How to End Classism

We can start with your attitude.

So how do we end classism? We can start with your attitude:

PSYCHOLOGICAL CLASSISM

"My attitude's fine!" the naive classist protests: oblivious to how they judge people, and merely knee-jerk denying the accusation because it's negative--if you don't know how you judge people, how do you know if it's based on class? You don't. And I can tell you that you do judge people based on class:

Most are so unreflective that they think their judgments fair, as if they come from nowhere perfectly balanced on the basis of no information at all. But what do you judge people based on? If you don't know what it is then you DON'T know if it's 'class'.

Do you successfully dissociate from someone's physical appearance when you engage with them? Physical appearance is tightly tied to class, whether it comes to fashion or to race. The same goes for other sensory attributes such as someone's smell, taste, sound, or feel. Review ‘The Parable of The Good Samaritan’ and get back to me.

Now, it's natural to object we can't judge purely on the soul, because it's immaterial and therefore, imperceptible. The same can be said of 'behavior' for as Hume remarked, 'causation' is invisible.

But what if we had attitudes that largely were reformed, through individual reflection, to cease all prejudice and skip now, zero steps in every argument, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and hence tying agnosticism and epistemic humility to fairness and social humility. Would that be it? Would that be the end to classism? Of course not, for no pervasive psychology logically guarantees its permanence: here 'systemic' and not merely psychological classism comes into play:

SYSTEMIC CLASSISM

We usually don't start with your attitude, the analysis usually begins with wealth: wealth inequality. This kind of classism reinforces and re-establishes what is classist merely in psychology, rushing you to skip over steps in your argument internally in the favor of your overlords. It's massive, it's been growing, it's at French-revolution-levels and it's growing more, and it makes elections impossible: one person, one vote, means nothing if you can purchase votes so easily. The greater the wealth inequality, the more buyable elections become, but wealth is not equalized overnight without bloodshed. And yet, the revolution is inevitable, if you look at inequality curves throughout history, or so I'm told, but not the bloodshed:

GETTING THE MONEY OUT OF POLITICS

"Getting they money out of politics" has been a catch-phrase for as long as I've been alive, and the usual idea: spending caps, has been blown off completely via Citizen’s United.

(See "Why The Right Became Obsessed With Freedom of Speech" for more on this weird mind game where money was equated with speech, despite it lacking speech's expressive capacity. (Where is MONEY on THE CHOMSKY HEIRARCHY, anyway?))

Even in Canada with spending limits it's easy to buy an election -- an opponent cited figures from his advisor to me privately on how much it would cost him if he wanted to buy the riding with ads -- it's not that expensive, and Rob and Doug Ford purchased many council seats this way, just tally up the donations: they were the top donors for years by a long-shot, meaning they own those people, they vote as a bloc, ("Team Tory" was "Team Ford" behind the scenes,) and the premises of Condorcet's jury theorem are invalidated: council isn't made more accurate by having many voices as on a jury because the voices aren't independent, they are financially shackled to act as one hive mind, not the plurality that would leverage the wisdom of the crowd in a democratic assembly. Money makes us stupid.

VOTES-PER-DOLLAR

So what do we do? It's simple actually: we divide them out. What do I mean? We remove the money from politics simply by dividing it out mathematically: Divide vote totals by the money spent. Here's a thought experiment:

CANDIDATE 1 SPENDS: $100, GETS 100 VOTES

CANDIDATE 2 SPENDS: $1,000,000, GETS 101 VOTES

Who has the stronger mandate? The answer is blindingly obvious, and yet it's been staring us in the face all this time? Why didn't we see it!? The answer is not just that power never concedes a demand willingly, but that democracy is still very young, and decimal numbers are even younger. But do the math on your favourite election: look up the vote totals, and look up the spending budgets, and do the math: divide votes by dollars, and see who REALLY should have won!

Our true leaders are those who earn the most votes on the SMALLEST budget. This entire system as it is rewards OVERSPENDING, despite the golf. Compute our true leaders and listen to them. The numbers are public. Votes-per-dollar is How to End Classism.

PS, also see: