My New Person-On-the-Street-Interviews Video Shows that Most People Want Radical Egalitarian Change

These new interviews made sure that people did not know what I, the interviewer, wanted to hear, and the question I asked people invited the anti-egalitarian response no less than the egalitarian one.

Yesterday (March 14, 2024) I spent about two hours with a camcorder on the sidewalk in my neighborhood of Boston (called Brighton) video taping my neighbors’ responses to the following question displayed on a clipboard that I showed them:

Here’s a question for you:

You can push as many of these three magic buttons as you wish; they do what they say in a good way without any surprise nasty tricks. Which button or buttons, if any, would you push?

Button #1 will make it so that things stay just the way they are today with some extremely rich people like billionaires and some very poor people.

Button #2 will make it so that there are no extremely rich people like billionaires and no very poor people.

Button #3 will make it so that people who work reasonably according to ability get to have what they need or reasonably desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.

I made sure not to let people I interviewed know my own opinion (at least not until after they had stated their opinion) because I wanted to make sure that they were telling me what they really believed and not just what they thought I wanted to hear.

When you open the video I encourage you to read the “Description” box beneath it, in which I provide the time points at which people answered the question. Lots of people, as you will see, declined to stop and answer the question but I included them in this video so you can see exactly how my sample was arrived at and how it was everybody who agreed to stop and be interviewed. As for possible bias, there’s no reason to think that people’s decision whether or not to stop had anything whatsoever to do with how they would have answered the question; some people were just too busy with something else to stop and answer some unknown person’s unknown question. I think my sample is quite representative of the general population in my neighborhood, and my neighborhood is typical of MANY others in the United States.

Here’s the video:

As you will see, of the ten persons (counting one couple who agreed with each other as just one person) interviewed, only one of them selected button #1 (to keep the billionaires) and he did not say his reason was because he expected to be rich one day; he said his reason was because the billionaires create jobs for lots of people. (This notion that we need the very rich to create jobs is a commonly held belief, which I refute here.)

90% (nine of ten) of the people interviewed selected a button (or buttons, i.e., either button #2, or #2 and #3, or just #3) calling for radical egalitarian change and definitely NOT button #1 that would keep the status quo of some rich billionaires and some very poor people.

Think about this! Is this what you would have predicted? Try this in YOUR neighborhood and see what happens. That way you won’t have to rely on mental images of people in your head that the mass media have been carefully creating in our minds for decades by, among other things, CENSORING any expression of egalitarian aspiration by ordinary people in the air waves or in newsprint. Do you think it is an accident that no mass media organization interviews people the way I did and reports the results? This failure by the mass media to tell us what our fellow citizens and residents think about the status quo versus egalitarian alternatives cannot be explained on the supposed grounds that such reporting wouldn’t be of interest to people. On the contrary, people would LOVE to know how others respond to such questions.

I have in the past made similar person-on-the-street-interviews videos that ask people if they think the message on a button with the image below is a good idea or a bad idea.

Here’s one of them:

and here’s another:

The people in these two last videos overlap. The difference between the videos is that only in the second video (in the second half of it) did I include footage in which I asked people who agreed with the message in the button (“Let’s remove the rich from power…etc.”) if they would support an organization more, or less, if it said its goal was also to “Remove the rich from power…, etc.”). They said they would support such an organization more. (This is why the video is titled, “Attention Activist.”)

But were people in the above two videos just telling me what I wanted to hear?

Well, it is true that when I made those two videos several years ago I was wearing a button with the same message that I was asking people about. So yes, they could tell that I thought the message in that button was a good idea. And therefore, it is a logical possibility that people seeing me wearing that button just told me what I wanted to hear. But I think that if you look at the people in the video, and see how they are genuinely thinking about the question, you will lean towards thinking that they were really saying what they believed.

But OK, it is conceivable that, as a good friend of mine claims, if I had produced a button with the opposite message (“Let’s keep everything the same with some rich and some poor, etc.”) and had worn that anti-egalitarian button when I asked people if they thought its message was a good idea or a bad idea, then they would have said it was a good idea just to please me (because, as my friend insists, I am such a “friendly-looking non-threatening kind of guy.”)

To test my friend’s hypothesis (that people just say what they think I want to hear, not what they really believe), I created the “Three Magic Buttons” question with its #1 button choice being to keep things the way they are with some rich people like billionaires and some very poor people. And, of course, I did not wear a button or in any other way let people know what my personal views were (until after they had stated their own view.)

It is abundantly clear that the reason 90% of the people selected a button (or buttons) that called for radical egalitarian change and NOT the button that called for keeping the status quo is because that is what they really believed.

Likewise, I think it is not credible that 500 of my zip-code neighbors eagerly posed for a photo (see all the photos here and zoom in on any one of them to easily read the sign they’re holding) with a sign I produced that said:

We the People want affordable housing for all. To get it we aim to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.

I would challenge you to persuade lots of YOUR neighbors to pose with a sign saying the opposite, i.e., that they wanted to “keep the rich in power, etc,” no matter how friendly and non-threatening you may look. :) You would learn that it is VERY hard to find people who would pose for a photo with such an anti-egalitarian sign.

I have an earlier post here with additional evidence for the fact that most people want an egalitarian revolution.

Anti-establishment, pro-people, activists have been making a HUGE mistake

Anti-establishment, pro-people, activists have been working under a false premise, namely the false idea that most people in the general public (non-activists) do NOT want an egalitarian revolution, and therefore if activists openly and boldly advocate for an egalitarian revolution this will (supposedly) scare the general public away so it’s best NOT to talk about the need for such a radical change. In keeping with this wrong premise, activists wrongly think they must do things to PERSUADE ordinary people that we need a radical change (as if they didn’t already know that!) since they currently (supposedly) want to keep the status quo.

This approach of wrong-headed activism prevents activists from addressing the actual wrong idea that most people believe, namely the false idea that an egalitarian revolution is impossible because hardly anybody else wants it. This false idea is the reason people feel so hopeless about making the radical egalitarian change that people know is required to really solve the problems that come from living under a dictatorship of the rich. When people feel hopeless about a problem, they don’t do anything to solve it, and this makes them APPEAR—contrary to fact!—to be apathetic (meaning not caring about the problem). When activists wrongly conclude that people are apathetic (not caring) then they don’t do what it takes to help people overcome their hopelessness; hopelessness is overcome when people learn that they are NOT alone in wanting an egalitarian revolution. Helping people learn this fact is the CHIEF task of activists today. This is why I made my videos.

One of the most effective lies that the ruling class promotes is the false idea that ordinary people want to KEEP the status quo with some billionaires and some very poor because they (supposedly) expect to be very rich one day and want society to make that possible. If you actually talk to random people about this, however, you will discover that this is a big lie, that very few people expect to be very rich one day and want to keep our society unequal for that reason. It just ain’t so! This big lie is as absurd as if a pro-slavery person in 1860 told the abolitionists that the slaves wanted to keep slavery for some idiotic reason. Can we please stop believing this ruling class lie that is designed to make us be afraid to talk about egalitarian revolution with ordinary people?

Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement and help people see that they are NOT alone in wanting to remove from power the billionaires who treat the have-nots like dirt.