The quickest way to anger anyone from the ultra-rich and powerful down through the upper middle class is with this simple phrase: “Sure, you worked hard for your money but you got lucky, too.”
Cue the indignant rage. Now listen to them tell you about all of the long years of relentless effort, smart choices and enormous sacrifice they made to get them where they are. By the time they’re done, you might even hear violins playing.
They get so mad because the status of everyone on the top half of the social ladder hinges on no one questioning if they deserve their wealth. Merit is an even more valuable currency than money, Michael Sandel writes in his book The Tyranny of Merit, because “I earned it” sounds so much better than “I bought it.”
Sandel is a law professor at Harvard University and an award-winning author, so he’s no stranger to success. That makes him the perfect person to reveal the incredible social damage caused by the Protestant work ethic of “you get what you work for.”
So if you work for it and don’t get it, that clearly means you didn’t try hard enough and it’s clearly all your fault, right?
So if you do get it, why be grateful or humble or share your success with others because you did it all by yourself, right?
As income inequality has increased in recent decades, so has the notion that the ultra-wealthy and elite deserve the spoils and the far greater number of people at the bottom scrambling to stay afloat just aren’t trying hard enough to get ahead. As the middle class has shrunk in the last 50 years, people moving on up to the upper class have valiantly clung to the belief they’re still middle class, even though they have new his and her vehicles in the driveway, no mortgage or personal debt and vacation each winter at a tropical resort.
Do you make more than $30 an hour? Does your family bring in more than $85,000 a year? If you do, you’re on the upper end of the middle class in B.C.
Sandel stresses that the noble ideal of self-made career and financial prosperity even crosses political lines, which might explain why the left has been so preoccupied with social issues and identity and the right has been so preoccupied with cancel culture. To address income inequality, unfair taxation, soaring housing costs and poverty at their root causes makes too many voters and political party donors uncomfortable.
This “we get what we deserve” philosophy tricks people into thinking that’s the way things are and it must be fair. It also makes it personal. When you’re successful, you get the ego-building self-satisfaction of knowing you got what you had coming to you. When you’re not, you carry the humiliation that comes with failure. Looking out through the same lens, Jim Pattison and Bill Gates are self-made billionaires and residents of Moccasin Flats are self-made homeless.
Not only is that false, both conclusions hide a deeper truth, Sandel explains.
The wealthy and upper middle class resent the amount of taxes they pay, especially when those funds are going to the “losers” lacking wealth and status to pay for social assistance programs. The more fortunate conveniently ignore how the tax structure is tilted in their favour, to benefit the growth of their retirement savings, their investments and their capital gains. They ignore how educational success in elementary school and high school is directly connected to family wealth, meaning that subsidized higher education tends to benefit them and their children more than it does the hard-working folks and their kids on the bottom half of the income ladder.
On the individual level, society divides itself into winners and losers. People on the top end bask in the self-satisfaction of their success while those on the bottom end bask in the self-loathing of their failure. Both views over-emphasize free will and the idea that everyone, equally, is the master of their own fate and deserving of what happens to them.
Instead, if everyone agreed that working people, regardless of their wage, work hard, retired people also worked hard during their careers and that unemployable working-age people are working hard (and deserve some help) to cope with their serious personal health issues, we’re left with good and bad luck deciding who gets ahead and who doesn’t.
Most people would rather say “I earned it” than “I got lucky.”
Over the last 40 years in particular, the game has become increasingly rigged, so the lucky stay lucky (but convince themselves it’s their hard work and amazing intelligence) while the unlucky stay unlucky (but convince themselves they are failures who deserve their lot in life).
Perhaps if the wealthier paid more consumption taxes and hid their money less while government spent less on administration and more on taxpayers, the playing field might be a little more level.
Or maybe it’s simpler than that.
The old phrase “there but for the grace of God go I” works in both directions.
If the fortunate thought that while gazing upon those with less, there might be less judgment and disdain, more compassion and more willingness to work for the common good, Sandel argues. If the less fortunate looked upon wealthier citizens with the same mentality, they’d be less angry at themselves and others, while finding it easier to keep their dignity and self-esteem intact.
