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Notes -
Privilege Theory
A Privilege is an unearned advantage according to this theory, and if you are born into a position of privilege, you dont know what its like to live without it. I think this idea has many flaws, but I'll let the author go more indepth:
I can't be the only one who dislikes the accusatory structure of Privilege to begin with? It kind of leads to the concrete argument inherently. Privilege is applied to the group that, by definition, lacks the disadvantage. Wouldn't a more productive conversation be around how to fix the disadvantages of others? If I say someone has Male Privilege, what is that meant to do? I cant say I've ever seen this used very productively. It just feels more like a bludgeoning fist than a helping hand.
Perhaps another argument could be that those with this advantage have an obligation to help others without it, but Its not like a lack of disadvantage is the same as being in a position to do anything, and its not automatically the case that the disadvantage have no power either. Maybe those with wealth privilege could give money to the poor, but that might not affect much if the reasons someone is poor is structural/government policy reasons, or due to their own personal failings. And some one who is poor could very well change their circumstances to become middle class if they work hard and stay in school. Yes this obviously has its limits, but it'll still put you in a better spot than doing nothing. Same with thing with male privilege: I can't stop other men from raping women and using money & power to get away with it unless I possessed a similar level of wealth and power. The fact that I am less likely to experience rape myself doesn't change this idea.
Its a frustrating conversation to have, because it pivots and assigns blame and responsibility to the "Privileged" group, instead putting focus on how to fix the issues of the less fortunate. It gives me the gist that many of these folk are just looking to shit on people and shut them up, rather than actually solve any real problems.
What made you want to resurrect these two ancient (by internet standards) videos for discussion today? The Counter Arguments YouTube channel is a blast from the past for me. Used to watch his stuff regularly. He's interesting in that it seems he really meant it when he retired.
As for privilege itself, it's always been a naked attempt to take what others have for yourself. If people were really serious about privilege, they would advocate for serious reforms to our selective institutions where any non-relevant characteristics are not only illegal to discriminate on, but impossible to discriminate on (because the selectors are unaware of them).
Blind orchestra auditions are a great example. What if we tried our best in every area of life to be blind to irrelevant characteristics? If you're auditioning to play the violin, only your ability to play the violin should matter, and that's all that should be considered in the decision of who to choose.
Here are some ways our institutions would change if we took this seriously:
What are some other areas of life you think could be blinded in this way? It's fun to think about.
But, actually, I don't think we value this as a society, and the only thing critics of privilege don't like about it is that they aren't the beneficiaries.
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There's also the issue that people have unearned disadvantages as well as unearned advantages, and the unearned disadvantages never seem to count as reducing or eliminating the privilege, making it a one way ratchet.
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Like most social codes, I'm sure it can be and has been extensively weaponized by bully types, but at its best this privilege discourse can be steelmanned as just formalizing attitudes of modesty, generosity, gratitude and perspective-taking that in a saner time would be universally agreed to be virtuous. The opening sections of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations? Just a big ol' session of checking his privilege. It's virtuous to train yourself to notice your unearned advantages and to sympathize with others' unearned disadvantages.
At least, I have yet to read a right-leaning denunciation of privilege awareness that didn't make the author themselves look extremely bad in ways that reverse those virtues: resentful, egotistical, preening, pushy. Self-absorbed, defensive, insecure.
You can train yourself to see it by taking the perspective of a less-privileged person, imagining a practical conversation with a member of your permanent outgroup who's also dramatically better off in a way you can't relate to/ will never access. Let's try outgroup = woman, advantage=good-looks and charisma. Picture the most pampered mean-girl college sorority girl you can imagine, rich family, beautiful, smart but also well-tutored, people falling over themselves to give her things. She's trying to get the awkward pimpled nerd out of her lab group. "This loser is actually the lucky one, because people feel sorry for him! I'm the real victim, I have to pretend to be polite and nobody feels sorry for me at all!" "I'm not sorry I'm better off, maybe I'm just a better person. I worked hard, I deserve everything I have!" "Anyway it's not my fault, sucks to be him. He should work on improving his lot and get out of my way in the meantime." Do you feel angry at her smugness here? As though she should have more sympathy and modesty, be aware that in some ways she's had it very easy, be more generous to someone who's struggling?
It bolsters my sense (confirmed by the excellent post on Reddit manners below) that some "woke" rhetorical norms are just uncomfortably rigid encodings of the types of high-EQ social behavior one needs to live cooperatively with economically diverse groups of people in a dense urban environment. Demolish them, and it's hard not to worry about a Chesterton's Fence situation where we descend into a pure post-apocalyptic Might Makes Right situation. And yes, it's fair to say that they should have to check their privilege too. But the opportunity to be the bigger person is valuable in itself.
