True but I think the vested interests issue tends to be more harmful because it seems to happen with a greater degree of organisation (such as petitioning politicians).thaluikhain said:Well, not merely vested interests. People are always more aware of problems that they themselves face, and even if they acknowledge other people's issues, they might not seem to sting the same.Lightspeaker said:There's a sentence that always comes to mind when people start claiming that "well X group has it worse than Y does so Y doesn't matter". That sentence is "I wasn't aware that its a competition".Cryselle said:As much as I self identify as a feminist and generally believe that women get the worse end of societal oppression, that doesn't mean that the ways in which men get treated poorly are 'okay' or don't exist.
I fully agree. Everyone SHOULD be working together in order to try for as equal a society as we can. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. Too many vested interests. :-\
Of course, there are people that flat out refuse to acknowledge that various other people have problems, which doesn't generally help.
Then again you do have a strong point here. Your second sentence reminds me of how true one of my favourite Men in Black quotes is: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals"
A person, you, me, someone else in this thread, whoever, might well be fully aware of the fact other people have problems. "People" tend to be fundamentally self-centred and only really interested in themselves.
Yeah I suppose. A bit like how very gradually society has moved away from its racist past (albeit at an absolutely glacial pace), I actually have a good example of this myself. My nan died end of last year. Lovely woman, kind, thoughtful, I miss her very much in fact. But by the gods she was one of the most casually racist people I've ever known. It clearly wasn't conscious in her but it was just such an ingrained and instinctive thing.Cryselle said:I don't even know that it's a problem of vested interests. In a lot of cases, people are actively working against their own benefit because of an ideology so deeply entrenched that they can't imagine doing anything else. To me it seems more like momentum. There's a huge amount of weight to societal views, they can't just stop on a dime or turn on a whim. It happens, things get better, but it's often measured in generations. People aren't so much changing their opinions as they are dying and being replaced by people with slightly different ones.Lightspeaker said:There's a sentence that always comes to mind when people start claiming that "well X group has it worse than Y does so Y doesn't matter". That sentence is "I wasn't aware that its a competition".
I fully agree. Everyone SHOULD be working together in order to try for as equal a society as we can. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. Too many vested interests. :-\
I guess its just hard to get people as a whole to change, the only real progress made is by teaching the next generation to do better, and setting things up for them so that they can BE better.