Rallying to the Underdog
by Joseph Rowlands
Altruism is a system of morality that upholds self-sacrifice for other people. This means that other people are of higher value than yourself. Your efforts are wasted if you use them for your own benefit, since your are of insignificant value in comparison to others. How do you determine which of the others are most worthy of this sacrifice? Since altruism is fundamentally pointless, not having any particular reason why other people are of higher value (they just are! Quit asking questions!), the standard may vary.
In practice, the standard by which most altruists figure out who should be helped is need. Those who are greatest in need are those you should sacrifice for. This means that the well-off should sacrifice for the least well-off. The most successful must sacrifice for the least successful. The strong must be sacrificed to the weak.
I bring this up because it has a very specific impact on a person’s world-view. By treating the weakest or least able as the highest moral end to which you can put your resources, you learn to favor the weak compared to the strong. By default, someone in need is considered to have higher value than someone who is successful. You can’t live your life for those in need without believing that they deserve your sacrifices. And similarly you can’t view the successful as being of any value if your morality puts them on the bottom of the ladder. Those in need are worshipped, and those who are successful are looked down upon.
And this leads to a problem throughout the culture, and one that many Objectivists haven’t gotten over. Essentially the problem is favoring the weak over the strong. In a confrontation between two groups, one successful and one not so successful, the inclination is to take the side of the underdog. By always viewing the weak as good and the strong as amoral at best, and probably downright evil, justice is perverted.
A common example of this is the Marxist view that the employer has "power" over the employee. Because the employer is seen as more successful, Marxists rally to the side of the employees in any dispute, assuming that they are victims in need of help. And this helps define the problem. It is the presumed need of the underdog that brings the altruists running, ready to help when they can. The specifics of the situation are irrelevant. The employees need help, and that’s final.
When this default position is taken, justice is thrown out the door. It doesn’t matter, in a conflict between a strong party and a weak party, who is on the side of right. Altruism is incompatible with justice (as self-sacrifice is fundamentally unjust). Those in need must be attended to, and we can’t let a little thing like justice get in the way.
It’s not hard to imagine that if you wanted to get away with an injustice, you could take advantage of this fact. And people do learn. There are those who learn to play this bias for all it’s worth. They learn that all they have to do is declare themselves the victim, and people will fall in line. If someone in a superior position attempts to stop or punish them, everyone jumps into the altruistic role and defends them.
Examples of this abound. A number of examples of this exist even here on SOLO. For instance, we’ve all seen the hoodlums hurling insults at the organization, the people who run it, and even the participants on the forum. But all they have to do is scream that they’re being censored, picked on and abused, and suddenly we have people who aren’t even familiar with the facts jumping to their defense. People complain about the heavy-handed approach to running things, even though we let these punks insult us on our own site!
The idea that we might kick out some people who contribute nothing but a hostile environment horrifies people. And even some who agree that these people should go are afraid that it’ll make SOLO look intolerant. And of course the only thing worse than actually exercising this property right is to remind them that we have the right. The message is clear. Those who put the effort into building a world-class organization and website are to be sacrificed for those who couldn’t, and would rather tear it down.
This bias towards the underdog needs to be questioned. Individuals brushing off the remnants of their altruistic past need to be aware of this knee-jerk reaction, and the consequent injustices. To the many Objectivists who have overcome this, and who have spoken up in the cause of justice, I applaud you.
Discuss this Article (10 messages)
|
