Why is it that when minorities speak of injustice, they are often met with solemn respect, yet when majorities raise their voices, they are mocked or silenced? Why is it deemed noble to suffer as a minority but suspicious, even illegitimate, to suffer as a majority? When did empathy become a currency doled out not according to the magnitude of pain, but strictly by demographics?
Is it not striking that much of the funding from Western donors – channelled through non-governmental organisations – in so-called developing countries, or the newly coined ‘Global South,’ is disproportionately allocated through this very prism?
Take Sri Lanka as a case in point. These are no mere rhetorical questions; they reveal a profound dissonance in contemporary political and moral discourse.
A social no-go zone
In the prevailing ideological climate, majoritarian suffering is rendered epistemically invisible by default. The assumption that the majority holds power – economic, cultural, and political – has ossified into a truism so rigid that it forecloses serious engagement with the grievances of the many. This is a structural violence of omission.
Alyson M. Cole, in her critique of what she terms the “cult of true victimhood,” explains how claims to victim status have been commodified, “cast as shamefully passive or cynically manipulative,” and granted only selectively. The majority, regardless of its material deprivation or cultural displacement, rarely passes the ideological litmus test for legitimate victimhood.
This selective empathy is compounded by what Miranda Fricker defines as epistemic injustice – specifically, hermeneutical injustice. It is not only that the majority’s pain is dismissed, but that the conceptual frameworks and language necessary to articulate their experiences are systematically denied.
Fricker writes of groups “rendered unable to make communicative sense of their experiences” due to a lack of shared interpretive resources. This is crucial: the erasure of the majority’s suffering is often not a matter of overt censorship but of hermeneutical deprivation – being denied the words and frameworks to express their realities. Their pain becomes a sort of linguistic taboo, a social no-go zone.
Christopher Lasch presciently diagnosed this elite-majority schism in ‘The Revolt of the Elites.’ He observed that the educated vanguard is “labouring under the delusion that they alone have overcome racial prejudice,” viewing the majority as irredeemably backward.
This contempt is institutionalised in political rhetoric, media framing, and academic paradigms. The majority is portrayed as a reactionary force, a cultural threat, or worse, a potential authoritarian insurgency. Their material and cultural grievances are re-coded as moral failures or psychological pathologies.
Lasch’s warning is stark: “the thinking classes” have become alienated from the very people whose collective will is foundational to democracy itself.
Systemic invisibility
Consider the case of Sri Lanka’s district quota system in university admissions during the 1970s. While widely narrated in academic and international discourse as a manifestation of Sinhalese majoritarian oppression against Tamil minorities, this framing omits a critical nuance: many rural Sinhalese communities suffered profound educational and economic marginalisation under the same policy.
Their experience, however, is absent from mainstream discourse because it does not fit the sanctioned narrative of minority victimhood. To acknowledge this would challenge the neat binaries of oppressor and oppressed, majority and minority, rendering the political discourse messier but more truthful.
India’s socio-political context provides another example of this epistemic skew. The Hindu majority is often reduced to a monolithic oppressor in elite narratives, masking the deep fissures of caste, region, language, and class within it. Millions of economically disenfranchised Hindus, particularly from rural and lower-caste backgrounds, are systemically invisible in conversations about injustice.
Constitutional safeguards and social recognition tend to focus almost exclusively on constitutionally protected minorities, leaving many struggling members of the majority in a state of ideological exile. Their suffering is either co-opted into minority-centric narratives or dismissed as inconsequential.
A hegemonic pluralism
Joel Kotkin’s ‘The Coming of Neo-Feudalism’ offers a searing critique of the cultural forces that perpetuate this asymmetry. He identifies a “new clerisy” comprising academia, media, and technology elites who “define the parameters of acceptable thought and punish dissent through social, economic, and reputational sanctions”.
This elite class is deeply invested in a cosmopolitan, identitarian moral framework that prizes symbolic gestures over empirical realities. Within this symbolic economy, the lived experiences of the majority – economic decline, cultural alienation, and social disintegration – are effectively subtracted from public discourse.
The consequences of this moral and epistemic exclusion are profound. When minority groups protest or assert their rights, they are frequently framed as participants in the democratic process. However, when majorities express similar grievances, their actions are often pathologised as ‘populism,’ ‘majoritarianism,’ or even ‘authoritarian.’ Material concerns – declining wages, job insecurity, loss of cultural identity – are too easily recoded as coded supremacism.
Ryszard Legutko, in ‘The Demon in Democracy,’ warns that liberal democracies often succumb to “totalitarian temptations” under the guise of pluralism, tolerating “only one version of democracy – its own”. This hegemonic pluralism demands the dissolution of majority identities, expecting them to secularise, fragment, and self-censor in the face of moralistic minoritarian vetoes.
In Western contexts, this phenomenon is glaring. White working-class communities, devastated by deindustrialisation and social despair, are often caricatured as ‘deplorables,’ ‘bigots,’ or victims of ‘white rage.’
The opioid epidemic ravaging these communities is rarely met with policy empathy; instead, it is dismissed as a moral failing. Michael Lind’s term “demonising the downwardly mobile” captures how the elite disparage those whom economic and social transformations have failed. Their suffering is trivialised, their voices ridiculed.
This is a betrayal of liberalism’s foundational promise: the equal moral worth of every individual regardless of identity. When suffering is validated only if it emanates from certain demographics, liberalism mutates into a tribal morality masked as universal ethics.
Pierre Manent’s insight is incisive: “To respect the nation is to recognise the people as political actors, not merely as subjects to be managed.” Majorities are not mere statistical aggregates; they are political subjects, cultural bearers, and rightful claimants to empathy and justice. In this context, US President Donald Trump marks not the peak of disruption but an early stage in a potentially more radical evolution.
A silenced rupture
This is not an attempt to silence minority voices or undermine their legitimate claims. Rather, it is a demand for intellectual and moral symmetry – an insistence that justice cannot be reduced to identity arithmetic. It must be rooted in empathy, empirical attentiveness, and a courageous willingness to confront inconvenient truths.
The current regime of selective compassion – where some sufferings are visible and others invisible – is unsustainable. Societies that refuse to acknowledge the full spectrum of pain risk fracturing under the weight of their own hypocrisies.
The majority does not seek martyrdom or exceptionalism; it seeks only to be heard without derision, seen without suspicion, and acknowledged without apology. To deny this is not to protect the vulnerable; it is to endanger the very conscience and collective will that sustain society. This is all about contradicting consciences and collective will.
If democratic legitimacy depends on the recognition of all voices, then the continued epistemic erasure of the majority is a crisis not just for the majority itself but for democracy’s survival. To confront this challenge honestly demands a radical recalibration of our moral imaginaries – one that refuses to grant victimhood as a scarce resource and instead embraces a plural, inclusive ethics of suffering.
Until then, the majority’s plight will remain a silenced rupture beneath the polished veneer of liberal discourse – a rupture that threatens to rend the social fabric itself.
(The writer is a Senior Manager at the Sri Lanka Ports Authority [SLPA]. The views expressed are personal)