Reply #3: popular and sexy

[Two Americas]

Brilliant post, and I think you are correct. What makes some things popular and sexy and others not? Beyond the human need to belong is the need to identify with the winners, and which groups are seen as sexy and popular is skewed by that. Then it becomes a matter of how we define winners. In the groups people form here and elsewhere, the criteria we are using for identifying winners is rarely examined, or even acknowledged as a factor in our decisions about where to place our trust and loyalty.

As I said often on poverty threads here, it is not anything that poor people are doing or anything about them that is wrong or needs fixing, it is what the winners are doing, it is in how we define winners. Poverty isn't a disease or mental illness. We don't have a poverty problem, we have a problem of selfishness and greed, of exploitation and domination and bullying. Poverty and homelessness and alienation and isolation are symptoms of that problem.

There is an assumption that those "needing help" are in some way defective, or not "making the right choices." The implication is that if we all "made the right choices" that life would be fine, and to the extent that anyone's life is not fine, they must have "made the wrong choices." The right choices are rewarded, the wrong ones punished. This is reinforced by the Oprah-Deepak Chopra New Age beliefs that have permeated modern society - the doctrine of a just universe that gives one back what one puts out, and that thinking beautiful thoughts magically will produce "abundance" in one's life, and that this abundance will then fulfill all human needs.

I am convinced that the opposite is in fact true. The right choices are punished - severely. The wrong choices are rewarded - lavishly.