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Why does it bother you so much when people say you have privilege? Your privilege is that your passion and hobby is in high demand... most people don't have tha
by cortesoft 5y ago
Why does it bother you so much when people say you have privilege? Your privilege is that your passion and hobby is in high demand... most people don't have that. They have hobbies like fishing or golf or gardening, and those things aren't in high demand. If you had been born 200 years ago, your passion might also have been something that wasn't in high demand.
I don't see how that concept upsets you. No one is saying you did anything wrong, or that you haven't worked hard. We are just asking you need to accept that some of your success is due to luck, and your luck is a privilege.
Why is this important? Well, it is important to have an appreciation that not everyone had the same luck, and other people not doing as well in their careers is not necessarily because they haven't worked as hard as you.
Once you accept that, the next logical step is to realize that those of us who have been lucky (like me and you, who were lucky enough to have our skills be in high demand) should think about ways we can help those who haven't been so lucky.
A healthy society takes some from the lucky ones to help the unlucky ones. This doesn't mean that everyone should get the same reward, or that you don't deserve success or praise for your skills, just that there is some humbleness in not thinking you are better than someone else who is not as successful.
The fact that you get so angry when anyone points out that some of your success is based on chance and was not just because you worked harder is troubling. Why are you so defensive? Is it because you want to be able to think all of your success is based on your own hard work and therefore you don't need to share any of your success with the less fortunate?
- bitcharmer 5y agoI don't think you read my comments. If anything it looks like you just skimmed through them. I explicitly said my success is a function of passion, hard work and LUCK. I have no problem admitting that part of my success is luck. However equalling luck with privilege makes absolutely no sense. In your dictionary if I play poker and get a lucky hand I am now privileged. What an utter nonsense. And for the record I have absolutely zero problem with paying high taxes. Again, if you read my comments you'd know I come from a poor family. Government support was sometimes all we had. I fully support offering safety net for the less fortunate but can see you already made unfair assumptions about me.
- cortesoft 5y agoIf you get a lucky hand in poker, then yes, I would say you were privileged... for that specific hand. Of course it doesn't matter much if you have privilege for one hand, and that privilege will change relatively fairly between everyone during a session of poker. This is different though. This is more like playing a game of poker where a single hand lasts your whole life, and you keep reaping the benefits of your lucky draw for your entire life. That is meaningful privilege. Imagine if instead of getting lucky with having an aptitude for computers, you instead inherited a million dollars when you turned 18. Would you consider that privilege? It is just luck in the same way as your skills... you just happened to be born into a rich family who gave you money. That is luck, in the same way. I think that is clearly privilege, and your computer skills are likely to earn you more than a million dollars extra in salary than someone working equally hard in a less lucrative profession. If you think that inheriting a million dollars isn't privilege, I am curious as to what you think is.
- bitcharmer 5y agoInheriting million dollars is luck not privilege. This discussion doesn't make any sense whatsoever as you decided to cling to a made-up instead of vocabulary definition of privilege [0]. The same is happening to other words these days. For example some people modified the term racism so that according to their definition you can't possibly be racist towards white people. Which is obviously idiotic, but at least it allows these people to push their sick racist agendas. Like I said, there is nothing to be achieved here when you're using your own definitions of words. [0] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-thesaurus/privilege https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-thesaur...
- cortesoft 5y agoOk, look at number 2 definition: "the power and advantages that come with great wealth or high social class" Well, your luck gets you a lot of wealth, which is having privilege
- schwartzworld 5y ago