It’s An Old Problem
The class war that is flaring up all over.
Ellroon quoted Herman Melville: “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made of the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.”
That reminded me of the similar statement by Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
The wealthy ran wild and destroyed the economy, but the punishment falls mainly on the lower classes, and this is presented as justice. The politicians and media don’t seem to understand why the lower classes might be more than slightly upset.
Scientist have discovered that all species of primates seem to have an innate sense of fairness. Humans don’t need laws to know when they are being treated unfairly. If they resort to violence and destruction, it may be that nothing else seems to work. It’s a variation on the old saying ‘don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time’, i.e. if you are being punished, you may as well do something that justifies the punishment.
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What scientists have discovered is that if you load up a primate’s environment with aversive stimulae — if, for example, almost anything he can do results in him being shocked with a painful electrical shock — the primate will literally go insane. He’ll tear up the monkey house regardless of how many shocks you give him, or he’ll huddle up in a ball and die completely ignoring any food and water you give him, but nothing good happens.
Our society is set up to attempt to guide primates to a specific behavior by shocking the monkey if the monkey does anything that’s not desired. But there’s a *lot* of things that aren’t desired by our elite overlords, that any primate naturally desires. Like social justice, or fairness, or equal access to health care, or a retirement that offers some degree of dignity rather than “if you’re too old to work, just die, already.” So the average person’s environment especially at the low end of the economic tier has become one hand-slap after another. “No, you can’t do that. No, you can’t have that. No. No. No. No.”
The only thing that consistently works for training primates is to provide rewards for desired behavior. If what you want as a ruling elite is a hard-working population that spends their time either working for you or consuming, for example, you have to reward them for their hard work by letting them get ahead in life if they follow the rules and work hard and do what they’re told to do. If instead, after hanging this bacon in front of their noses, you slap their hands and say “No, you can’t have the reward we promised you”… or you never hang the bacon in front of their noses at all and instead try to shock them when they try to do anything other than what you want in order to force them to tread the straight and narrow… well. Bad Things Happen. And it’s not surprising that it’s happening in the society with the least social mobility on the roster of OECD “advanced economies”. The only real question is when it’s going to happen in the next two societies on that list — Italy, and then, at #3 from the bottom (where “the bottom” is the least chance of ever escaping whatever class you were born in, so it’s not a good place to be), the United States, the Land of (little) Opportunity if you don’t happen to be born in the right class.
– Badtux the Primate-training Penguin
We both know it’s going to happen, it is no longer a matter of ‘if’, but of ‘when’ and ‘where’.
If there is no benefit to following the rules, why bother? When punishment is totally dependent on class, there is no respect for the law.
OT: aren’t you supposed to be AFTK?