The idea of steelmanning is that you take an argument and build the strongest possible version of it. Not that you take a real-life phenomenon, build some idealized version of what it claims to be (but is not), and attribute the virtues of the "steelman" to the real-life phenomenon and denigrate anyone opposing the real-life phenomenon as opposing the "steelman".
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Sure, but this is not usually what is meant by the progressive privilege. It has a very specific intersectional structure and it has to by part of a system(s) of oppression and has to be less individualistic. Trailer white trash is still privileged by virtue of their whiteness.
This is unironically the critique people have today for progressives who talk about privilege exactly in this manner. Celebrities like Michele Obama cannot stop talking about how hard they have it - such as when somebody told Michele that she is not Princeton material, that was obvious example of racism and misogyny.
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They're uncomfortably rigid because they're enforced by policy and fear of litigation.
Perhaps related: they're intolerable to many people because they're also not stable (wokes continually add new things) and they're not fair. There's a rigid hierarchy of which groups don't have to show this empathy or this good behavior - in fact their failure to do so mandates that you show more sympathy*. This is where privilege differs from fortune. The gods can favor any of us and we should all be humble as a result, privilege is an unjust social hierarchy which requires fixing and some people in particular are guilty.
I actually think you're right that a lot of this is good for managing diversity in a legalistic diverse society. But the structure it comes in leads to it getting poisoned. It's always a tax on certain people, which allows bad actors to use it as a cudgel.
* A hierarchy that arguably doesn't make sense (are black women lower or higher on the hierarchy than black men? How does male privilege rank next to a massive murder rate and lower educational attainment?) and even some wokes would tell you is a misreading of intersectionality.
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The accusatory attitude towards privledge seems to me like the crabs in a bucket mentality, jealousy, or other similar ressentiment towards towards the more powerful. I think this is what matters, as it gives you us a model for understanding the position. If we merely listen to the position explaining itself, we'll find that it breaks down completely under scrutiny. I could rip the entire concept apart with clever arguments (let me know if anyone wants to read that), but at this point it feels like we're just pointing out the obvious and agreeing with one another as a way of venting.
A better question is, will anyone here defend the idea of privilege being used like this? As you point out, it's used as a way to bring down the successful rather than as a way to help those who are unsuccessful. If you look more closely, this is a common psychological theme of losers (underprivileged, needy, use any synonym). They hate the rich but do not love the poor. They want to see evil people punished, but they don't check what happened to the victims. Psychologically speaking, hatred of X is distinct from the love of (opposite of X).
Of course the disadvantaged aren't without power. They're actually the most powerful when you consider the strength in numbers. By definition, being disadvantaged has become an advantageous position, meaning that the powerless are powerful. Think about it - if white men are being harassed, how are they privledged? There's no force more difficult to oppose than public opinion.
The so-called fight for the good (especially of a class or category of people) is just a fight for power. Femininsm is a fight for power. Communism is a fight for power. Maybe this comment too is just an attempt to elevate myself. I'd argue that it's not, though, since my will to power is lacking. Anyway, psychology is not rocket science, our social norms just prevents a clear understanding of human nature from becoming common knowledge.
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The purpose of privilege as a concept isn't to center groups to help (which would necessitate actually identifying and helping those groups), but to center groups to hurt. The latter is much more useful for intra-elite conflicts, because one faction can deploy it against the other; and it outcompetes the idea of helping the less fortunate, because it supports the accrual of more power and resources to reproduce itself, while the concept of helping the less fortunate dissipates the power and resources of those who hold it.
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This is deliberate. Privilege is a concept evolved from the Marxian branch of Hegelian dialectic and specifically the Lord-bondsman dialectic.
Hegel's original argument is that asymmetric relations such as these are metaphysically defective and create the contradictions that lead to transcending them. Marx would later extend this as a general theory of history and politics.
From within this framework there can be no such thing as "fixing issues". The only way that history advances is through the conflicts of distinct classes that are both conscious of themselves as classes and of the other as their opponent in a conflict, such that their struggle can deduce the next stage of history.
Therefore, it is of use to create such concepts that heighten the consciousness of people as class and their sense of the conflict that opposes them to the other. For it is only this way that the inherent contradictions present in their condition can be discovered and transcended. And "Privilege" is one such concept, developed by the Marxist revolutionaries of the Weather Underground, later formally codified by academic feminists within the post-Soviet cultural Marxist tradition.
