That swings too close to conspiracy theory territory. Hanlon’s razor still applies. The powerful didn’t say ‘I want them dumb, so I will defund the schools.’ They said ‘I don’t get anything out of paying for other people’s schooling, so I won’t.’ Then it was ‘just world’ bias combined with PR to bring it into the mainstream.

Defeating the just world bias at scale is probably one of the greatest hurdles to achieving anything really great on a societal level. How do you achieve a sane middle ground between ‘I deserve everything I experience. Luck had nothing to do with it,’ and ‘I have no agency whatsoever.’?