On Nicole Wallace’s podcast, Ken Burns, the great historian said that when racists found that blacks were going to be on their favorite baseball team, the higher quality individuals embraced the fact, came to accept it. Not that simple. What makes higher quality? It rather should be looked at as the decisions made based on doors of opportunity to attain gratitification.
Hammurabi wrote a code of laws for Babylon 4000 years ago, it was with the wisdom that the society as a whole would be much more productive, predictable, and happy if laws and enforcement curtailed some of the violent, unfair, and disruptive behavior.
But now we have to go deeper. We know that men can aspire and conspire to circumvent, change, and rewrite laws to gain power and influence that is beneficicial to a small group but harmful to the greater number of people in a society. To make long principle short, the problem is that man, as a species, community, or nation has not yet engineered a way to control the small minority of humans who seek unfair, disproportionate wealth, power, or other advantage over the society, at the expense of the majority of the members, and sometimes even to the demise of the society. Some members simply don’t care if their actions will lead to the destruction of the society as long as it is after their lifetime. “What do I care. l’m not going to be around in 30 years.” (an actual quote from Donald Trump)
So the initial question is – how do we as a society control those few who are hypermotivated to gain huge personal power to the detriment of society. There wust be new institutions, attitudes, stated moral principles. This question is more theoretical. More practical is How do we reverse the present situation where the top 1% owns 32% of the wealth and the bottom 50% own 2 per cent of it? . slavery was an institution that was overwhelmingly accepted in the North s well as the South in the US in the 18th century. Back then the idea that black and white children would be educated in the same schools, the same universities. was simply not in the dreams of anyone of any color. So maybe we can take solace that it is possible to reverse the tides of the political economy that dictate the hegemony of the financilly elite.
