Wealth is righteously earned and poverty is righteously dispensed
The cult of the just world
I would like you to do something for me. Please imagine how dumb you think this editorial is going to be.
Wrong. It is so much dumber than that.
The likely 2028 presidential candidate is arguing that there is no idea anyone can have, or company anyone can start, or value anyone can generate for others, that could possibly be worth a billion dollars.
If true, that raises questions that a fawning [Illana] Glazer did not ask. In what ways does Ocasio-Cortez believe that Taylor Swift, Michael Jordan, Jerry Seinfeld, Oprah Winfrey or Beyoncé — billionaires, all — broke the rules to accumulate their wealth? Who did they take advantage of?
Does she think the FBI should investigate Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) or Tom Steyer, the Democratic candidate for California governor? What about Democratic megadonor Alex Soros, a big fan of Ocasio-Cortez’s?
You wouldn't redistribute the wealth of your liberal heroes Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Jordan would you?
I'm doing Jim Face at the camera right now at never seen before levels.
How much money does he have at this point now that I think of it? Take it all too who gives a fuck.
This piece of shit article for dickheads follows a similar one from the other day by The Wall Street Journal (which has a Substack for some reason?) that uses Elizabeth Warren in lieu of AOC in the scolding shrew role and Lebron James as the emblem of the "good billionaire" we all surely must not be able to despise.
Buddy... I hope you are sitting down for this: There is no good billionaire.
To state the obvious to anyone reading this newsletter every single one of these people mentioned – yes even Beyonce and Taylor Swift :( – got their billions the same way any other did: exploiting the labor of workers in a cruel economic system maximized for the few to be able to do just that. The end.
It’s a quirk of American political thought that we revere rich athletes and entertainers, whose talents are on very public display and can hardly be dismissed. Yet when it comes to billionaires, whose skills are often exercised in invisible ways, many of us grow beady-eyed and wary. The big difference between LeBron James and Bill Gates is apparent, though: Mr. James never did anything for you except be entertaining. Mr. Gates, whose operating system made the consumer-friendly desktop a staple of the American home and office, measurably improved your life.
He is right about their skills being invisible part I'll give him that.
And now to satisfy the rule of threes please also watch this video of Robert Kennedy Jr. saying anyone who died of Covid had it coming.
I love to be a pumpkin headed Irish piece of shit from the Inbred Cape Cod Family That Loves to Die and a junkie and a drunk and sound like that and hold the Josef Mengele Distinguished Professorship at The Island of Dr. Moreau University.
Not that there is anything wrong with being a pumpkin headed Irish piece of shit from the Cape or a junkie or drunk to be clear.
Josh Crowley turned in a draft of today's feature about the cult of the Just World before any of these things dropped so it was very nice of them to do a lot of heavy lifting for our purposes here by way of introduction. The poor and sick in America, he reminds us, are poor or sick because of the poor choices they made. The wealthy, on the other hand, have earned their riches by their savvy. Wealth is righteously earned and poverty is righteously dispensed as punishment. It's just that simple. Don't think anymore about it.
A bunch more from me after that.
Oh also today I just posted a video and a transcription of this reading and interview I did at my town's book festival a couple weeks ago. You can find it all here.
Luke O’Neil
I'm lucky to have a fortunate life at the moment. I've suffered in a lot of ways before, but the people who are actually suffering, that's where the focus should be. I just believe that we all deserve better than this. And I believe that the world deserves better from us as a country. I'm just trying to convince five people at a time that that's something that can actually happen. And the one thing I find is that you have to… people sort of stop their own imagination when it comes to imagining a better world. This is something I write about a lot. People will be like, well, that can't happen. We can't do that. It's like, why not? Why are you already negotiating against yourself in your own imagination about what the world can be? If there’s anything you can take away from this, I would just say that a better world is possible and you don't have to cut yourself off before you start wanting that. The first step is wanting it.
The cult of the just world
by Josh Crowley
Forget what you think you know about billionaires as greedy exploiters of the working class, even though some of them are hoarding more wealth than fictional dragons by an entire order of magnitude. Turns out they actually rock according to the Wall Street Journal. And they did in fact “earn” their riches, as the Washington Post reported this week, despite what nags like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might say. Think about it: Without these “wealth creators,” how else would we have same-day deliveries brought to us by dying workers who can’t even take bathroom breaks, chat robots that lie all the time and drive us insane, and apps that prey on our insecurities and erode our mental health to show us as many ads as possible all while spying on us? How dare we punish their success?
