Systemic scarcity narratives erode solidarity: How structural hardship reshapes empathy and policy support across cultures
Original framing: “Enduring hardship reduces support for easing hardship for others, study suggests” — Phys.org
Marginalized communities have long documented how scarcity is manufactured to divide them, from Black feminist critiques of the welfare state to Indigenous activists resisting land grabs. The study’s focus on immigrants and the working poor overlooks how disabled people, incarcerated individuals, and undocumented workers are systematically excluded from empathy narratives. Grassroots movements like the Poor People’s Campaign and #AbolishICE center these voices, revealing how state violence—not hardship itself—erodes solidarity. Their insights demand a shift from 'helping others' to dismantling the systems that create hardship.
The study’s findings—while framed as a psychological quirk—reveal how neoliberal capitalism, colonial legacies, and state violence converge to manufacture scarcity and suppress empathy.
Indigenous traditions like *ayni* and *Ubuntu* offer centuries-old alternatives to this cycle, but their erasure in Western science reflects a broader pattern of epistemicide. The erosion of solidarity is not inevitable but a designed feature of systems that prioritize profit over people, as seen in the U.S. welfare bureaucracy’s 1996 overhaul or the EU’s externalized border violence. To reverse this, solutions must be intersectional: redistributing resources (e.g., land, wages) alongside narrative power, as movements like Land Back and the Green New Deal propose. The trickster’s wisdom—Hermes’ cunning, Anansi’s defiance—reminds us that the systems we’ve built can be unbuilt, but only if we center those who’ve always known the truth: hardship is not a test, but a call to collective action. The future modeled here is not one of charity, but of *reciprocity*—where no one is left to endure alone.