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The Cognitive Dissident

A blog by Ronald P. Thompson, Ph.D.

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Social Justice

How do so many good people do so many bad things.

One of the great mysteries in life is: How do so many good people do so many bad things?

It is so easy to write off anyone we do not want to address in a meaningful way as being evil and point out their misdeeds negate the good that they might have done.  The sad truth is that there is not a soul on earth that could not be so dismissed.

So the question becomes how is that the same humans can on one hand be committed to doing the right thing and still find themselves doing so many things that are hurtful?

I live in the Deep South, the land of churches and southern hospitality and Jim Crow.  The people of the Jim Crow world were on one hand generally honest, hardworking, generous and committed to living a Christian life. Yet, they perpetuated an abhorrent system of repression and dehumanizing behavior.  My 88 year old mother-in-law is of that generation. Sure, the good church people were not usually the ones that actually committed the lynchings and terror, but they provided cover for those who did.  A number of years ago I asked my mother-in-law how she and her peers, after WW2, had justified denying the vote to the black vets returning from fighting the same war their brothers and husbands had been fighting.  She did not have to look for an answer, right off she said “Well our blacks just weren’t smart enough to vote.”

Her answer to my question gives me the answer to the question I am asking in this essay. Why do good people do evil things? I propose that fear supported by man’s uncanny ability to engage in self-delusion allows good people to do evil things. Continue reading “How do so many good people do so many bad things.” →

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The Moral Imperative for a Livable Minimum Wage

We are all prisoners of our own life experience.   Even the fairest minded person interprets the world as if their own experience in life is a universal life experience.   This is not a moral deficiency as some would assert, but rather it is an inescapable reality of our existence.   Sure, it is easy to throw rocks at people who have a different life experience and say they should be able to see things your way. But realize as you do so, you are in fact admitting you cannot see the world through the eyes of the person receiving your rocks. Not having lived that other person’s life however, is not an excuse for not trying to imagine how things look from the other side of the rock you are throwing.

I say that in introduction to the “minimum wage” issue that has been simmering for about two years  but has not raised to a level of even a soft boil.  Over the past few years a string of news stories declare  that the US middle-class continues to slip in relation to the last generation, not just that, but are slipping behind the rest of the industrialized world.  Something is fundamentally wrong, but neither political party has a real commitment in actually doing something about it.

It is simply a fact that over the past 40 years the purchasing power of the minimum wage has steadily declined as the minimum wage does not automatically increase to keep pace with inflation.  No one is disputing that.  Also no one disputes the fact that as our manufacturing base has declined, the percentage of the workforce in very low or minimum wage jobs has increased.

When I was a teenager there were jobs that were effectively “kids jobs” because only students like me would work for the minimum wage being offered (which was worth significantly more than it is today). Fast food, grocery store check-out clerk and such jobs were entirely the province of people under 21. But during the 90’s something began to change, you began to see adults who once worked as unskilled labor in factories and warehouses began to be pushed down the economic ladder into low/minimum wage jobs.

Continue reading “The Moral Imperative for a Livable Minimum Wage” →

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California is first state to approve $15 minimum wage

From the CNN article:

California has become the first state in the nation to approve a statewide $15 minimum wage.

“No one who is working full time in California should live in poverty due to a low wage,” said Democratic State Senator Mark Leno, who cosponsored the bill.

The measure will raise the state’s minimum wage to $10.50 in January and to $11 in January 2018. It will then increase by an additional $1 per hour every year until it reaches $15 in 2022. If, however, the state goes through an economic downturn or budget crisis, the governor may choose to slow the implementation.

The final bill gives small businesses, with 25 or fewer employees, an extra year to implement the increases.

About 5.6 million Californians, or about 32% of the state’s workforce, currently live on the minimum wage, according to Kevin De Leon, the president pro tempore of the state senate.

Setting a minimum wage at $15 has plenty of critics.

“California may be the first state to pass a $15 minimum wage, but it will also be the first to find out why that’s a bad idea,” said Michael Saltsman, research director of the Employment Policies Institute, a conservative think tank opposed to minimum wage hikes. He argues that many businesses will have to cut staff or close because of the deal. “This pain from a $15 minimum wage will only be exacerbated in more troubled counties in the state.”

My thoughts: 

So I ask Mr. Saltsman, how many business are employing more workers than they need?  Though my wife makes significantly more than minimum, her retail employer pays most people minimum or close to it; I can assure you they have already paired staff down to the bone.   How many janitors or McDonald’s burger flippers can these companies actually fire and still make money?  I suggest the number is close to zero.

What will happen is a modest level of inflation will occur in fast food and retail and other business that pay low wages. Perhaps a few percent points.  The real effect is that the moneyed class will take a hit in that they will make less profit and pay a more for personal services provided by the working poor.  Their concern for jobs and the welfare of the poor is a sham.