And hey, have you heard the news? Anyone who dies from an infectious disease deserves it, as our Secretary of Health and Human Services recently said. It’s also okay to bully children again. In fact, you’re obligated to do so to get them to stop being so fat. “It is a part of the MAHA movement,” says Fox and Friends host Ainsley Earhardt. How else are they going to learn to make the right choices? It is a choice, after all. Everything is a choice.
When I was a little kid I used to tap out ‘pyramids’—1, 2, 3; 1, 2; 1. I didn’t understand why, but some mechanism in my brain convinced itself this would somehow keep my family safe. Sometimes I’d have to have my feet planted firmly on the floor by the end of the commercial break or repeat a little mantra in my head a certain number of times before my mom walked into a room. Ever the curious kid with access to encyclopedias (this was the early 90s), I eventually put the pieces together and “diagnosed” myself with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, though it’s probably more just “obsessive-compulsive tendencies”. Whatever it is, I managed to turn it against itself and make limiting the compulsions and obsessions part of the whole operation, e.g. I “have to” do the mental mantra thing, but only once per day, which feels a bit like inventing prayer.
At the root of all this absurd magical thinking is fear. I’ve been afraid my entire life of losing the people I love. I know I don’t have any real control over it, but my brain can’t live with that, so it invented these magical rules to follow to give me the illusion of control so I won’t feel paralyzed by existential terror and dread. The universe is capricious and unforgiving, and terrible unavoidable things happen seemingly at random. It sounds silly but some of us find comfort in telling ourselves, “Everyone’s going to be safe, see? Look: none of my fingers are touching and this Nissan ad just ended.” The human mind is a fascinating mess.
We of course have much healthier coping mechanisms available for all this. A stoic approach, for instance, involves recognizing the limitations on our scope of control, focusing on affecting what we can, and accepting that that’s all we can ever truly do. Live life as well as you’re able to and give it meaning. Death comes to us all. No one gets out of here alive.
Unfortunately we also have much much worse coping mechanisms, and by far the worst of them is a common thread that emboldens most of our cruelest ideals. Similar to OCD, it’s an attempt to manifest control, except instead of inward rules you impose upon yourself, it’s an insistence that real control is actually possible, that suffering is a matter of choice, and as such that people who experience personal tragedies are to blame for their own misfortune. Many of you already recognize this as the Just World Fallacy —the belief that “people get what they deserve”—but for a significant portion of the population, this tendency has dovetailed with American Individualism, growing hypertrophied through mutual reinforcement and propaganda to the point of cultish devotion.
To spot this in the wild one need look no further than the rhetoric surrounding poverty and wealth. Poor people, the thinking goes, should “make better choices.” It’s all about “personal responsibility.” From the other end we often hear that we can’t tax billionaires, because that would be a form of “punishing success.” The wealthy, in this binary, deserve their prosperity because of their “good” choices and the poor deserve their suffering because of their “bad” ones. Simple as.
It should be too obvious to have to point out, but reality isn’t so childishly simple. The World is not Just. One cannot simply Personal Choices their way out of poverty, let alone into riches. Throughout most of my life, the costs of necessities have skyrocketed while wages have remained stagnant, at best, all in the midst of a volatile job market where deranged sociopaths have placed entire careers in jeopardy chasing the latest tech phantoms. Meanwhile there is currently nowhere in the U.S. one can rent a single-occupancy apartment on minimum wage, and at ~$2,600 the median mortgage is a whopping 37% of the pre-tax gross median household yearly income of ~$83,000.
One would think that being on the receiving end of an Unjust World for long enough, or to enough of an extreme, would make it click for more people that maybe we don’t “get what we deserve,” but that’s where faith comes in—not faith in Jesus or anything corny like that, but faith in America’s true god: capitalism. Capitalism is the official religion of the Cult of the Just World, a system that can only exist thanks to cognitive dissonance and the collective unexamined belief that things are naturally fair, that success and failure are true metrics of merit. Any minute now the Invisible Hand will stop shoving my head in the toilet and flushing it over and over again and it’ll finally let me out so I can take my turn holding other people’s faces in the water instead. The American Dream.
