantime, people do exactly as you point out--identify outliers to avoid dealing with the norms and recognizing things are actually broken. Use anecdotal stories about someone who did something surprising (given his or her original material conditions), and allow themselves to be content with the idea that "if so-and-so did it, then so can everyone else".
As a parent (and a Marxist), I, too, am constantly battling a palpable sense of unfairness and guilt when I examine the ways in which I work as hard as I can to make sure my sons have an unfair advantage. I want them to have a better education, better life, better opportunity, better options, increased chances of avoiding all the shit I was not equipped to avoid by my parents and learned the hard way. I attempt to balance this by raising my kids to be aware and mindful of their advantages and, above all, of the complexity of everything around them--the need to avoid at all costs allowing themselves to look at others and relegate them to simplistic explanations that they're lazy, unmotivated, or whatever. I try to help them recognize the ways others try to boil things that arrest their attention into simplistic (and often polarizing) viewpoints that delete all the nuance of life, allowing an erroneous worldview to plant itself in their minds that they're any different from anyone else. And yet I feel guilty knowing that--because of the structural problems in our society that we've both created and continue to allow to remain in place--they actually will find they are different from others. Experiences that will be known by others because of their material conditions and limitations will be foreign to them (statistically speaking, at least, both poorer and richer included). It's not easy raising kids in a broken society that seems to only be concerned with incremental changes that give people the illusion of hope and change, while resigning itself to doing nothing at all about things that would rapidly and significantly ameliorate a host of social problems.
What do I really want to be part of providing them? A better world. Oscar Wilde wrote the following in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:
> "“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
I think it's time we stopped dismissing Utopia as a fool's errand, and start sailing toward it as humanity's destination. We need Utopia. It's how we plot our course. We've been severely off-course for long enough now. We could use a bit of fixing our eyes on it to see which direction we should move for the benefit of as many as we can fit on the ship.
[1]: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/08/karl-marxs-...