Rationalizing one’s status provides moral reassurance resembling belief in a Just God

Evidence

Changing ideas is a strain not to be lightly incurred, particularly when these ideas are intimately related to one’s self-esteem. The less education one has, the harder it is to change such ideas. Painfully these men have elaborated an explanation for their situation in life; it helps explain things to their wives who take their status from them; it permits their growing children to account for relative social status in school; it offers to each man the satisfactions of social identity and a measure of social worth. … Their rationales are endowed with moral qualities; the distribution of values in the society is seen as just and natural. … This reassurance is not unlike the reassurance provided by the belief in a Just God while injustices rain upon one’s head. The feudal serf, the Polish peasant, the Mexican peon believed that theirs was a moral and a “natural order”—so also the American working man. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2234

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The analogy between social-order rationalization and theodicy — that viewing one’s own low status as ‘just and natural’ functions like belief in a Just God amid personal injustice — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting synthesis worth rereading.
• XREF: Echoes the observation that people justify status hierarchies even against their own interest, core to System Justification Theory covered elsewhere in this book.