People who have experienced personal and professional success and benefit from various privileges DEFAULT to understanding these successes and privileges as a result of their own unique traits and their personal good decisions.
And these same people (the beneficiaries of success/privileges) look at a world filled with truly RADICAL inequality that results in human beings getting destroyed by grinding poverty, unhealth, imperial violence, and capitalist extraction,… and they think "i'm not like them because i made good choices and because i have a unique mixture of skills and traits - if only these other people living on the streets and hungry and poor and unhealthy had made better personal choices."
This is the path of radical individualism that capitalism wants to keep us traveling - it relies on the implicit and unexamined assumption that our successes and privileges result from how awesome we are individually and everyone else's poor personal choices and lack of skill result in their own failures and disparities.
It takes intentionality to critically assess and deconstruct your own successes and privileges (as well as your own failures and lack of privilege) - what you will find when you do so is that the vast, vast majority of the causes are the following: (1) the pure accident of the zip code, family, demographics, and wealth you were born into, (2) being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time, and (3) how much education you have been encouraged and socialized to pursue and achieve. All of these causes are the result of structural, collective forces and being lucky or unlucky.
Then and only then should you consider how your personal, unique mix of traits and skills and charisma (or lack thereof) MAY have contributed - and this is by far the smallest piece of the puzzle.
People living on the streets or struggling through poverty or working low wage jobs or suffering from serious health disparities are NOT where they are because of personal choices. They have been entirely fucked by a collective, structural system and by horrible luck in the same way that those experiencing success and privilege have been entirely supported and advanced by a collective, structural system and by excellent luck.
If what I'm positing here is accurate,... then it follows that the only just society is one in which all people, regardless of their personal mix of traits/skills and regardless of their personal connections and the accidental circumstances of their birth,... are fully empowered and resourced with everything they need to flourish and build a life filled with rich personal and collective meaning.
And, on the flip side, if what I'm positing here is accurate,... then it follows that the society we have constructed at present is profoundly and rapaciously evil because it reinforces and reproduces structural conditions that create WILDLY unequal outcomes due simply to accidents of birth and bad luck... and that abandon our fellow human beings to the violence of grinding poverty and homelessness and imperial conquest and capitalist extraction and mental/physical unhealth.
I simply don’t see another coherent way to make sense of the world.