Supporters Of Capitalism Are Victims Of Their Own Cognitive Biases

Reading by Tim Foley:

People who believe capitalism is working out great are just sloppy thinkers who’ve fallen victim to survivorship bias and the just-world fallacy.

Survivorship bias is when your analysis focuses on those who made it while ignoring those who didn’t. You got a decent job, bought a house, and are now living comfortably, which means the system works fine and there must be something wrong with anyone who can’t thrive under it.

All the people who work just as hard as you do but still find themselves struggling go completely missing from your perspective. All the people who are just as clever and resourceful as you but haven’t found financial stability are conveniently overlooked. Everyone whose business venture failed instead of thriving, everyone who got laid off instead of promoted, everyone whose family circumstances were less fortunate than yours, everyone who has a race, gender, disability, or socioeconomic situation which makes their life harder than your own, simply doesn’t factor into your understanding of the way things work.

You got lucky, and you can point to other people who got lucky, and you use those examples to hide from the inconvenient reality that it could just as easily have been you who got the shit end of the capitalism stick. You see a guy out your window sleeping on the sidewalk and you tell yourself there’s a perfectly good reason why you’re in here while they’re out there, and in order to make that cognitive tango work inside your head you have to tell yourself a fairy tale.

That’s where the just-world fallacy comes in. The just-world fallacy is a cognitive bias which assumes that everyone gets what they deserve: that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.

The appeal of this fallacy is that it gives us a sense of control. It allows us to believe that nothing bad will happen to us if we just do the right thing and avoid making stupid mistakes. It also allows us to believe that we deserve all the good fortune life has brought us, and that the poor exist because they’re not as virtuous and wise as we are.

The trouble with the just-world fallacy is that it only works if you don’t think about it too hard. Anyone who’s been alive for a few years knows that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. We’ve all seen it countless times, with people we know personally. The world simply is not fair. If you are doing well under the current system, it’s only because your luck has held out. You have what you have because of sheer dumb luck.

If you can get real with yourself about this, you will understand why the system needs to change. A system which insists upon maintaining a very large tier of society who must stress and struggle throughout their lives is not a just or moral system. It cannot be defended by anyone with a rational mind and a well-formed conscience.

People who oppose the movement toward a more equitable society often accuse socialists of “jealousy” and “greed”, but that’s just projection; it is their own greed and selfishness which prevents them from sincerely reckoning with the unjust nature of the society they coincidentally wound up on top of. It is true that those who support socialism are frequently less economically privileged than the average capitalism proponent, but that’s only because they have a reality-based perspective on the abusive nature of the capitalist status quo.

Those who have been fortunate under capitalism often have a harder time forming a reality-based understanding of the system they live under, because they have to fight their way through all the comfortable cognitive biases which insist that everything’s more or less fine the way it is. If they still insist that capitalism is great, it’s only because their own intellectual laziness, ego, and moral cowardice have prevented them from getting real about their circumstances.

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