Does being privileged provide an advantage?
Helping individuals who may be at a disadvantage in life is a virtue, but there is an ideology which doesn’t care about the individual, but instead sees only a collective group of various arbitrary categories of people based on skin color, gender, sexual preference, social and political affiliations, etc. and invokes the group as categorically privileged or dis-privileged.
But if a group is “privileged” does it result in having an advantage in life?
The concept of privilege is just a fallacy to make people feel like a weak victim who needs to be rescued.
On the surface, it may appear that best path to explore in life is the one with the least challenges, but the reality is there is no easy path that will bring about fulfillment, because fulfillment and satisfaction derive from overcoming adversity.
For each of us, there is a fluctuating degree of adaptation to adversity by which we are equipped to handle, and that threshold of adaptation increases or decreases based on past experiences including degrees of so called “privilege.”
For example, if someone who is out of shape and unhealthy could take a magic pill and become fit and healthy overnight without any effort, there would be no long term contentment from being fit and healthy.
The satisfaction and happiness of being fit and healthy comes from the process itself. The satisfaction originates from consistently embracing the rewarding challenge of exercise, discipline, and eating right, not from the end result itself.
There are individuals in so called “privileged” affluent communities who take the magic pill option of plastic surgery, liposuction, drugs, etc. to be (or at least appear to be) fit and healthy, but this road does not bring about long term results, or fulfillment.
On the other hand, someone who doesn’t have the privilege of having these magic pills of affluence at their disposal who chooses to be fit and healthy will take the more challenging road by exercising and eating right, and will have the advantage of long term results and a feeling of satisfaction.
Many folks assume a child who doesn’t have to move to different cities and change schools while growing up may be privileged, but is this really an advantage?
Children who endure the struggle of changing schools, neighborhoods, or cities at least 1-5 times growing up typically become better later in life at assimilating into social situations, networking, making friends, and negotiating, much more effectively than children who had the comfort and “privilege” of not moving or changing schools during childhood.
Children who grow up poor have to adapt to delay of gratification. People who become good at delaying gratification statistically become more successful in various metrics of success compared to the “privileged” children who didn’t have to practice delayed gratification.
Paul and Frank
For example, back in the early 1900’s, Paul Williams was a young black orphan who had dreams of being an architect.
After taking steps to pursue this path, he turned down a paying job at an architectural firm that would have given him a so called “living wage”, and instead took a non-paying job at a better firm in order to gain more valuable experience (human capital).
This non-paying job at a better firm, combined with his ambition to be what others told him he couldn’t be because of his race and class, resulted in him being on of the most renowned architects of his time. He designed mansions, churches, and homes for Hollywood stars.
Some folks might have you think this dis-privileged situation of a black orphan who worked without being paid put him at a disadvantage in life.
Would he have had a more prominent and fulfilling career if he started out more privileged?
Would he have been less driven and more apathetic if he grew up privileged and getting everything he wanted as a child?
Frank Woolworth had a similar experience of growing up without privilege.
He and his brother grew up on a humble farm where they would have to milk the cows on frozen mornings. Since they couldn’t afford shoes, they kept their feet warm by standing where a cow had just been laying.
Pursuing the improbable dream of leaving the farm and having a clothing retail store, Frank would walk to town in upstate New York after milking the cows in the morning and work for a shop owner without pay for 14 hrs a day at in order to get experience in retail and clothing, practice his sales skills, and build a social network, which years later would result in him becoming one of the wealthiest people in the country and having a chain of stores.
If he had been privileged in his youth, and perhaps inherited a chain of stores from wealthy parents, without experiencing the contrast of going through the struggles of being poor on a farm, delaying gratification, and grinding through long hours without pay to gain knowledge and experience, would he actually have had an advantage?
If he had grown up privileged, would he have acquired the grit and persistence to withstand the obstacles that come with building a business?
Would he have been as satisfied and fulfilled from his success and wealth if he grew up privileged?
If Paul Williams and Frank Woolworth had the “help” of leftist policies that came later on such as minimum wage laws, living wage laws, and child labor laws, these men may not have had the opportunity to pursue their dreams and add value to our society in the way they did.
