It’s easy to blame capitalism for this and I don’t disagree it’s pretty broken right now but I’ve been all over the world and people are largely like this. In India I heard a lot of “rich people deserve it because they have good karma” in China I heard a lot of “rich people just work harder or come from a great family” against all visible evidence.
Thats because the Western capitalist worldview has spread globally.
Many of these countries had more socialist systems after establishing their respective post colonial governments but embraced more protectionist strategies or had sanctions placed on them by the wealthiest (Western) nations for not playing ball with the neoliberal capitalist agenda.
Basically, the West stole from them for centuries through settler colonialism, left with the riches and then said ‘you better do things our way or we will refuse to do trade with you and you will continue to starve’
The world has had no choice to embrace it, for better or for worse.
Western capitalist mores are actively brainwashing us into thinking wealth is virtue. Might is right. It is not.
I think once you see how much damage colonization did it’s easy to blame everything on that one evil. But that’s oversimplifying to an extreme extent.
For example, I really doubt the idea of class based karma (or karma based class perhaps) was a colonial introduction to India. I’m not disagreeing with you that modern capitalism is bad or saying that colonialism wasn’t damaging, those are both true, but it’s pretty damn patronizing to says “they couldn’t have had bad socioeconomic practices without us” Hell they had a literal caste system of worker exploitation long before we showed up.
It’s easy to blame capitalism for this and I don’t disagree it’s pretty broken right now but I’ve been all over the world and people are largely like this. In India I heard a lot of “rich people deserve it because they have good karma” in China I heard a lot of “rich people just work harder or come from a great family” against all visible evidence.
Thats because the Western capitalist worldview has spread globally.
Many of these countries had more socialist systems after establishing their respective post colonial governments but embraced more protectionist strategies or had sanctions placed on them by the wealthiest (Western) nations for not playing ball with the neoliberal capitalist agenda.
Basically, the West stole from them for centuries through settler colonialism, left with the riches and then said ‘you better do things our way or we will refuse to do trade with you and you will continue to starve’
The world has had no choice to embrace it, for better or for worse.
Western capitalist mores are actively brainwashing us into thinking wealth is virtue. Might is right. It is not.
I think once you see how much damage colonization did it’s easy to blame everything on that one evil. But that’s oversimplifying to an extreme extent.
For example, I really doubt the idea of class based karma (or karma based class perhaps) was a colonial introduction to India. I’m not disagreeing with you that modern capitalism is bad or saying that colonialism wasn’t damaging, those are both true, but it’s pretty damn patronizing to says “they couldn’t have had bad socioeconomic practices without us” Hell they had a literal caste system of worker exploitation long before we showed up.