Why Do We Defend the Systems That Keep Us Down?

Capitalism, the far right, and the psychology of power, privilege and belonging

Why would anyone defend a system that makes their life harder? Why would someone with little wealth defend the interests of the wealthy, someone with little power support those who want to concentrate it, or someone who feels excluded blame the people who are even more vulnerable than they are?

We tend to explain these contradictions by saying that people have been misled, that they are afraid of change, or that they do not understand what is in their own interests. Sometimes, that may be true. But I think we need to ask a more uncomfortable question: what if defending an unequal system is not always about what people have, but about what they hope to become, whom they want to belong to, and whom they need to believe they are better than?

We have built a world in which success is often measured by money, status and power. We tell people that hard work will allow them to rise, that wealth reflects merit, and that those at the top must have done something to deserve their position. When people struggle, the explanation is often personal failure rather than an economic or political structure that distributes opportunity unequally.

This story is powerful because it offers hope. Even someone with very little can imagine becoming wealthy one day. Someone with little influence can identify with the powerful. Someone who feels overlooked can find comfort in the belief that, at least, they are not at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

The problem is that the promise of moving up can make us defend the very hierarchy that keeps us down. We may become more concerned with the possibility of joining the privileged than with questioning why privilege should depend on someone else having less. We can begin to measure our worth not by the lives we lead or the people we become, but by our position relative to others.

And that raises a difficult question: if we created a society in which everyone had dignity, security and a meaningful opportunity to thrive, what would happen to the feeling of superiority that comes from being above someone else?

Equality does not mean that everyone must be identical, that effort should not matter, or that people cannot excel. It means that no one should have to be devalued, excluded or deprived of basic dignity for another person to feel important. Yet when status depends on hierarchy, equality can feel like a threat. If your sense of worth depends on being superior to someone else, another person's progress may feel like your loss.

This is one reason political movements built around exclusion and domination can be so appealing. The far right, for example, often offers more than a political programme. It offers identity, belonging, certainty and a clear explanation for why life feels difficult. It divides the world into people who supposedly belong and people who do not, those who deserve protection and those who are blamed for society's problems. Immigrants, minorities, political opponents and other marginalised groups can become convenient scapegoats for anxieties rooted in economic insecurity, declining trust or a sense of lost status.

The appeal is not necessarily that supporters consciously want to harm others. Some are frightened about their future. Some feel ignored by institutions that have failed them. Some are drawn to promises of order, national renewal or a return to a time when they believe life was better. Others may genuinely agree with exclusionary beliefs or benefit from the hierarchies these movements defend. These motivations are not interchangeable, and we should not pretend they are.

But we should pay attention to what happens when legitimate grievances are redirected towards people with less power, while the structures and interests that helped create those grievances escape scrutiny. Anger about insecure work, unaffordable housing or declining public services can be channelled towards a vulnerable group rather than towards the decisions, institutions and economic arrangements that need to be examined. People who have much more in common with one another economically can be persuaded to see one another as enemies.

That is politically useful to those who benefit from the division.

The same dynamic appears in the way capitalism is defended. Capitalism is not a single, uniform system, and market economies can operate under very different rules. They can coexist with strong public services, social protections, regulation and efforts to reduce inequality. The question is not whether every form of private enterprise is harmful or whether markets have no value. The question is what happens when profit and the accumulation of wealth become the dominant measures of success, while human wellbeing and the natural world are treated as secondary considerations.

We are told that economic growth benefits everyone, that competition produces the best outcomes and that the wealth generated at the top will eventually improve life for those below. Sometimes economic activity does create wider benefits. But those benefits are not automatic, and growth alone does not tell us who receives the gains, who bears the costs or whether people's lives are actually improving.

An economy can grow while housing becomes unaffordable, essential services deteriorate, workers become more insecure and environmental damage increases. A business can be profitable while its employees burn out. A country can become wealthier on paper while many of its citizens feel increasingly powerless. When we continue to call this progress without examining its human and environmental consequences, we are not measuring success in any complete sense.

The question is not simply whether capitalism works. It is for whom it works, under what conditions, and at whose expense.

Criticising capitalism does not mean that every alternative is just. Communism, too, has been used to justify authoritarian rule, the suppression of dissent and the concentration of power in the hands of a political elite. A system that promises equality can betray that promise when those who govern cannot be challenged and citizens have little freedom to question their decisions. Changing the ideology does not necessarily change the underlying relationship between those who hold power and those who must live with its consequences.

Yet there is a revealing contradiction in the way these systems are discussed. In some political narratives, communism is presented as the ultimate threat to freedom, while the harms produced by existing economic arrangements are treated as unfortunate but unavoidable. The word itself can become a warning that ends the conversation before we have examined what is actually being proposed. Meanwhile, the concentration of wealth, the influence of powerful interests and the limits placed on ordinary people's choices may receive far less scrutiny.

We should be able to criticise authoritarian communism without treating capitalism as beyond criticism. We should be able to recognise the value of markets without accepting that profit must take precedence over people. And we should be able to demand equality without assuming that equality requires everyone to live the same life.

The real question is what kind of society we want to build, how power is distributed, how decisions are challenged and what responsibilities we place on those who benefit most.

There is also a psychological dimension to this problem that is harder to confront. Power is not always about having more money or making the decisions. Sometimes, it is about needing to feel superior. A person may have little control over their own circumstances but still find a sense of status in looking down on someone else. The existence of a group portrayed as less deserving, less capable or less entitled can provide reassurance to people who otherwise feel insecure about their own position.