Of course minimum wage laws originated out of the racism of the progressive left by keeping blacks from competing with whites for job opportunities. It’s sickening to see the left still promoting such policies today.
These progressive leftist policies wouldn’t have only suffocated the dreams of these two men, many other people were raised out of poverty because of the careers created from the companies they built that otherwise these policies to “help” the dis-privileged would have destroyed.
Lottery
You see, the altruistic left would have you be envious of people they categorize as “privileged” as if it’s some lottery ticket to a better life than others.
In some ways being privileged is like a winning lottery ticket, but does that equate to having an advantage, or a better life?
For example, within 3 years after winning big in the lottery almost every winner ends up being no more happy or fulfilled from it.
Within 5 years of winning big, most people have spent the full amount on things other than investments or helping others. Some end up bankrupt.
When you look beyond the initial stage of winning the lottery, it doesn’t look so appealing.
The ultimate jackpot
The ultimate privilege sold to us, even greater than a big lottery winning, is the privilege of becoming saved and going to heaven after death.
The general interpretation of Heaven is that in the realm of the Throne of God, there is no pain, suffering, loss, adversity, sorrow, or grief.
There will be no need for sun and moon in the paradise of God because eternal light of the Lord will shine on everything, including the tree of life giving twelve kinds of fruit of vitality. There will be vibrant colors from flowers and trees, gold streets, walls adorned with jewels, and (according to Colton Burpo) rainbow horses.
In previous articles we explored the metaphysics and epistemology of Heaven, but even if Heaven is just an intersubjective concept of the mind, just the idea of Heaven doesn’t appear to be all that gratifying after looking beyond the initial stage of bliss.
Doesn’t satisfaction, empathy, gratitude, fulfillment, and love come about from experiencing pain, suffering, adversity, sorrow, loss, and grief?
Most hikers climb a mountain to experience all that comes with the challenge of the climb. The spoils of the view at the top is just the sweet dessert following the fulfillment of the meal itself.
If we rode a helicopter to the top, the view wouldn’t provide the same feeling of achievement compared to going through the struggle together in the journey to the top.
The best memories of completing a marathon are in the run itself along with the previous runs to train for the marathon.
Crossing the finish line has no value without the struggle of getting there.
In heaven, we are deprived of the struggle in the climbing, or crossing a finish line. That doesn’t sound very appealing.
I love hiking and running marathons, but if I were to do that in Heaven, it would not illicit that pleasurable sense of well-being, since there is no pain and suffering in Heaven.
I love the idea of “seeing” loved ones again in Heaven, but most of my family and friends are growth minded individuals too, and growth minded individuals would get bored pretty fast in Heaven with no adversity to grow from.
It reminds me of when cheat codes are used on a video game. It’s fun for a bit, but then it gets old and boring. And when you do the God mode cheat code, where you’re invincible, it gets old very quick. It’s too easy for it to stay interesting.
A never ending state of being in cheat codes and “God mode” in Heaven would just lead to apathy and disinterest.
Heaven needs a bit of Hell to make it more appealing.
“Helping the California girls”
Looks like lefty California is trying to become Heaven-like, since they recently passed a law requiring all California based publicly traded corporations to include at least one woman on the board of directors.
As usual, if you look at this on the surface, it appears to be a great idea. I mean, this could be a benefit to women, right?
Public corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to satisfy shareholders and make the company profitable. By law of fiduciary obligations, directors on the board already must be hired based on merit and how much value the applicant can add to the company regardless of being male or female.
Most CEOs are male, generally because more men pursue this position, and women generally prefer to pursue careers with less working hours, and more family time. There is no choice which is superior to the other.
The women who do pursue a career as a corporate CEO generally have a higher median income than men of the same position.
Women typically are seen as more valuable in that position, but the qualified pool of women to choose from is less than the qualified supply of men, since women choose to pursue other paths statistically.
So in the regards of the supply of qualified male and female individuals demanded, the proportion of male to female CEOs already matches the scarcity of supply.