Under capitalism we don’t grow food to feed people but to generate profit. And sometimes we destroy food to generate that same profit. (RIP John Steinbeck. You would have hated the future too.) In order to maximize that profit, prices are set not for affordability but rather at the highest point the largest number of people will be willing to pay. This necessarily prices out the poorest X%, which, extrapolated into every other arena—housing, clothing, healthcare, utilities—creates a layer at the very bottom of people who cannot afford even basic necessities. Perhaps they can fulfill some of their needs, sure, but certainly not all. This strata of guaranteed poverty is practically inescapable. It is, in fact, very expensive to be poor. (RIP Terry Pratchett too. Bad news about the quality of boots these days.) Capitalism ensures there will always be people who can’t afford things no matter how hard they work.
Those lucky few who do make it out are statistical outliers winning a lottery of opportunity, held up as examples to shame the rest. Often they themselves even buy into the idea that they’re better than the others by virtue of their “choices,” perhaps to assuage their survivor’s guilt. These glorifying tokenizing narratives ignore that most of the people living in poverty are in fact constantly trying to escape it, often taking the exact same approaches as those who get out, yet remaining trapped. Survivorship Bias is a crucial concept in a critical thinking toolkit that should be taught as early as grade school, but suspiciously isn’t part of any K-12 curricula. If we’re not careful, within a few years AI will help finish the job of obliterating critical thought in education and then we’ll really be in trouble.
Ultimately poverty is a systemic failure that we punish and demonize affected individuals for being dominated by, and when it comes time to attempt to rectify it, remedies are met with fervent opposition on the Just World basis that these people are only where they are because of their “bad personal choices.” “Why should I have to pay for someone else’s mistakes?”
I’d say society is a nice thing to have if you can keep it, but we don’t even seem to be able to convince people they are supposed to be living in one in the first place.
Meanwhile the fortunes amassed by billionaires aren’t the product of wise or virtuous choices, as we’re so often told, but rather the result of leveraging wealth inertia to increasingly exploit the working class, in an ecosystem where executives’ compensation packages are guaranteed irrespective of their performance. In fact, the highest-paid CEOs tend to be the worst performers. Despite endless narratives about shouldering herculean risks, executives reaping millions or hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars per year can make catastrophic decisions for their businesses and still retain their money and power. This despite perpetually laying off large numbers of employees in sacrifice to nervous shareholders, who themselves reap vast riches by virtue of simply already having money. Contrary to all these profiles on how rich people got rich, the common factor in poverty is “not starting out with money” and the common factor in wealth is “starting off with money”.
Near the bottom of the wealth spectrum we find legions of people working full-time jobs, or more yet making so little money they qualify for government assistance, but we can’t increase their pay because “they need to feel motivated to work.” They’re only poor because of their bad choices, after all, and require the threat of punishment to keep them on the right track. At the top of the wealth spectrum we find individuals like Elon Musk, who must never be taxed because that would conversely be “punishing success”. In a Just World “people get what they deserve” so clearly on the basis that he’s the wealthiest man alive, slated to become the world’s first trillionaire while millions go hungry, he must also be the most virtuous and meritorious man, right?
There is of course nothing meritorious or honorable about Elon Musk or his ascent to World’s Wealthiest Man—a fact glaringly apparent at this point to anyone even remotely paying attention. (For anyone interested in a refresher of some of his greatest hits, I’ve included an appendix at the bottom.) At most generous appraisal, he’s a clever charlatan adept at playing the role of a genius to further his investments. More realistic assessment pins him as an ignorant bigoted fascist bullshit artist with delusions of grandeur who’s scammed people into believing the many interwoven fictions he’s spun about being a kind of “real-life Tony Stark”, despite no producible evidence of any engineering marvels or inventions other than the loathsome, pitiable Cybertruck, with his ascent to power and wealth directly resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Another ready example of Just World Cultism comes in the form rape culture, abundant example of which you can find flourishing on Musk’s social media apparatus daily. Just like with poverty, victims here also take the blame. Again, the core lie is the idea that if we simply “make the right choices” we won’t “get what we deserve.” Vilifying the actions of the victims—even if it means partially if not completely exonerating the perpetrators—gives the illusion of control over whether or not one gets sexually assaulted. “What was she wearing? Well, I would never wear that (or let my daughter/wife wear that), so I’m safe!”
