Quote Originally Posted by TheCurmudgeon View Post
I have come to the conclusion that there are at least two potential sources of social unrest. The first is a mismatch of legitimacy. The second is a feeling of injustice. The mismatch of legitimacy is tied to Maslow's hierarchy but the feeling of injustice does not depend on the level of need being satisfied. It is a static motivation, like religion. It is not hierarchical that I can determine.
My quick reponse to this bifurcation is that the relationship between the questioning of legitimacy and the questioning of justice is not one of co-equals. Illegitimacy is a special case of injustice. In other words, the class of unjust things includes the class of illegitimate things as a sub-class.

By this I mean that the perceiver's distinction is drawn based on the perceived source or cause of the injustice. If I go to the grocery story and think that my milk costs me too much, then this may spark a feeling of injustice but not necessarily a feeling of illegitimacy. I may just think that my grocer is ripping me off or that thestore's chain is making too much profit at my expense. However, if I further reflect on the issue and decide that the reason the milk costs too much is because the government has applied price controls to milk in order to ensure that dairy farmers in Alaska make a profit, I may start to feel that my government is illegitimate,( especially if the city of Cambridge just raised the cost of my vendor's license and I'm not getting some form of price support for the wicker baskets I sell from my pushcart near the Coop in Harvard Yard while the Pier One store in Porter Square is getting a tax break for renovating its building).

Based on the above, I would submit that, vis-a-vis the elements of Maslow's hierarchy, feelings of illegitimacy are more likely to be static than those of injustice. (By static I mean that it is not found at different levels of the hierarchy and is unlikely to vary in intensity; I'm unsure that this is the same meaning that The Curmudgeon uses.) I might well feel a sense of injustice at a failure to be satisfied at any level of the hierarchy. However, I think people need to be somewhat more satisfied in the lower level needs before they will push the analysis to the second order of causation that I have suggested is required to sense illegtimacy. The history of revolutionary movements seems to bear this out; such movements typically have arisen with members of the more satisfied classes of society--upper and upper-middle class students for example. Their basic needs have been satisifed, allowing them the time to reflect more deeply on the causes of injustice they see around them. I would further suggest that feelings of injustice are inversely proportioonal to where one finds them in the hierearchy. That is, the lower on the hierarchy they are found,the greater they are as motivating factor in social unrest. In other words, if I feel injustice at the level of physiological or safety need satisfaction, I am more likely to act to remedy that injustice than if I feel injustice at the esteem or self-actualization level. However, merely having the feeling of injustice is usually insufficient to cause one to act to remedy the injustice. Some spark or catalyst is still needed to cause one to act.

I propose that neither the sense of illegitimacy nor the desire to act to remedy injustice usually arises spontanteously in most of us. It must be stimulated by someone else--the so-called outside agitator. The causal nexus for the apppearance of these agitators, when couched in terms of Maslow's hierarchy, is that such people have been unable to attain satisfaction of their love and belonging needs in what most people would considered a socially acceptable way. Therefore, as a method to achieve some sense of belonging, these people create a cause and convince others to join them in trying to realize the goals of the cause. The cause may be something relatively innocuous, like "Save the Whales." However, over time it may become much less innocuous as members of the group choose the means of achieving the cause's ends--mnoving from printing and distributing pamphlets to sinking whaling ships, for example.

What the mechanism is that leads to the degeneration of the means to the group's ends into actions with less and less social acceptablility is not clear to me. I suspect that it might have something to do with the fact that the love and belonging need is still felt to be unsatisfied by at least a subset of those who join the movement, which becomes yet another instance of a feeling of injustice and requires the holder of that feeling to "act out" even more vigorously.