Now, thanks to the California law passed, if a woman is on the Board of Directors, she will have this voice of doubt in her head asking if she got that position based on her merit and qualifications, or if she’s there based on leftist laws of equality.
The other board members, shareholders, and anyone else may ask the same thing.
This would be detrimental to this woman’s resume now.
Is California trying to say women are inferior and must be propped up by passing laws?
Does artificially propping up women to have privilege over others to be on a board of directors really provide an advantage for them?
If I were a woman who was potentially CEO of a California corporation, I would be disgusted with this law which says I’m inferior and incapable of getting on the board upon my own volition.
If privilege is generally identified as societal benefits that are bestowed upon arbitrary groups over other groups, the societal benefits act as a crutch for both the privileged and disprivileged in different ways.
The solution is to stop identifying groups as a collective, and start promoting equal justice among individual sentient sapiens.
Growth-minded women and minorities who are being “Helped” by some form of this collective mindset of affirmative action, by way of lower barriers to things such as, getting on the board of directors, getting accepted to university, academic testing, job market placement, wage payout, home loans, financial assistance, physical ability testing in police/military etc. are disgusted with these racist and sexist policies supported by the political left which arbitrarily says some humans are less capable than the superior humans of social privilege, and these helpless victims must be given a crutch to even out their handicap in society.
I personally know many women who are way better than me and most other men at running, deadlifting and squatting, tolerating pain, golfing, entrepreneurship, combat, and anything else for that matter.
I wouldn’t dare use a third party of force (government) to artificially bring me up to the metrics of those women with a social handicap policy. That would be insulting and disrespectful to them and to myself.
The political left clearly doesn’t care about equal treatment among individual humans.
Privilege is just a subjective ideological concept
Each Homo Sapiens is a carbon-based sentient ecosystem of DNA coding, a processor of biochemical algorithms, and a symbiotic host for bacteria which have individual DNA coding.
The DNA coding is a continuously evolving system of adaptations, mutations, and reconstructive sequencing, through symbiotic interactions with other organic matter and with environmental stimuli.
When you examine the biochemical essence of h. Sapiens, privilege does not exist, and race, gender (different from sex), and identities of the collective don’t exist. They are subjective categories.
For example, the MC1R gene variant plays a role in having red hair or not, more or less melanin in skin pigmentation, more or less inflammation responses, pain responses, etc.
When the political left sees a group as “black” and treats that group differently than others, it’s a subjective grouping of certain DNA expressions, just the same as if they were to treat others differently because of having red hair, different pain tolerances, different responses to morphine, or inflammation, Vitamin D absorption, etc.
There are many differences in cultures among populations who have so called “black skin” (which is really a degree of pigmentation’s and MC1R gene expressions, not a categorical color of black or white skin).
These cultural differences should be embraced and celebrated, but to lump people into a category of “black” and treat them differently the way the leftist ideology does, is disrespectful to cultural differences in populations.
Is someone “privileged” because they have less or more MC1R gene expression, more or less back hair, more tolerance to pain sensations, myostatin inhibition from GDF-8 expression seen more in men?
You could really find infinite variations to turn someone into a victim or exploiter of victims based on any characteristic.
I suppose some political ideologies use gender and race most often because it gets votes from politicians who control how the rest shall live their lives.
The “political left” is an arbitrary social construct in itself too.
There are individuals who identify as politically left, or politically right, but these are subjective identities that have nothing to do with the individual on any objective level of science or biology.
A happy and dis-privileged people
The Mbuti Pygmies are a peaceful culture of hunter/gatherers who live very humble lives in the Congo.
There are no stores for food or clothing, no cell phone service or WiFi, hospitals, or Starbucks.
This Pygmy tribe in the Congo have been categorized by the political Left as underprivileged and needs State welfare. Well, they were the lucky lottery winners of Government “aid” for a short time in the past.
This temporary “aid” was in the form of food and water handouts from government, but this disrupted the incentives that were preventing other tribes from being hostile.
You see, the Mbuti Pygmies would make market exchanges with other tribes which would be considered hostile to the Mbuti if it wasn’t for the incentives of mutual exchange to dampen the violence.