While it might be nice to imagine certain people getting what they have coming, the World doesn’t actually care how much we yearn for it to be Just.
The individualization and fixation on “choice” also drowns us in a propagandist narrative where “it’s up to everyone to turn off your lights when you’re not in the room” and “if you cut up the plastic rings holding your soda cans you can save dolphins from getting their snouts trapped”, which conveniently distracts from the facts that 80% of CO2 emissions are caused by 57 companies, businesses are carelessly ramping up energy consumption, and that our garbage shouldn’t be getting dumped into the ocean whether it’s chopped up or not.
The most recent surge in Just World Cultism is the victim-blaming response across the right to ICE’s public execution of civilians. Social media comments are littered with sentiments like “I just stayed home and didn’t get shot” and “he should’ve just complied” and “I heard she was antagonizing ICE” and “all you have to do is not interfere with law enforcement and you won’t get shot,” all of which are sentiments flawed at baseline in a legal system where law enforcement officials aren’t (supposed to be) allowed to extrajudicially execute you even if you’ve done something wrong. These beliefs in “safety through compliance” are also demonstrably untrue when you look at the many victims of police who were following every instruction, like Philando Castile, or asleep in a mistakenly-targeted house, like Breonna Taylor. Our world is one where some trigger-happy panicky idiot with the qualified immunity granted by some dumb badge can pull anyone over and unload his entire clip into you and at your wife and your baby and walk away with zero consequences. What a horrifying place, rendered bereft of justice thanks in large part to the belief that it is already naturally just.
And this is itself wrapped around Just World thinking that demonizes undocumented immigrants for crossing an imaginary line “the wrong way” and acting like that “offense” justifies brutality and homicide and concentration camps. This indignant rage against perceived “shortcuts” out of suffering or toward prosperity by the supposed undeserving also fuels opposition to things like student loan relief and GLP-1 drugs and abortion. Since insurmountable debt and obesity and pregnancy are the “just” consequences for “wrong choices,” anything that allows the people who “chose wrong” to avoid those punishments interferes with a Just World. The entire MAHA movement, headed by RFK Jr. as he and his plague of parasites clumsily demolish the federal government’s scientific approach to healthcare, is centered around the idea that your health is entirely a matter of choice, that vaccines are unnecessary risks because you can just exercise your way out of viral illness, and if you’re sick or you’re overweight or you’re disabled, that’s because you did something to deserve it or you didn’t do enough to avoid it. By logical extrapolation then, anyone who is sick or disabled did something wrong, so their condition is fitting punishment.
Before anyone walks away with the impression that this thinking is exclusive to the right wing, just take a look at the way liberals will say that southern states who’ve elected terrible people “get what they deserve” when they experience misfortune. This attitude ignores aggressive disenfranchisement, razor thin victory margins, and the fact that many of these districts are tortuously gerrymandered beyond the limits of geometry. There’s also a strong case to be made that people don’t deserve to suffer just because they’re the third consecutive generation so utterly failed by all their states’ systems that they fundamentally lack the critical thinking toolkits to know how to vote in their own interests. In many of these places, there’s no such thing as informed consent when it comes to politics—it’s just purposely-rendered-illiterate people neck-deep in a swamp of propaganda.
Sadly, the World is in fact terribly Unjust. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians in Gaza were murdered en masse, and countless parents who were “lucky” enough to survive all the bombings and shootings and incinerations and starvation lost their children to one or more of those atrocities. Hundreds of thousands of hungry people in Africa were killed by Elon Musk when he singlehandedly canceled funding for USAID as part of a campaign to further improve his grotesquely opulent life. Man is selfish and cruel, and the universe is indifferent to our suffering and loss. Yet so many of us doggedly insist on blaming victims, on pretending that these horrors are somehow avoidable if we merely “choose to do the right thing”.
