this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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There is also a giant undercurrent of wealth ministry in the American upper classes. Since about the 1960's they've been pushing the idea that God blesses good people with money and punishes bad people by making them poor. It's mixed with the Protestant Work Ethic so they also see poor people as lazy and undeserving.
It's a completely self serving and self fulfilling ideology but it makes them feel good so we all have to suffer because we lost the lottery at birth.
The mentality goes back much farther than the 1960s. In a traditional Christian family the father is the giver of rules and justice. "Wait til your father gets home!" Kids learn that doing what daddy says leads to rewards and disobedience leads to punishment. Follow the rules and you prosper, break them and you suffer. This translates very directly into thinking poor people must be bad people. They must have broken the rules somewhere along the line because look how they're being punished. Wealthy people must have done all the right things in all the right ways, because they're getting rewarded with prosperity and that's what's supposed to happen. f you're conditioned into that mindset, class differences make perfect sense.