Religion of Privilege

Racism is not born out of a lack of empathy, it is born out of a love for one's class and the privileges that class tends to provide. The less privileges your class provides you, the less conservative you will be in your desire to maintain a system based on classes of people, race and wealth and what have you, while the more privileges your class provides you, the more conservative you will be to defend a "right"  - and often they are thought to be "God given rights" - to enjoy those privileges.   

Those who advocate for the status quo, those who wish to maintain the most stability to the system that provides them with the privileges they enjoy, see themselves as being the more "responsible set of men" who contributed to building the system into the monolith that it is. And because they feel responsible for, in some small way, contributing to the virtues of the systems more than to its vices, they feel they have earned the right to enjoy the privileges they have, and bound to defend them with their lives if necessary.

During apartheid, white people in South Africa, for example, who did not want to allow whites to become the minority in South Africa, because white people in Sought Africa did not want to be treated the same way white people in South Africa knew they were treating black South Africans. Instead, white South Africans believed, like a religion, that they had the "right" to preserve a system that allowed them to think of themselves as better than others, based on race and wealth. Again, this is a kind of religion based on the virtues of privileges, which are designed to increase as one moves up the economic ladder.

This is not out of a lack of empathy for those who have less privileges or material means, however, but a sense of entitlement that comes with increasing affluence or "wealth." But wealth is a purely man made technological device, which most of human history evolved without any knowledge or need of, but to which the world is hopelessly addicted today as if it were more important than the sun, the moon and the stars, and even the very oxygen we breath.    

Fascinatingly enough, the justification being given for supporting theories of privileges accruing with a person's rise in the economic ladder, are all based on the "science" of economics and political "science," even though there is nothing really "scientific" about either economics or politics. In fact, economics and politics are basically two sides of the same thing, which is why both have mostly been used as a way of producing privilege inequality and then defending, justifying, and facilitating it. In this subtle way, then, "science" is then used to operate like religion was used for centuries, to defend a system of slavery that was established under the belief that the assignment of different privileges to different people, whether because of skin color or economic status or religious affiliation, was a perfectly moral thing to do. More than that, it was even thought to be the most moral thing that could be done.

 The effect of the acceptance of such an inequality of privileges, in a finite world, requires a person to "believe" they live in a world of abundance - something Anthony Robbins and other "power of positive thinking" gurus teach their disciples to repeatedly chant to themselves like a prayer - even though you can walk down the street of nearly any city and see how homeless demonstrates the very opposite to be true. It also means that the greatest wasters of resources, by those who have more money than God, is killing the planet from the top down just as much as poverty is killing homo sapiens from the bottom up: one stomps on the forests of the world like a giant walking over a grass football field, while the other is slowly crushed by the slow advancing of an invisible tank in the shape of a bank.