Opinion: Why Privilege Is So Dangerous

Privilege creates a lack of awareness because it interrupts natural feedback mechanisms

Photo bySusanne Jutzeler, suju-foto on Pexels

Take whatever privilege you will — whether it’s based in race, being attractive, or being born into wealth — and we’ll find that one of the primary issues is that it interrupts the natural feedback loop experienced throughout life.

Feedback

If you come from a wealthy family, for example, it’s very easy to “fail up,” meaning that you can perform poorly and make the wrong decisions but still come out ahead. You can be an underachiever academically but buy your way into the best schools. You can use your degree from a notable university to mask your poor work ethic or unremarkable intelligence. You can start a company and hire competent people to do the real work, while being the face for said company and taking the credit.There are a thousand different ways in which your actual performance becomes disconnected from the outcomes you see as a result of it.

Most people learn about themselves, over the course of a lifetime, through a process of trial and error. A salesperson, for example, goes out into the field each day, and after many failures and a smattering of successes, they begin to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t. This happens in every area of our lives, whether it be with our personal pursuits or professional ones. If we do the wrong thing, we’re typically punished for it, so we learn to adapt and better ourselves.

Some of the most insufferable people on the planet are also the most physically attractive. There is no fundamental reason their physical beauty should correlate with an unpleasant or selfish personality. It’s very likely the raw material of who they are on the inside was no different than what it is for anyone else.

However, a less attractive person will have to undergo the normal process of trial and error. If they continued to be inconsiderate of other people and rude, they would eventually find themselves facing direct criticism, rejection, and suffering from loneliness. This negative reinforcement will act as a strong incentive for them to change their behavior. Thus, by a slow and painful process, most of us come to understand what it means to be a good person — the type who can get along well with others and do right by those around them.

The person gifted (or cursed) with “pretty privilege” will always have those who want to be around them.They will obviate the pains of loneliness, of rejection, and even of criticism, because their physical appearance is sought after by others. If they end up with an off-putting and unkind personality, their position is truly pitiable because their behavior is not a consequence of an inherent personality defect. They are simply blind to what the rest of the world is naturally taught over the course of their lives.

It’s the informational deficit, or the lack of awareness, that underlies the issue with these forms of privilege. The way we see ourselves, the visibility of our flaws, and even our understanding of the world is all changed under privileged circumstances. Those who have been wealthy from birth have no idea what life is like for the vast majority of people out in the world. Those who are particularly beautiful, likewise, are apt to consider making a life for oneself to be much easier than it actually is. Another example is white people in the US being blind to the lived experiences of people of other races. It creates separate realities and partial perceptions of self.

Case Studies

I met a young man, the son of a powerful business magnate, who worked for 6 months at finding someone in his father’s social circle to invest in his company, and then went on to tell the story of how hard a worker he was ad infinitum. “I didn’t leave the house for 6 months, didn’t go looking for a girlfriend or anything,” he’d say. Somedays he’d sign onto the virtual meetings at his company, 20 minutes late and hungover, while his employees chatted while waiting around for him. Yet, he was genuinely convinced his success was owing to him being the hardest worker — he’d mention it almost daily as a way to try to inspire others.

Like me, you probably find such behaviors obnoxious, but truly they’r’e lamentable. He wasn’t unintelligent or lacking in motivation, so he will very likely fall short of his actual potential because he cannot see basic realities about himself or the world.

I’ve known a young women who is stunningly attractive and as self-absorbed as can be. She only ever talks about herself, she’s so mercurial with her obligations to others that they might as well not exist, and she treats any passing feeling as if it’s more important than anything else going on in the world. She has only male friends and blames other women for it.

Again, one reflexively moves to label this person as bad, but they’re suffering from a massive blind spot. There is an endless supply of men who will come along to validate every feeling, to patiently listen to her drone on about herself, and endure her flakiness without a hint of resentment. Her male boss will look to promote her, even if her work product is shoddy or her handling of office politics is tactless. The world around her is lacking the normal feedback mechanisms, so she’ll never know her failings or know what life looks like for the majority of people.

Many white people in the US can carry on with a callous indifference to the plight of Black Americans. I’ve often shared statistics about how the average Black family has1/10ththe wealth of the average white family.After writing a series of articles earlier in the year talking about such disparities, I received thousands and thousands of comments from upset white people. Most of these respondents greeted the facts with disbelief. Again, their worldview differs from reality based on their privilege. Some, blind to that privilege and considering their position as the standard, viewed members of other races, who are suffering under the sequelae of a systematic oppression, as inferior in kind because they experience worse outcomes in life.

Of course, we all hate a racist. Even racists, caught up in their delusion that they are not as such, often say they hate racists too. But racism is a horrible and ugly thing, and it’s based in a lack of awareness, stemming from privilege like any other discussed above. It’s a sad state of affairs for a person to look down on their fellow humans, and to treat them with disdain or indifference on the basis of ignorance. Yet, having by the vagaries of fortune avoided the circumstances themselves, they are blind to what so many suffer under.

Conclusion

In all cases, privilege runs counter to awareness. It keeps one in ignorance of themselves and the world around them. That’s why privilege is so dangerous — it even finds a way to damage those who have it. However, the damage this causes is redoubled because privilege doesn’t only keep some random sampling of people disconnected from reality, it keeps those with the most power disconnected from reality.

The wealthy, for example, are in control of the vast majority of the resources in the world. Yet, that same power causes them to operate with blinders on. It’s the same thing for demographics that constitute a majority. They hold all the sway in a given country, and for that very reason, they end up incapable of fully understanding the position of those who are disenfranchised as a consequence of it.

The simple fact of life that some people will have magnitudes more power than others is a dangerous circumstance to begin with. Factor in that a predictable consequence of that power disparity is that the powerful will be oblivious to what life is like for the less privileged, and you see how all the ills of the world were able to come about.