We want to believe we’ll be okay. We want to think of ourselves as insulated from misfortune and suffering and indignity by virtue of our “good choices.” I have a hard time reckoning with the fact that one day I’ll die, that the best-case-scenario terminus for me is that I’ll leave my kids behind to be heartbroken over my absence. I have an even harder time thinking about anything bad ever happening to them—holy shit! Tap tap tap; tap tap; tap.
It bears noting, of course, that Just World thinking isn’t the origin of misogyny or racism or classism or rape culture or xenophobia or any of those things, and it’s not the only reason it persists. Each of those problems has a number of possible vectors, often involving combinations of upbringing, manufactured illiteracy, propaganda, misinformation, defunded education, etc. But fervent belief in a Just World is a common and especially powerful justification that perpetuates the cognitive dissonance that obstructs challenge to those ideas, and its strength comes from its connection to our existential fears. Acknowledging that the people on the receiving end of misfortune and cruelty and horror are undeserving of it and did nothing wrong produces reflective terror (“it could happen to me too no matter how hard I try?”) and guilt (“I supported—or did nothing to stop— this mass suffering.”). Resistance to empathy is the response of cowards and sociopaths.
The compound tragedy is that while helping to make everything worse, none of this Just World garbage even makes its adherents’ lives better. While reinforcing cruel myths about elective suffering, it doesn’t provide anything but the mere illusion of control and insulation from consequence. No matter how much anyone believes “people get what they deserve,” we’ll lose the people we love much sooner than we’d like, we’re vulnerable to random unavoidable misfortune, and one day we will in fact die. It’s awful and it hurts to think about but it’s all inescapable no matter what we say or believe. We could get hit by a bus tomorrow and our time here will end, but the cruelty we helped inflict in a futile effort to assuage our existential terror will persist long after. It’s crucial we eliminate Just World bias, especially the cultish extreme pervasive in America, and part of that effort begins with interrogating people’s assumptions about deservedness. Considering right-wingers tend to absolutely lose their shit at the slightest inconvenience, there’s a likely foothold there for dislodging the idea that people only end up in situations in which they place themselves through their choices.
And if you’re going to continue to insist on pretending you have control in spite of all this, just flick the light switch 3 times whenever you enter or leave a room like a normal person.
Josh Crowley is a writer, engineer, and musician living in northern New Jersey with his wife, daughters, and pets. You can find out more here.
Hello it's me Luke again. You won't be able to guess who is singing the National Anthem here but you will instantly recognize them a microsecond after they appear on the screen which is also an indictment of us all.
You may have seen a video of this fella speaking at a town meeting in Marblehead, MA going viral this week. As clear an example of Massachusetts Excellence as you'll ever see. The wealthy seaside town north of Boston was debating whether or not to comply with state regulations about building multifamily housing. You'll never guess if they want to or not!
"So this is way to comply with 3A without doing any 3A stuff?" David Modica asked.
"So we're preserving 'the character' of Marblehead? It's selfish. We're doing a bad thing. We're not doing any housing? Are we kind of being pricks? Are we trying to do nothing, because it seems like we're doing nothing... We're trying to make sure we build no houses? I don't get it. People live in houses. ... I just wanted to make sure we're voting on nothing substantive."
The Marblehead Independent caught up with David Modica and he continues to cut through the nonsense.
Will Dowd
A sample of his quotes:
“I had the sense it was fake,” he says. “I wanted someone just to say it that way. We couldn’t all pretend anymore.”
“Who is this for?” he says. “It’s a performance at that point. I guess we’re performing for the state, but I think they probably know it’s a lie too. I don’t even know who the whole jig is for.”
“We are the luckiest bastards alive,” he says of living in Marblehead. “We can’t also be the most self-interested bastards alive. They can’t be the same thing.”
“This place isn’t nice because the houses are all old,” he says. “It’s nice because we’re very fortunate. It’s wealthy. It’s near the water. We’re not nice because there’s an old building with a plaque.”
“If you ask people in Marblehead what their values are, they’d say they love everyone, they like neighbors, they’re inclusive — whatever,” he says. “But then you get a vote like that.”
And this is the best of them in my opinion:
“Any moment we spend bullshitting each other,” he says, “is just a sin.”
