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Comment by hour_glass | Hacker News Reader

It's just about the perception of injustice. A privileged person facing minor injustices could completely have this mindset. In fact I've met many many people like this.

A journalist came up with this concept at the World Economic Forum, I think it was fractal poverty??, and it was this observation that from the poorest people in the world to the absolute richest there was this sense that they were excluded from and oppressed by someone more powerful. Absolutely anyone can feel this way.

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Interesting observation. I feel it's all about baselines: To decide if you have a lot of something, you need to compare your allotment to some baseline. You'll feel like a victim if you're more mistreated than your baseline of choice. If zero -- that in the ideal world with no mistreatment -- you'll always feel put out. If it's the median amount of mistreatment, half will feel good half bad, etc. Interesting that humans seem to statistically select their baseline as that just better than their current state.

Exactly and it goes beyond victimhood as well. You'll have a group of people go through the same negative experience (e.g. almost dying from a natural disaster, being held as a POW and tortured) and what's interesting is you'll see a huge variation of the impact of those events.

Some people will come out of it relatively unscathed, while others will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.

No doubt their past experiences shaped their mindset and how they made sense of the negative experience.

It's just about the perception of injustice. A privileged person facing minor injustices could completely have this mindset. In fact I've met many many people like this.

Privileged people facing no injustice howl the loudest that they are the most oppressed. In fact, facing no justice either, getting away with every crime under the sun.

Nobody faces ‘no injustice’.

We simply bring different levels of privilege to it.

Certainly many privileged people are blind to that.

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