This government “aid” disrupted that market economy of trade with other potential hostile rebels which made the rebel tribes envious resulting in theft, enslavement, rape, and cannibalism by the hostile rebels rather than peaceful cooperation from micro-capitalism that had prevented much of the violence.
It wasn’t until private charities like Justin Wren’s “Waterboys” team helped build an infrastructure to facilitate the market exchange economy by digging wells for fresh water, and enabling the Pygmies to build utility based infrastructure in the way they prefer, that aligns with their culture, which kept an incentive for other tribes to be more cooperative rather than violent.
The Pygmies are a smiling happy people who live simple and humble lives with only the most basic primary needs of shelter, nourishment, and community fellowship. That is their culture.
They have no desire to achieve the type of success and wealth that is promoted in modern Western culture.
The political left would label these cheerful and peaceful people a tragedy of underprivileged helpless victims.
Are the pygmies at a disadvantage because of their humble simple lives without privilege?
Privilege makes you soft
Some people will find many categories to put you in, and identify you as either a privileged exploiter, or helpless victim of dis-privilege. You are not seen as an individual human by this ideology.
They seem to be ignorant of the fact that the struggle is where the reward of strength comes from.
In reality, if you live a life of so called “privilege,” you are more likely to become soft and unfulfilled.
For example, if your first car had a full warranty, you didn’t have the advantage of learning how to maintain and fix your car.
If you had the privilege of growing up in a home with climate controlled heating and cooling at the push of a button, you didn’t get the advantage of learning how to be comfortable in hot and cold temperatures outside.
If you had the privilege of growing up where everyone treats you nicely because of your family status in the community, you don’t have the advantage of learning how to navigate various social situations and earn the respect of others through street smarts.
Have you ever noticed that people with “privilege” seem to be unsatisfied and easily whine and complain about trivial things such as, weather, car problems, a hard long day of work, not enough money (even though they have a 3 car garage filled with so much stuff that there’s no room for the cars), being hungry if they go a half a day without Starbucks and take out, etc.?
Many of these privileged are miserable and soft, and didn’t have the advantage of going through the crucibles in life which bring about resilience.
Of course, being extremely wealthy and affluent doesn’t mean you have to be soft and wrapped in luxury.
For example, Warren Buffett still lives in a modest home he purchased over 60 years ago that doesn’t have the comforts and luxuries of many modern homes.
Sam Walton drove the same beat up old 1979 pick up until his death in 1992 even though he had billions of dollars, and created half a million jobs, while some employees who worked for him would only drive a new Mercedes in order to “satisfy” the ego.
Some folks have enough wisdom to find happiness in helping others and adding value to society rather than becoming weak and fragile in the lap of luxury.
It is virtuous to help people through their struggles, because struggles, no matter how screwed up and challenging they may be, must be overcome with the hope of becoming stronger on the other side, and that hope comes from the virtue and compassion of others who help.
On the other hand, it is not virtuous to make the struggles of the dis-privileged just vanish in the way the altruistic political left outsources the State to do, or the way the compassionate faithful believers outsource God to do.
To make the struggles of others just vanish altogether does not facilitate growth or provide any true advantage.
Embrace the struggle which empowers you
In some regards, if you live in a first world modern country, you are more privileged than the most wealthy and powerful people of privilege just 100 years ago and the rest of all your ancestors before that.
Look at the privilege you have compared to your great great great grandparents for example. Even if they were King and Queen of Aldovia, or the wealthiest people on the planet, they didn’t have the luxuries which make us soft and privileged today, like air conditioning and heat at the push of a button in our homes and cars, or cars, or paved roads, or soft beds and pillows, Netflix, Amazon, Audible, and the ability to write an article on a laptop and have it instantly available to anyone around the world.
Be grateful for your modern world privilege, but understand it comes at a price of making you weaker in some ways to the realities of this fragile life.
If you want a sense of empowerment, you must realize your circumstances have more to do with the choices you make, the adversity you embrace, and the persistence of a growth-minded attitude, rather than whatever degree of social privilege you may have.
The strength and power to achieve your goals is within you. Don’t let yourself become soft and disadvantaged by being privileged.
