Our world is strange. So are we. We seem to be governed by psychological barriers that, over time, we either stop noticing or never become aware of at all. Among the strangest things in this already strange world is our willingness to accept conditions that are neither ideal nor just. Sometimes it goes beyond acceptance and becomes something close to support for an order that keeps us in a state of perpetual crisis—an order capable of dragging any one of us under if several pieces of bad news arrive at precisely the wrong time. For most people, their livelihood, their home and their most basic needs are only a few unfortunate events away from disappearing.
And yet millions of people who stand to inherit no property of their own spend their moments of relaxation and necessary escapism in front of a screen worrying about whether an aristocratic family will manage to keep its enormous estate. That, for example, was the emotional engine behind the hugely popular series Downton Abbey. The viewer knows that the servants rise before their masters, iron their newspapers and live surrounded by wealth that will never belong to them. Yet when the estate faces ruin, the heart somehow sides with its owners. The revolutionary instinct, it seems, is no match for excellent set design. But why? What appears to be a trivial question may hold the answer to many of the contradictions we encounter in our strange world.
This does not mean the viewers are secret feudalists. The explanation is more unsettling. Downton Abbey does not conceal the class hierarchy; it makes it bearable. Lord Grantham possesses almost unlimited power, but occasionally uses it decently. He saves a servant from humiliation, continues to support a disabled wartime comrade and appears conscious of the burden that comes with his position. The series, of course, never asks why one man owns such a vast house, so much land and the destinies of everyone living there. It asks whether he is a good man. The intensely political question of ownership is transformed into a moral question of character.
This is one of the oldest operations of social power. A bad order becomes acceptable when it is given a good master. The king is deceived by his ministers, the factory owner is betrayed by callous managers, the leader is sabotaged by those around him. The structure remains innocent because the blame is shifted onto a handful of corrupt individuals. The most effective defence of the master is not to deny that the master exists, but to persuade us that he has a heart.
Approached scientifically, the question is not simply why people submit to force. More interesting is why they perceive an order that disadvantages them as natural, necessary or even worth defending. The bars are not always hidden. Sometimes they are polished, decorated with a family crest and presented as the very thing holding the roof above our heads.
A Psychological Painkiller
In the early 1990s, American social psychologists John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji attempted to explain a curious political paradox. People generally defend their own interests and the interests of the groups to which they belong, yet they may simultaneously defend a social order that places them at a disadvantage. A worker may believe that the factory owner deserves to earn hundreds of times more. A poor person may regard vast disparities of wealth as broadly fair. Members of a disadvantaged group may accept stereotypes portraying their own group as less capable. Jost called this mechanism "system justification theory"—the need to see existing social relations as natural, legitimate and at least roughly just, even when we personally derive little benefit from them.
But why would anyone do that? Because it is psychologically difficult to live with the thought that the system on which we depend has nothing to do with justice. If wages, wealth and social status are largely the products of inheritance, chance and power, then there is no guarantee that hard work will be rewarded. Believing that the system nevertheless follows certain rules provides a sense of order. A person may conclude that they have little today, but that their diligence will eventually pay off. They may believe that those at the top did not get there by accident, but because they were more capable or made greater sacrifices. That picture of the world may not be accurate—and usually is not—but it is easier to bear than the knowledge that someone can behave responsibly throughout their life and still end up at the bottom.
A particularly revealing experiment was conducted in 2003 by John Jost and Aaron Kay. Participants were shown brief descriptions of fictional individuals. In some versions, wealthy people possessed other desirable qualities, such as honesty, while poor people were portrayed as unhappy or unsuccessful. Other versions relied on what are known as complementary stereotypes: the poor person was depicted as happy and honest, while the wealthy person was unhappy and morally dubious. After reading the descriptions, participants were asked whether they regarded the wider social system as fair, legitimate and generally arranged so that people received what they deserved.
Participants justified the existing order more strongly after reading stories about the "poor but happy" and the "rich but miserable." The inequality itself had not changed at all—the rich still possessed the money, property and social power. But the story now suggested that life somehow balanced the books. The rich had money, but supposedly paid for it through loneliness and unhappiness. The poor had little, but were said to possess love, honesty and a clear conscience. Material injustice was given a moral counterweight and began to resemble a fair distribution of different forms of wealth. Some had mansions, others had rich inner lives—although the bank continued to accept only the first currency.
