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Commonplace Book #231

John Fea   |  January 19, 2023

The poor are not actually as disinterested and pure as the Marxist apocalypse assumes. They do have fewer interests to defend than the rich. But though their justified resentments against injustice may be a creative force in history, their bitterness and their compensatory utopian visions may as frequently be sources of confusion as the social pride of the successful. Utopia is, in fact, “the ideology of the poor.” Invariably those who suffer from the arrogance or the power of others wrongfully assume that the evils from which they suffer are solely the consequence of the peculiar malice of their oppressors; and fail to recognize the root of the same evils in themselves

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 164.

Filed Under: Way of Improvement Tagged With: Commonplace Book