Out Loud

As LinkedIn has become more of a general purpose social media site, a good amount of advocacy has started competing with the more business and sales related posts for attention. Much of it is business-related social advocacy, such as for more women in the workplace, more opportunities for people with Autism disorders and the like, but there is also a noticeable amount of the sort of strident social media advocacy where people randomly stand up and aggressively proclaim their support (or opposition) to something or other and wait for the likes to roll in. Like the following:

Perhaps it's a good thing that the poster declined to elaborate further, as my first thought was: "citation please." And not because I'm unaware of the fact that wealthy people who find ways to defraud people out of their money tend to be treated more leniently than people who are forced to rely on violence when they steal. But because the statement, taken simply, seems flatly untrue. Presuming that the original poster was referring to the United States when they said "this society," the idea that there is any significant number of people who considered a homeless person stealing $5 to be more worthy of outrage than a wealthy person stealing $5,000,000 is fairly ludicrous.

Where the controversy tends to start is when it's not clear if, let alone which, laws were broken. And this is something that people with money are able to take advantage of in ways that poor, and most middle-class, people cannot. Snatching a bill from a countertop or tip jar and running away with it is clearly illegal, if not worth pursuing in most jurisdictions. But it's also the sort of crime that confronts people with their own vulnerability in a way that dubious financial engineering does not. And it should be noted that outright fraud, even when perpetrated by the wealthy, tends to push people's buttons and arouse public sentiment.

On the other hand, there is a certain subset of the conservative mindset that believes in literally unlimited opportunity for anyone willing to do a modest amount of work to take advantage of it. And there are people in that community that see homelessness and crime as signs of an immoral character. But that's not "this society" any more than Millennials are.

Presenting the existence as mindsets one disagrees with as being indicative of an entire society's worldview isn't even good virtue signalling; there's simply too much noise. And that, I suspect, is why so much of it is simply people shouting in the void; there's not enough information content to engage with.