by TerranceDC

I'm sure this has been covered by everyone and his brother, but I couldn't help being amused by this study suggesting that conservatives are happier than liberals. But before any conservatives start gloating, there's another thing to consider.

Being happy is a cinch, if you can rationalize not giving a shit about injustice and inequality.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance,
right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and
well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives
also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a
person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not
really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life
than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less
about how equal people are."

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of
meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status
in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one's
social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be
perceived as totally fair and justified.

If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left
frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier
and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric
survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the
findings.

It makes sense. If you can rationalize inequities as right and just,
then no matter how bad things are for someone else, you can rest
assured that things are as they ought to be. So, naturally you're not
bothered by economic injustice. You're not bothered by discrimination
either.

In other words, going back to a previous post, you don't have to acknowledge your privilege.

No one likes to be reminded of their privilege — whether it’s white privilege, heterosexual privilege, male privilege, or class privilege
— because acknowledging that privilege commutes responsibility for that
privilege, and the day-by-day, moment-to-moment decision to perpetuate
that privilege or know — while knowing the consequences it imposes on
others.

Whether we asked for our privilege or not — acknowledging
it, if we don’t want to be responsible for perpetuating it and the
injustice it perpetuates, means changing how we are in the world, day-by-day and moment-to-moment.

That is difficult and never-ending work, to be honest. It’s easier
not to acknowledge it. It’s even easier to pretend it doesn’t exist. In
fact, the first essential rule of perpetuating privilege is to pretend
it doesn’t exist. That becomes difficult when the voices of those who
can confirm the existence of that privilege, because they (a) do not
possess it and (b) live with the consequence of its existence every
day, become unavoidable.

And, the truth is that even though almost all of us enjoy one or
more of the privileges above (especially if you consider class or
economic privilege on a global scale), we also live with the
consequences of not having one or more of the privileges
above. The lack of one privilege can mask the existence of the other.
(i.e. “What do mean I’m privileged? I’m barely making ends meet, just
got laid off, and don’t have health insurance because my spouse and I
aren’t married and he/she can’t carry me on hers, etc.”) That privilege
doesn’t go away, but it becomes something taken for granted, as natural
as breathing out and breathing in, so that we don’t take it as
privilege anymore.

If you can rationalize your privilege, and rationalize related
inequities on the flip-side, then you don't have to change how you are
in the world; because all is right with the world, no matter how bad it
is for somebody else.

In fact, your privilege — whether it stems from your race, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, etc. — doesn't even exit.
The whole world is suddenly a meritocracy. What you have, you deserve,
basically because you have it. And the "have-nots"? Well, if they
deserved it, they'd have it.

Essentially, the have-nots deserve whatever they get. It's an aspect of conservatism that we saw play out during Katrina. We've heard it paraphrased by the likes of George Will and Bill O'Reilly, as well as Neal Boortz. Still I haven't heard anybody put it any better than George Lakoff.

Worldly success is an indicator of sufficient moral strength; lack of success suggests lack of sufficient discipline. Dependency is immoral. The undisciplined will be weak and poor, and deservedly so.

… The role of government is to:
* Promote unimpeded
competitive economic activity so that both the disciplined moral people
and the undisciplined immoral ones are able to receive what they each
deserve, based on their own choices;
… The Economy and Business: Promoting
unimpeded economic activity means favoring those who control wealth and
power, who are seen as the “best people,” over those who are
unsuccessful, who are seen as morally weak. Corporations are
more heavily favored than non-corporate businesses, because big
businesses (like wealthy people) have gotten big precisely through
working hard and being disciplined.

Norman Vincent Peale, as I recall, came close.

Over the years, others have had uneasy doubts about the Narnian
brand of Christianity. Christ should surely be no lion (let alone with
the orotund voice of Liam Neeson). He was the lamb, representing the
meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight. Philip Pullman -
he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials - has called
Narnia “one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read”.

Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular
Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain
that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the
famous preacher Norman Vincent Peale in New York expound a sermon that
reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by
God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward
because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be
CS Lewis’s view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a
great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for
no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis’s
earth.

The best I could do to paraphrase it was this.

The better off are so because they are better people. Thus if the
poor were better people they would be better off. Therefore, there are
very few good people who are poor, and probably even fewer well-off
people who are bad. What we saw in the post-Katrina suffering was
simply bad things happening to bad people. Most, if not all, of the
good people had the means to get themselves out of the hurricane’s path
and did so.

Though I did manage to take it a little further.

Mix it all up together, stick it in an oven until it’s half-baked,
and you end up with an ideology that people will eat up with both hands
if they have any economic strength, or hope to have any because they are sure
of their moral virtue and know they will be justly rewarded (even if it
means buying another lottery ticket or two), because it at once
elevates and absolves them. It elevates them above others who have less
(or whom they deem less moral), and absolves them of helping the great
many of the poor because the poor are right were they deserve to be.
Heaven has mandated it so.

I didn’t say it made sense or that it holds together, just that an
awful lot of people happily swallow it whole. Once they do it’s easy to
see things as portrayed above and accept it as not just reality but as
the way things ought to be.

If you accept all that, then depending on charities to deliver services to the poor isn’t
“punishing the good guy.” The good guy has all he needs to take care of
himself and his, and if he decides to reinvest his tax cut rather than
donate it to charity, that’s his business. Besides, who are we to
question the righteous?

