After studying ethics and international justice, and conducting research in Greece last summer about immigration I have been thinking a lot about the sentiments, intuitions, and justifications for borders and constricting the movement of people. Now I have friends in Rome, Italy and they report to me many of the same things that I have experienced, observed and studied. That is when it dawned on my that the issue of Feudal Privilege is more than just an American thing. In fact, what I have observed is that the same arguments exist all over the world for constricting the movement of people. What it tends to come down to is fear, which is caused by concern over access to resources.
Scarcity is a thing that is created by those who control the resources we have. It is a fact that there is enough produced on the planet to feed everyone on the planet, but that is not profitable. It is also the case that empires still exist. It is more hidden because states have been replaced by corporations, but the results are the same, people are relegated to inferior positions as a labor force. To maintain the public’s adherence to the arbitrary borders that have been drawn the people have to believe that they will benefit from them; in other words, those within certain borders receive a privilege simply because of where they happen to be born. Then the people who have this privilege seek to protect the rewards that result from it and this is what social scientist would call Inclusive Fitness; i.e., making sure that those who share their genes have what is necessary to promote the flourishing of those genes. What this does is place groups in competition over the access to resources and this competition leads to the formation of Stereotypes.
There is a point in time that in many regions that it may have been necessary to form stereotypes about particular groups that others competed with, simply for survival’s sake. Heuristics is the term that social scientist use to describe the immediate association of something so that the brain can focus on what it needs in order to survive. Stereotypes help this process because it assists in the identification of potential threats and permits immediate response to those threats. The problem is that social conventions, such as stereotypes, have a way of becoming traditions, and traditions tend to outlive their necessity for functioning. Yet, while it may have been the case that there was a time the these stereotypes were necessary, they have now become tradition and have come to cause more harm then good because they have lost their usefulness.
This song addresses the core of those beliefs that persist today, which are based on false perceptions and maintain the feudal privilege wall thus, barring access to resources to others.
Chorus
We have to smash the Stereotypes
Breaking our ties, and robbing our Rights
Destroying our Lives, Confounded with Lies
Open your Eyes, We have to Devise
A way to Revise, the Power Divides
If no one Abides, and no one Complies
Then the Privilege dies, and we’re up on the Rise
For the Surmise, reject the Lies
Verse One
Slam shut, closed tight,
Kept out, that’s right
Can’t be havin immigrants
Stealin jobs, becoming plights
A tax payer burden
Burning holes up in they pockets
Cuz all of them are jobless
Homeless, robbers
Liars and connivers
Will be Filling up our streets
Our Hospitals are breached
Obamacare defeats
They looking for a hand out
Not to come here and compete
Wanna lay at home and get a check
Having babies, living fat
Using all our resources, not adding to the pot
Invading our culture bringing junk that we will naught
The freedom of association is a right to stop
You from coming in my house, yo, somebody call a cop
Verse Two
It’s the same everywhere you go
Unrestrained, regrettable
People are hated, cuz their rated as detestable
Labeled as the ‘other’ and a ‘foil’ to amenable
Discounted as a human, till you think they are an ‘animal’
This feudal privilege paradox
Boxes I would rather not
Have to shatter from the start
Migration is a normal part
Natural in the truest form
Corrupted from cuneiform
Specialized the labor force
Till work is what they’re bringing home
Stacked against the odds
Now they’re fighting for their jobs
Against those they once called friends
Work drove a wedge; between them
The demon competition, risen
Derision made incisions in them
Hatred spewing venom in’em
(Ster-eo-types)
Verse Three
The danger is a single story
Robs us all of glory
Paints as the enemy
The phantom of the Tory
Afraid of change
And thus estranged
And campaigns,
A, moratory
To keep at odds
The working class
Surviving in the allegory
By listing our differences
Focusing on pittances
Heightening the instances
We resort to hate
Lashing out with violence
At those who come to make
A new life for themselves
Their family and to break
Away from troubled markets
Hardest fact to harvest here
Is the reason they’re in trouble
Is because they’re labor fare
And are the work force
Producing our food
Can’t let them move and undo
The undue (HARM)
Verse Four
It’s simply not true
That migrants
Are lazy, crime driven individuals
When in truth they are
Some of the hardest working,
Tax paying, community, contributors
And they tend not to benefit
On systems that the rest of us
Take for granted, blasphemous
But that’s the way it is
And to top it all off
They re-invigorate culture
Their constant flux of ideas
Remolds us
But conservative elites
Would have us believe
Without a reprieve that scarcity
Is a thing that we need
as humanity, the vanity
disparaging it is
that falsities and half-truths
found the feudal privilege