Your frustration is because (again from within this framework) you are a reactionary element who seeks to quell revolutionary fervor in a futile plot to stop the natural and inevitable flow of history by "solving" the "problems" of the oppressed instead of creating the conditions necessary to transcend their oppression and render their status as oppressed meaningless.
This. The thinking also created structure of universal leftist conspiracy theory. You have oppressed class Red and oppressor class Blue. Blue people have access to some specific property, they call Privilege and restrict access to this privilege to oppressed group. They also create a system that perpetuates this dynamic indefinitely, lets called it privilegeism.
In traditional Marxism you have proletariat vs bourgeoisie. Bourgeoisie has access to privilege in form of capital and limits access of workers to it by creating system of capitalism that reproduces itself over generations. In feminist theory there are men and women, men have male privilege and create system called patriarchy to restrict access to this privilege. In Critical Race Theory you have Black and white people, white people have access to whiteness and use it to create system of white supremacy. In queer theory the oppressed are Queer/LGBT+ people vs cishetero people. The cishetero people have access to "normalcy" and deny that to queer people by creating and perpetuating the system of cisheteronormativity. The same simple conspiracy then copies itself to basically all progressive thinking.
The point being that privilege has a specific meaning in leftist thinking, it does not signigy an individual thing in common parlance. It has philosophical and metaphysical meanings, exactly like capital has different meaning to somebody about to create his business vs Marxist revolutionary.
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Wow. A true Hegelian - you are quite literally the only person I have ever seen call it the Lord-Bondsman dialectic instead of the Master-Slave dialectic (following the translations of Kojeve, Lacan, etc.). Though I would say, that, at least through the prism of my Kojevean reading, any honest interpretation of this dialectic for the present has to put capitalists and workers on the same side (as the Slave) against the State.
I loathe Hegel and German Idealism as a whole, I must say. But I understand him somewhat, and his ideas are so influential it's necessary reading to even understand where half of contemporary politics even come from.
I would say you're correct in putting private citizens in opposition to the State as the most significant confrontation of our time, though I'd have perhaps a much larger conception of the State than is common in this reading, encompassing all managerial institutions and their tendrils.
In my view, we are still in a post-Burnham world. Though perhaps not for very much more time.
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No. But that is its function.
You are assuming that the stated goals and justifications of its advocates are the actual goals and justifications. You can simply look at how it is used to determine whether or not this is true, the purpose of a thing being what it does and all.
To shut them down, to denigrate their opinions, and to devalue their achievements. It is meant to serve as an I-win trump card over opponents who have the appropriate characteristics. It is Smite Evil for social justice types, that is to say, it functions as "Smite Male" or "Smite White". A superweapon that only harms the specified targets. How glorious!
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Privilege discourse always seemed exactly backwards to me. If you have two people with the same exact nature, one white and one black, who is privileged in post-1970s America? Black. Socially, they get the enormous privilege of “having overcome”, of “having been the victim”, of being a kind of token of justice, which are very advantageous social myths. Because expectations are lower for them in an unconscious way, they get the privilege of having their work more socially reinforced and teachers will be more lenient. There is also the stereotype of their being more mirthful and cool, and even the stereotype of aggression is beneficial in most social scenarios of note. Education would boost the black person, while in the justice system black jurors discriminate against white offenders and white jurors do not discriminate against black offenders.
And if privilege discourse relies on the assumption that a person is victimized when others of their race are victimized, then surely it’s also the case that people should be lauded when others of their race do something great, like end world slavery, and a person is at fault when others of their race do something bad, like be very murderous. In any case this is a very old topic, but it’s still remarkable how baseless it was; in my mind, not merely untrue, but exactly opposite of the truth. Whites reduced the sum total oppression of blacks to an infinite degree!
It’s probably correct to see the whole phenomenon as based more on conditioning, eg “if I associate X with bad stories, over time people will hate X, and the phenomenon will continue on its own”. Just an op.
Why would you assume the same exact nature and circumstances for what is clearly a judgment on a group's standing?
So you would rather be the retarded kid who gets points for the touchdown because of all he's overcome rather than just being the good football player? A beneficiary of other people's charity so they can feel good about themselves and look down on their fellows?
You don't see how this is humiliating?