And it doesn’t matter that charities will not be able to deliver the
same level services to the same amount of people as the government,
because the whole idea is that there will be fewer services, and there should
be fewer services. The government may be able to help more people, but
the problem is that it will inevitably help people who shouldn’t be
helped. So less help is better, even some of the folks who may deserve
it don’t get it. After all, if they were better people they wouldn’t’ need services in the first place.

Convince yourself of that, and you spend the last few hours before your winter break cutting heating assistance to poor families, and feel good about yourself. (You might even hum "Winter Wonderland" as you cast your vote.)

President Bush says that his 2006 budget "is a budget that sets
priorities." Examining those priorities is a moral and religious
concern. Just as we have "environmental impact studies," it’s time for
a "poverty impact statement", which would ask the fundamental question
of how policy proposals affect low-income people. Such a moral audit
might reveal unacceptable priorities for many of us, including in the
religious community where the president finds much of his political
base. In a recent letter to the president, nearly 80 prominent
evangelical leaders warned: “We know there will be powerful pressures,
from some places, as you and the Congress work to reduce deficit
spending, to cut even effective programs for poor people. We pray that
you will not allow this to happen.”

But it is happening. In this budget, the cost of deficit reduction
is mostly borne by those least able to bear the burden—the
lowest-income families in America, rather than by those most able to
afford it—the wealthiest Americans who benefit from the largest tax
cuts. The budget projects a record $427 billion deficit, along with a
promise to make tax cuts permanent. Does that make fiscal or moral
sense?

Religious leaders have spoken clearly in past years about the perils
of a domestic policy based primarily on tax cuts for the rich, deep
program cuts for low-income people, and an expectation of faith-based
charity to make up the huge gap. This budget runs directly counter to
that religious wisdom. Billions of dollars are cut from programs that
most directly impact America’s poorest families—in education,
nutrition, child care, health care, affordable housing, job training,
heating and cooling assistance, and in community and rural development.
At the same time, mere millions of dollars are added as increases to a
number of faith-based programs focusing on marriage, fatherhood, and
abstinence. On the street, that would be called “chump change.” The
warning that faith-based initiatives should provide a partnership with
effective government anti-poverty programs—and not a substitute—has not
been heeded. And the added tax cuts for the rich merely compound the
moral and biblical offense.

You can even successfully sell that idea to the disadvantaged themselves, as purveyors of the prosperity gospel have shown. And you can grow quite wealthy doing it, even if your followers don't.

The message flickered into Cindy Fleenor's living room each night:
Be faithful in how you live and how you give, the television preachers
said, and God will shower you with material riches.

And so the 53-year-old accountant from the Tampa, Florida, area
pledged $500 a year to Joyce Meyer, the evangelist whose frank talk
about recovering from childhood sexual abuse was so inspirational. She
wrote checks to flamboyant faith healer Benny Hinn and a local
preacher-made-good, Paula White.

Only the blessings didn't come. Fleenor ended up borrowing money from friends and payday loan companies just to buy groceries. At first she believed the explanation given on television: Her faith wasn't strong enough.

"I wanted to believe God wanted to do something great with me like
he was doing with them," she said. "I'm angry and bitter about it.
Right now, I don't watch anyone on TV hardly."

All three of the groups Fleenor supported are among six major
Christian television ministries under scrutiny by a senator who is
asking questions about the evangelists' lavish spending and possible
abuses of their tax-exempt status.

The probe by Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican
on the Senate Finance Committee, has brought new scrutiny to the
underlying belief that brings in millions of dollars and fills churches
from Atlanta to Los Angeles -- the "Gospel of Prosperity," or the
notion that God wants to bless the faithful with earthly riches.

On the other hand, someone more liberal or progressive, and lacking
such simple (not to mention self-serving) rationalizations for the
inequities the witness might be more inclined to question —
to ask why they exist and why they persist — and keep questioning until
they reach a more challenging (and perhaps less self-serving, depending
on their relative degree of privilege) answer, rather than simply
accepting that they exist and that they persist because they ought to.

Essentially, progressives see injustice and ask "Why?". Conservatives, on the other hand, see in justice and ask "Why not?"

If you ask why, without settling for simplistic answers, you might
conclude that inequity an injustice do not exist in a vacuum and do not
persist according to some law of nature, but because they serve as the
basis for the privileges of some, and thus the privileged perpetuate
them in order to preserve their privileges. You might be inclined to
believe, then, that inequities and injustices are not "inevitable" or
"natural" and you might also be inclined to do something about them.

You might join something like the Mississippi Freedom Summer,
and spend what h have been your vacation registering people to vote who
had been systematically denied the right to vote for generations. You
might give your life doing it.

If you're someone like Michael Ashcraft, you might stop a gay bashing, even though you're not gay and not being bashed.

Or , if you have a simple explanation handy, you might just leave
things be, since everything is a it should be already. Of course, you
might also wonder why other people don't see it the same way you do —
especially the have-nots. You might wonder why they make such a fuss
over it, and you might wish they would stop. You would definitely start
to worry when the don't stop.

I think, then, that the study might have confused happiness with something that can look a lot like it, but isn't: complacency.

a feeling of quiet pleasure or security, often while
unaware of some potential danger, defect, or the like;
self-satisfaction or smug satisfaction with an existing situation,
condition, etc.

Then again, maybe there's a simpler explanation.

Crossposted from The Republic of T.