This does not mean that every unequal relationship is deliberately maintained by someone who consciously wants to dominate. Power operates through institutions, expectations, habits and beliefs, often without any single person directing the whole process. But the effects can still be real. When a society repeatedly tells people that some lives matter more, some voices deserve greater authority and some groups should accept a subordinate position, hierarchy becomes more than an economic arrangement. It becomes part of how people understand themselves and one another.

This is where the relationship between perpetrators and victims becomes important. Systems of domination require unequal relationships to continue operating. Someone must be permitted to make decisions for others without being meaningfully challenged; someone's labour, time or vulnerability must be treated as less valuable; someone's suffering must be accepted as an unfortunate cost of maintaining the system. Those who benefit from these arrangements may defend them, while those who are harmed may be pressured to accept them as normal.

The people involved do not always fit neatly into the categories of perpetrator and victim. Someone can be disadvantaged in one part of their life and exercise power over another person elsewhere. Someone can experience exploitation at work while supporting policies that marginalise another group. Recognising this complexity does not make the structures less real. It helps explain how inequality can be reproduced by people who are themselves affected by it.

It also helps explain why crises deserve particular scrutiny. Wars, recessions, financial instability and other periods of upheaval can devastate ordinary people's lives while creating opportunities for others to accumulate assets, acquire influence or consolidate control. Some people lose their homes or livelihoods; others can purchase assets at reduced prices, benefit from public spending or emerge with greater market power. Not every crisis is engineered, and benefiting from a crisis does not by itself prove that someone caused it. But it is reasonable to ask who was prepared, who was protected, who profited and who was left to absorb the losses.

When people are told that suffering is unavoidable and that there is no alternative, scrutiny becomes even more important. Who decides what is unavoidable? Whose interests shape the available choices? Why are some losses treated as acceptable while other interests receive protection? And why do those who bear the greatest costs so often have the least influence over the decisions that affect them?

These are not only questions about economics or politics. They concern the values that shape our everyday lives.

We see the same imbalance in workplaces, where targets, budgets, productivity and performance indicators can become more important than the people expected to deliver them. We see it in leadership cultures that reward decisiveness but discourage questioning, value control more than trust, and treat emotional understanding as a distraction from getting things done. We see it in organisations that describe themselves as successful while their employees are exhausted, afraid to speak up or made to feel that their wellbeing is an obstacle to performance.

And we see it in the qualities society chooses to reward.

Assertiveness, competition, control, invulnerability and the ability to impose decisions are often treated as signs of strength. Listening, nurturing, collaboration, emotional awareness and the willingness to acknowledge vulnerability are more easily dismissed as weakness or secondary skills. These are human capacities, not qualities that belong exclusively to one sex. Yet they have historically been associated with gender, and the qualities culturally linked to men have often received greater recognition, authority and material reward than those linked to women.

The consequences are not abstract. When care is undervalued, the people who provide it can be taken for granted. When women are associated with emotional labour and nurturing, their contributions can be dismissed as less important, while their assertiveness may be judged more harshly than the same behaviour in men. This hierarchy can help sustain the exclusion of women from power and normalise the expectation that they should carry responsibilities for which they receive little recognition. In its more extreme forms, the belief that men are entitled to authority and women should remain subordinate becomes a justification for control, coercion and abuse.

But this hierarchy also harms men. When they are taught that strength means never showing vulnerability, that their worth depends on status or achievement, and that emotional openness diminishes their authority, they may struggle to understand their own needs or build relationships in which they can be fully themselves. The expectation to dominate can restrict the person expected to dominate, just as the expectation to submit restricts the person expected to submit. Neither is freedom.

This is why the way we understand leadership matters so much. The same narrow model that places profit above people can place authority above understanding and control above connection. It encourages us to separate qualities that should work together: ambition from care, reason from emotional awareness, accountability from compassion, decisive action from reflection.

But these qualities do not need to compete. We can set clear expectations and still listen. We can hold people accountable without humiliating them. We can pursue ambitious goals while considering their consequences for workers, communities and the environment. We can make difficult decisions without treating the people affected by them as expendable.

Leadership, whether in government, business or everyday relationships, should not be measured only by the ability to secure compliance or deliver immediate results. It should also be judged by the quality of the decisions made, the distribution of their benefits and costs, the treatment of people and the capacity to recognise when a successful outcome has been achieved at an unacceptable human price.

This is not an argument against ambition, responsibility, markets or effective government. It is an argument against treating any one measure of success as more important than the human lives it is supposed to serve.

We cannot build a fairer society simply by telling people to be kinder while leaving the structures that reward domination untouched. Nor can we expect meaningful change if we continue to equate wealth with worth, authority with competence and vulnerability with weakness. The institutions we create reflect the values we reward, and those values are reinforced every time we accept an outcome as inevitable without asking who benefits from it.

We may not all have equal power to change the system. But we can question the narratives that make inequality appear natural, recognise when fear is being turned against people with less power, and refuse to treat another person's loss as proof of our own success.

Perhaps the question we should be asking is not simply why people defend systems that harm them. It is why we have become so invested in a definition of success that allows us to feel successful while other people pay the price.

What would progress look like if economic growth mattered, but so did dignity, security, health, relationships and the natural world? What if the success of a country depended not only on its wealth, but on whether people could live safely, access essential services and participate meaningfully in decisions that affect them? What if leadership meant bringing together the ability to act with the willingness to understand, rather than rewarding control at the expense of care?

We do not need a society without ambition or differences. We need one in which a person's dignity does not depend on their position in a hierarchy, in which power comes with accountability, and in which economic and political systems are judged by the lives they enable people to lead.

Because if a system can generate wealth while damaging the people and planet that sustain it, if it can promise freedom while leaving many without meaningful choices, and if it can call itself successful while treating human suffering as an acceptable cost, then we have every reason to question it.

And if we cannot question the systems we have built, we should at least question why we have learned to defend them.