All I can say is “Boo Hoo for you.”

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Stop Blaming the Poor for being Born Poor

On the surface it seems this poster (below) promotes social justice; however, read the last two lines and the moral high ground falls away.

In both the UK and the US, your socioeconomic status as an adult is nearly 100% related to the socioeconomic status of your parents.   This poster clearly blames the poor the fact that it is nearly impossible to climb up from poverty. The poster says “your own poor choices.” is the cause.

Well in all my years working as a social worker, I never once found someone who chose to be born into an impoverished family. I never once found someone who said they chose to enter kindergarten impossibly behind their middle class peers. I never once found someone who was happy their family could not afford the resources that would improve their chances to escape poverty.

Look at the “foreigners” in the poster and ask yourself “What is the chance any of them were born in a slum?”  There are many foreign born professionals in the US and the UK, but virtually all of them were born into wealthy families in their home countries.  To attack the native born poor for”making poor choices” that caused their poverty will not lessen the resentment to foreigners. Instead, it will reinforce the feelings of alienation and anger.  People around the world keep wondering why working class whites in the US are flocking to Donald Trump.  This poster might just be the answer.

We must not blame the poor for being born into poverty, even if we are doing so with a “good cause”

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Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan

This video  has Turkey’s would-be dictator President Erdogan so angry that he called in the German Ambassador to complain about it and demand it be censored.   Of course the one way to make sure everyone see’s a video is to complain about it.  So, here is the video that you are not supposed to see.

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hubris

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Mocked and forgotten: who will speak for the American white working class?

This is a terrific article. Here are two excerpts.

“The National Review, a conservative magazine for the Republican elite, recently unleashed an attack on the “white working class”, who they see as the core of Trump’s support.

The first essay, Father Führer, was written by the National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who used his past reporting from places such as Appalachia and the Rust Belt to dissect what he calls “downscale communities”.

He describes them as filled with welfare dependency, drug and alcohol addiction, and family anarchy – and then proclaims:

“Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster, There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. … The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”

“The differences are manifest in education. The pathway offered out of the working class is to get a college education. Yet at the best colleges there are veryfew low-income students, except for a few lucky enough to grow up in New York City, Los Angeles or Boston.

Differences are also stark around health issues, as well as social issues such asmarriage, family and where people live. The growing differences have made it easier and seemingly acceptable to ridicule the white working class, further marginalizing and isolating them. Go into an office in New York City (I worked in them for 20 years) and you will hear people joke about “white trash”, “trailer trash”, “rednecks”, “round people from square states”. Turn on the TV and you hear more cheap jokes about how they dress, talk and behave.”

My thoughts:

The author is quite right in how the Republican elites attack working class whites, but he is remiss in not pointing out that the Democrat elites do the same.

I spent over a decade as a social worker in Appalachia.  I know full well how these people feel utterly abandoned and powerless.  As a social worker I found that all of the activist and advocacy groups were based on race not income. The Urban League, NAACP and La Rasa are all good groups that do a lot of great work. However, there is no comparable group advocating for the working poor whites, especially rural and suburban whites.  It is hardly any wonder why they feel marginalized and are easy prey for those advocating white supremacy.

These are the Donald Trump voters. I am seeing and hearing increasingly virulent attacks on these low income white supporters calling them neo-NAZI’s and such, but in fact they are not; however, it is easy for them to be convinced the problem is caused by foreigners when no other easy answer is given.  You will notice that working class whites are also flocking to Bernie Sanders. He also gives the working poor whites a simplistic scapegoat (Wall Street bankers); but in reality he, just like Trump, sidesteps the larger problems facing the working poor.

To make matter worse, the working poor whites are increasingly hearing attacks on them because they are white. Poor blacks and Hispanics are being taught to scapegoat whites in general, not just rich whites, but all whites.   Talk of “White Privilege” coming from rich kids at elite universities does great harm to impoverished whites who would love to trade places with their accusers. The effect of this is to divide the working poor and further dis-empower all of them.

It seems the white working poor no longer have any political friends and are consequently easy targets for the elites of both parties. Not only is this immoral, it is a ticking time bomb in the US.

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The War on Drugs a Front?

A CNN article quotes John Ehrlichman:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
My Thoughts
I’ve never been a drug user and as a social worker I’ve seen first hand the damage drug abuse does to families and especially children.  So, I am not particularly sympathetic to the efforts to glamorize drug use in magazines like The Rolling Stone.  However, it is abundantly clear that the War on Drugs has been a colossal failure not only wasting billions of dollars but causing incalculable “collateral damage.”
I also think of myself as being cynical of almost everything; but, never had it dawned on me that the War on Drugs had never been about limiting the damage done by drug abuse. This new piece of information from one of the few people who absolutely know the truth about this issue is both disturbing and will require a great deal of thought.
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