Raising the drawbridge

It's the oldest trick in the b-movie script book: if you're going to kill somebody off senselessly, make sure you give them some bad qualities to bestow a sense of justice on the event.

I've been thinking quite a lot of late about the intensifying denigration of the losers in this economic crisis. Greeks and Italians are shiftless scam artists, the unemployed and too lazy to buckle down to the jobs that are available, student protesters are dirty hippies unprepared to make tough, adult choices.

This sort of chatter seems to have become quite de rigeur in some parts of the financial blogosphere and media. The Economist's Ryan Avent has a great takedown of the stance, in a post laying into laying into economist-blogger Tyler Cowen, who really should know better:

"It is remarkable to me how readily old, successful professionals dismiss the labour-market difficulties of young adults as the product of their poorly-chosen majors and general lack of ambition, and on what flimsy evidence they're prepared to base these views."

It's not a great mystery what's going on here. Humans are naturally empathetic. We mostly don't like to see our fellows suffer, still less so if we're in some way responsible. To get people to accept with equanimity making others worse off in large numbers, you need certain psychological processes to take place to ease the transition.

One of these processes is the Milgram experiment-type insistence that what's happening is an irreversible consequence of immutable rules. "I was just following orders." "We have no mandate to do that." "If we allow this one instance, it's the thin end of the wedge."

Another of these processes is what seems to guide this blame-the-victim rhetoric:
dehumanisation of the losers. Being a bystander or a responsible participant in a time of suffering is a lot easier to accept once you've convinced yourself that the victims are in some way beneath you, and have brought it on themselves through their inferiority.

Of course, there's nothing new in this stance, which has been used to comfort elites about inequality since society began. But it's still striking to witness the raising of this mental drawbridge going on in real time.