There are people out there – in fact, the great majority of Americans – so divorced from reality that they believe – no, they _have_ to believe – that the world is fair.
Recently, a group of Harvard and Stanford researchers led by graduate student Kristina R. Olson concluded in a study of American children that kids as young as five to seven believe that luck is not random, but explainable by “good things happening to good people”, and vice versa.
Per Olson, “One theory is that humans have a very powerful need to believe in a just world, where good things happen to good people, bad things to bad people. The kids appear to be generalizing their emotional response, so that they cannot distinguish between malevolence and misfortune. If you get a bad roll of the dice, you somehow must have deserved it, even if the reason is not readily apparent.”
Further, “Such preferences may, in turn, help explain the persistence of social inequality”; for example, why in the US, poor people are incarcerated more often and for longer sentences than the rich.
This story was reported in media outlets as an insight into an innate “human” need to make sense of life’s random cruelties rather than a national prejudice. In point of fact, though, this belief in just rewards, success through hard work, etc. is more prevalent among Americans than Europeans.
For example, according to another study by researchers at Princeton and MIT, only 30% of Americans believe that poverty is the result of luck rather than effort or education, versus 54% of Europeans.
Put another way, 60% of Americans believe that the poor are lazy, versus 26% of Europeans.
The second study acknowledges that the “traditional Marxist explanation is that workers, especially in America, hold a “false consciousness” about the fairness of market rewards and the prospects of improving their lot through effort, because they have been so indoctrinated or “brainwashed” by the propaganda of capitalists – who control education, the media, etc.”
Smugness, selfishness and self-congratulation have been bemoaned as part of the national “collective reality distortion” since the Reagan administration granted its imprimatur to same.
It has been tut-tutted as the hallmark of the “Me” generation, the notorious baby boomers, of which I am a member.
Regardless of when this attitude became part of the American belief system, the inability to distinguish between malevolence and misfortune helps to explain a great deal about such diverse phenomena like the persistence of racism, prejudices against the obese, and the effectiveness of political manipulators like Karl Rove.