The other day I saw another great example of the way people in capitalist societies tend to reframe their dumb luck as the result of their own hard work and resourcefulness.
At the end of the last season of the surivalist competition Alone Australia, the winner Trent Felton was asked if he felt he’d just gotten lucky catching dozens of fish while all the other contestants starved, and he insisted that his success was actually due to the fact that he had made the wise decision to work hard obtaining food.
“My strategy when I went out there was food,” ▶said Felton. “I’ve been a big fan of the show for a long time, and I’ve never really seen anyone leave ‘cause their shelter’s not quite up to scratch or anything like that, so from day one priority for me was food.”
Oh you made food a priority, did you Trent? On the show about obtaining food to survive in the wilderness? Wow, I bet your opponents wish they’d thought of that.
He’d just watched the same show we all watched. He saw all his other co-contestants taking far more extraordinary measures than he ever had to take in order to obtain fish and other nourishment, building boats to try to change their luck with the fish, constantly moving their gill nets and trying all kinds of lures and bait and still getting nothing.
But he couldn’t just be humble and say “Yeah, I was dropped off at the only decent fishing spot on the show during a season where fishing was the only way contestants were allowed to harvest animal protein. I got lucky.” He had to pretend his fortune was actually the result of his hard work and his clever “obtain food” strategy.
This is such a perfect example of the phenomenon we discussed the other day where people who’ve managed to thrive under capitalism assume the system is working fine because survivorship bias and just-world fallacy cause them to believe that everyone’s getting exactly what they deserve. If I have more than I need it’s because I worked hard to obtain it. If you have less than you need it’s because you didn’t work hard enough.
Our whole insane society runs on this premise. Those who got lucky say their fortune is the result of their own hard work and cleverness, so they should enjoy tax cuts and generational wealth while the less fortunate are sleeping on the sidewalk.
Meanwhile those who’ve been working their fingers to the bone just to survive in this shitshow know that money doesn’t actually reward hard work. In our society, money rewards being born into the right family, being cruel enough to exploit the working class, being sociopathic enough to externalize the costs of industry onto the environment, and being ruthless enough to crush anyone who is in competition with you.
Which is why we find ourselves ruled by a plutocratic class of psychopaths today, who preside over a tiered society of haves and have-nots whose continued stratification is foundational to the system under which we live. Sure, as an individual you might one day get lucky and move from the lower tier to the higher one, but such instances are just the “poor girl marries a prince” stories of our day. The odd exception to the general rule doesn’t change the fact that our entire civilization depends on the permanent existence of an impoverished underclass.
Those with clear eyes and humble hearts understand that there’s no good reason why we should be living comfortably while others struggle and suffer, and that we must do whatever we can to help create a more equitable society which uplifts those who are more needful than ourselves. We reject the temptation to tell ourselves stories about why we shouldn’t have to share our good fortune with those less fortunate, and we join hands with our brothers and sisters in humanity to help build a healthy world.
We have more than enough resources to care for everyone, if we would only redesign our systems to advance the interests of humanity over the interests of capital. There is no valid reason why poverty should continue to exist. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves, either intellectually in their heads or morally in their hearts.
As Buckminster Fuller said many years ago, “It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting high technology from weaponry to livingry.”
He was correct then, and he is correct now. We can still have a world like this. It’s not too late to change.
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