This is what Jost called the "palliative function of ideology." A palliative does not cure the underlying illness; it merely eases the pain. Belief in an essentially just system works in much the same way. It can reduce anger, anxiety and helplessness because people no longer have to confront, every day, the fact that they depend on an unjust order. The price of that psychological relief, however, is a diminished desire to change the system. If we believe that life somehow balances wealth against happiness, inequality ceases to appear political. It begins to look like an imperfect but ultimately fair distribution of fate.
When the Victim Has to Be Guilty
An even darker mechanism was studied by the American social psychologist Melvin Lerner, one of the pioneers of the just-world hypothesis. In his famous 1966 experiment, 72 female students watched another young woman who was supposedly participating in a study of learning. She was asked to memorise pairs of meaningless syllables and received an electric shock whenever she answered incorrectly. The shocks were not real, and the woman was an associate of the researchers merely pretending to be in pain, but the observers did not know this. Seventy-five students had originally been recruited, but three were excluded after learning the true purpose of the study in advance. The researchers selected only women so that the observers would be of the same sex and roughly the same age as the supposed victim. They also relied on the then-common stereotype, supported by some earlier research, that women would show greater compassion than men. This was intended to provide a stricter test of the hypothesis: if the victim was devalued even by a group expected to be especially sympathetic, the effect would appear more convincing.
All the observers first watched the same ten-minute recording of the supposed punishment and were then divided into different groups. One group was told that the experiment was only halfway over and that, after the observers had assessed her, the woman would undergo another ten minutes of electric shocks. These participants had no say in the matter and no permitted means of intervening.
A second group was allowed to vote secretly on whether the woman should continue receiving shocks, proceed without punishment or receive a financial reward for correct answers. After the vote, they were told that their choice had been accepted and that the woman would receive money for correct answers instead of further shocks.
Another group voted but was not told before making its assessment whether the decision had been implemented.
Only after receiving these different explanations were the observers asked to evaluate the woman’s character—how likeable she seemed, how morally worthy they considered her and how much they liked her as a person.
The result was disturbing. The observers who received confirmation that they had stopped the shocks and secured a reward for the woman viewed her positively. Those who believed her suffering had already ended reacted similarly. But the group that thought she was about to endure another round of shocks, while they remained powerless to intervene within the rules of the experiment, began to judge her more harshly. Her suffering could not be stopped, so their perception of her character changed. If she had to continue suffering, it became psychologically easier to imagine that perhaps she was not entirely deserving of sympathy. The experiment exposed one of the most disturbing defence mechanisms of the human mind: when we cannot eliminate an injustice, we may try to eliminate the victim’s innocence.
Lerner’s explanation was not that the participants were simply cruel. They were attempting to protect one of the fundamental beliefs on which people build their sense of security—the belief that the world generally gives people what they deserve. To admit that a completely innocent person could suffer for no reason would mean accepting that the same thing could happen to anyone. To them. If they could not help her, only two possible conclusions remained. The first was that the world was unjust and unpredictable. The second was that the victim must somehow deserve what was happening to her. The second conclusion was morally uglier, of course, but psychologically more comfortable.
Victim-blaming is therefore often not the result of insufficient information, but an attempt to preserve a sense of order. The homeless person supposedly chose the street. The poor person did not work hard enough. The dismissed worker failed to adapt. The heavily indebted family lived beyond its means. If all these people are responsible for their own fate, everyone else can continue to believe that obedience, hard work and prudence will protect them. Injustice is not eliminated—it is merely rearranged psychologically until it begins to resemble justice again.
Because if the game is rigged, effort may have no power at all. Paradoxically, blaming oneself can sometimes be easier to bear than an accurate diagnosis.
Conclusion
Revolution remains distant not because people cannot see injustice, but because they have learned to live with it as though it were a form of weather. Wages are low, housing is unaffordable and employment is insecure, yet all of this still seems less frightening than the possibility that the familiar order might collapse and no new one take its place. The system is therefore maintained not only by the police, the law and the wealth of those at the top. It is also maintained within the minds of those at the bottom—in their hope that they may personally rise, in their fear that change could make matters even worse and in their need to explain their own defeat as a temporary mistake rather than a permanent feature of the game into which they were born.
A person who believes they are personally to blame can still dream of improving themselves. A person who realises the game is rigged must decide whether to resist it, and that means risking the little they have left. Rebellion therefore rarely begins when injustice is at its worst. It begins when injustice stops looking like a private misfortune and starts being recognised as a shared experience. Only when the existing order becomes more frightening than the unknown future, and an alternative begins to offer at least the outline of security, does the cage cease to look like a home. Until then, many will prefer to repair the bars rather than step out into the cold.
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