Privilege isn't a judgment on a group's standing, though. It's about the standing of an individual relative to another individual when, all else being equal, the only differences between the 2 are some particular characteristic in the approved list such as race, sex, sexual orientation, sexual identity, immigration status, etc. We know this, because policies that are meant to counteract the differences in privilege of people who are different in, e.g. sex, discriminate against individuals on the basis of that individual's sex, not on the basis of the specific privileges/lack-thereof that that individual actually, truly did encounter, that are downstream of that individual's sex.
If privileges truly were judgments on groups rather than on individuals, the people who are the strongest proponents of policies to counter the differences in privilege would be the strongest opponents of any policies that discriminate individuals on the basis of the privilege-level of the group they belong into, because that would be a gross perversion of their ideology that also makes their ideology look uglier to others. But that doesn't really happen.
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The underlying moral claim of the racial progressive is not merely that a group average is worse and that this worse result is a travesty (this would be justice, it would be a group getting what they deserve). The racial progressive believes that there are blacks with the same nature as whites, and that if you tracked a white and black with the same “skill points” (simplifying) that the black would have a worse outcome. This is opposite of the reality. And they additionally believe that the low skill points blacks currently possess are an artifact of past moral transgressions by whites, transgressions which need reparation, while they ignore the past moral benevolence of whites to blacks, like lifting them out of a maximally oppressive environment in Africa and teaching them to read and so forth.
But the black is not seen as the retarded kid. There is a very important distinction to be made here. The black is seen as a secret genius who has been thwarted by evil school officials, a Will type character from Good Will Hunting (I imagine this is not really the protagonist’s name, I won’t google it). That an average IQ Black can perform averagely is seen as proof of their superiority, because their oppressive history would make any man perform worse. This is what they believe. A retarded kid is retarded, they are innately dumb and thus of low value. The black is actually valuable but has been unjustly attacked; he is all the more worthy of our admiration because of this; any low performance is simply the relic of white ppls’ original sin, for which we must be the constant penitent (in the extreme manifestations).
Praise and compassion feel good to receive. The black gets more praise and more compassion from, say, a boss who is very progressive. They also get more respect because of the ambient stereotypes (strong), and are seen as more cool because of the stereotype (eg dancing). These are all good social dynamics to be on the receiving end of; the praise socially-reinforces your good behacior, and the compassion increases a sense of belonging. These are advantages. The studies show that blacks are more narcissistic so it’s possible they do not, on average, recognize their myriad “unjust” blessings due to the ignorance of progressives (imo).
We can consider a parallel. If I never had a piano teacher because of evil oppressive monsters who hate me, and when I go to my first lesson my teacher is amazed at how well I can play, how would I feel? Quite great, actually. I will be a lot more confident and happy in my playing. I would be very reinforced. The other students would look upon my state when some envy, that I am the Harry Potter of the Pianoverse.
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Professional beggars and scroungers do not feel their way of life as humiliating, they see themselves as smart and clever and see dumb mugs who believe their sob stories with the deepest contempt. Ofc, the professionals are in the game for more concrete gains than some football game points.
And evidently even professionals who are proud to perform well aren't ashamed to do very fake and gay shit such as diving to scrounge up some extra points, if the game allows it.
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The retarded kid won't be humiliated, because he's too retarded to get it. He gets his points, it makes him happy, and the actually good players go find something else to do. Further, in real life, those points tend to be quite valuable, which can cover up for a lot of humiliation. Yeah, maybe the kid who made it into Harvard on his skin color instead of his ability is a little embarrassed... but at the end of the day he's at Harvard and whitey Poindexter isn't.
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If I have to pick between being two equally good or retarded kids, but one gets charity while the other gets shut down and diminished for being a part of the group who "has it good enough as is", I'd rather be in the former group.
It's not as simple as charity, though: if it were just a matter of material goods, yeah, it's a no brainer.
But the trade is much more pernicious. It means you grow up in a community that has had all sense of real agency ripped from it. It means that your (real) successes will be judged negatively. It means your children will be told from every angle that they are a victim and must view themselves that way.
Concretely, would you like to quintuple your chances of getting into Harvard, at the expense of having everyone in your family and friend group pick up the pathologies of black culture?
Would I rather be told that I'm worse off than I can feel I am, or told than I'm better off? The former.
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Things aren't equal and they're not going to be equal. The kids who get affirmative action, for example, are not equally skilled as the kids who don't or they wouldn't need it. Nor are their group outcomes the same.
I do not believe you can't imagine two kids who are equally good yet are of different races. I'm not talking about groups.
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I find it interesting that Webb was not mad that he mis colored her but mad about the concept. She didn’t seem to grok that he was upset about her concept.
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