God I am in love with Massachusetts.
We finally had a day or two of perfect weather here so you know what that means. Time to listen to The Modern Lovers.
This is a prototype The Smiths song by the way. Not sure I ever noticed that before.
In other Massachusetts news people seem to be excited/mad(?) about Odysseus having a Boston accent in the forthcoming Christopher Nolan film so please enjoy if you like me reading from Homer's epic poem.
I would like to send out a hearty lol/lmao to Matt Taibbi – whose diaper must be absolutely overflowing right now – and congrats to our man Eoin Higgins.
Eoin Higgins
Read an excerpt of Higgins' book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left in Hell World from a while back.
Luke O’Neil
Higgins also wrote about his favorite Chris Cornell songs.
Luke O’Neil
Yesterday it was two years since we lost Steve Albini. If you never did read this one by Trevor Shelley de Brauw, a Real Chicago Guy, from the band Pelican and others, about the too short life and unbelievably prolific work of Albini, a Real Chicago Guy; seeing Shellac; recording in his studio; and trying to live an ethical punk life.
Luke O’Neil
There’s something of that aesthetic that carries across everything Steve touched, from the recordings he engineered, to the music that he created, to the essays that he wrote, to the conversations that he had, right on down to his acerbic and often hilarious social media posts. At the core of his interdisciplinary work was an unwillingness to gloss over the ugliness and banality of the world. Given his skillset, intellect, and notoriety, he could easily have pandered to an audience, but he opted for a rockier road – willfully shaking people out of a complacent stupor with songs and screeds about the many, many ways we are exploited by those we trust, and urging us all (including himself) to be better, more ethical people.
Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of the day we killed my father as well. I shared this one from We Had It Coming recently but here it is again I don't give a shit.
Some further notes on Musk from Josh Crowley:
Elon Musk presents himself as the founder of Tesla but he invented nothing and bought everything. In fact, many actual engineers who have worked with him in any professional engineering or scientific capacity have reported on his severe and catastrophe-threatening incompetence. The only thing he can truly claim to have invented is the largest and most needlessly dangerous flop in automotive history. Rumor has it there’s an entire division at SpaceX tasked with distracting him from active involvement, as his ideas are potentially disastrous. He settled a fraud case where he lied in order to take Tesla public. Like all billionaires, he can leverage his stocks in order to take out no-strings-attached loans well into the billions as if it’s tax-free personal income, which he did to spite-purchase Twitter (after fraudulently driving down its stock price) in order to silence his critics and elevate only the voices that agreed with him (and amplify his own account)—many of whom just so happen to be white supremacists—destroying a communications platform many relied on by transforming it into a right-wing echo chamber into which he shouts his own hateful racist rhetoric somehow hours a day despite being such a “busy CEO”. His public brand has become so toxic that it’s grossly impacted Tesla’s sales, yet despite this, the board has agreed to a compensation package that would give him wealth greater than the bloated yearly budget of the entire U.S. military. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the election of a fascist so he could be appointed to a government position that afforded him the authority to dismantle organizations tasked with regulating his businesses, in the process ideologically shuttering things like crucial aid programs, the closure of which killed literally hundreds of thousands of people. The AI he paid to build undresses children and he doesn’t care—even laughs about it. (He’s also been posting quite a number of strange AI-slop videos of young women himself.) He makes Nazi gestures, Nazi jokes, and attends Nazi rallies. At a personal level he’s a terrible father hated by his children and their mothers, especially his trans daughter who he demonizes and bemoans using his global platform at every opportunity because he’s transphobic. He promised to solve childhood hunger but when presented with a plan for it he backed down. Same goes for Flint’s drinking water, which he promised to fix—and certainly has the means to—but merely donated some filters to some schools. His “Hyperloop”, which never materialized, was just a way to shut down other public transit projects, and his Las Vegas tunnel for Teslas is an idiotic one-lane death trap. He called a man a pedophile for rescuing trapped children. He makes sweeping promises that he consistently and absolutely fails to deliver on. He’s publicly fallen for just about every hoax and bit of right-wing misinformation that’s gained widespread traction over the last five years, revealing an intellect and capacity for critical thought on par with the dumbest guy you went to high school with despite his claim to “genius."