Any number of people believe that everything that happens to people is their consciousness or their karma. This belief is very easy to stand on its head. All I need to do is shoot the person, and they would have to say that it’s their consciousness or their karma rather than my fault.
My life has been quite a fortunate one, and I stand to gain from such beliefs. I reject them for ethical reasons. This attitude would justify any crime under the sun under the claim that the victim has brought it about.
You don’t owe your situation only to yourself. You also owe it to parents who raised you, teachers who educated you, military and police that protect you, business and labor that provide your prosperity, and intellectuals and Freemasons who gave you your liberty. Not correctly crediting such things is not enlightenment. It is being an unappreciative pig.
Once again, I stand to gain from such beliefs. I am privileged, and the idea that this privilege is my good karma stands to work in my favour. However I also know many good people who are not privileged, and I have to take their experience into account in framing my beliefs. I have not found myself to be more naturally wise or personally better than these people. Many of these people were better and wiser people than me.
I know both people who were more privileged than me and people who were less privileged than me. I didn’t find the more privileged people to be wiser or better than the less privileged ones. In many cases it was the opposite. I’ve known a number of wise and compassionate people who had horrible lives, and I’ve known many cruel and abusive people who had good ones. If our good fortune was reward for work on ourselves that we’ve done in past lives, then the better-off people would be wiser than the less well-off people. They are not.
So then in opposition to that we have the likes of Richard Nixon making a lifetime cause of attacking the high-born or Marxists advocating for slaughters of propertied class. That is wrong too. There are plenty of high-born people who are good people and any number of low-born people who are jerks. I do not see why there would be any correlation, positive or negative, between levels of privilege and personal goodness. We will find the good and the bad across social lines.
What these people are right about is that, whatever one’s social birth circumstance, one has the choice to improve upon it instead of whining all day about his bad fortune. Well sure. There are many things that people can do to improve their lot, especially in the West. If someone is whining about his bad fortune, the solution is bringing to his attention the situation of people less fortunate than himself, of whom there will always be plenty. One error I’ve seen being made is mistaking social analysis for whining or blaming. This is wrong. Not much of anything is owed to whining or blaming; a lot is owed to social analysis.
So that while it is valid to encourage better choices, there is no merit in beliefs that would excuse any crime under the sun under the claim that the person committing it has brought it about. These beliefs are ethically wrong. By all means rise above the circumstances of your upbringing, but do not look down on people less fortunate than yourself. I have seen the good and the bad in people both more fortunate than myself and less fortunate than myself. And I saw no correlation between their levels of privilege and their levels of wisdom or personal goodness.