Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

[7Wannabe5]

Yes, but noting that RG’s lifestyle would be more dangerous for person of color does not imply that a person of color would not desire this lifestyle. RG’s lifestyle would obviously also be a lot more dangerous for a female, but that doesn’t stop me from desiring it. A person of color and/or a female who was braver and/or otherwise more skilled than me might attempt it anyways.

[Alphaville]

Yes, but noting that RG’s lifestyle would be more dangerous for person of color does not imply that a person of color would not desire this lifestyle. RG’s lifestyle would obviously also be a lot more dangerous for a female, but that doesn’t stop me from desiring it. A person of color and/or a female who was braver and/or otherwise more skilled than me might attempt it anyways.

okay, we can pick the desirability nit in the fantasy realm, and i admit defeat before the possibilities of dreams, but an involuntarily insecure and vulnerable person in the real world *generally* does not crave further insecurity and vulnerability in what’s already an abusive world. then again exceptions may apply, and i plead guilty of not knowing everyone and my description is not absolutely universal

[jacob]

@Alphaville - I get that. Picking berries or dumpster diving should probably come with a disclaimer, but that's different that describing the entire concept as an example of privilege. On a similar note, during the early ERE years, people would happily dismiss FIRE because "he doesn't have children", "he lives in an RV", or "he's wearing an oversized hockey jersey", that is, take a minor aspect of the strategy(*) that's incompatible with or didn't address a particular concerns and use that to invalidate the entire idea. Yet, that is extremely common and I'm likely sensitive to this or at least easily triggered because I've been on the receiving end of it.

(*) Actually more precisely, ignore the strategy, and focus on a personally disagreeable aspect of the person representing it and use this to dismiss the strategy itself.

Thanks to media selectivity, FIRE has gained the unfortunate reputation of being comprised almost exclusively of high income white male software engineers. If one looks under the surface, this particular demographics is not representative of the FIRE movement per se, but merely its loudest voices. However, rather than look at and importantly acknowledge the principles (spend less than you make, be more frugal than you think you should be, save and invest a significant percentage) people dismiss FIRE by focusing on their similarity to the reduced stereotype. In particular, there's a lot more to RG's strategy than foraging.

Thus, in terms of my comments on collateral damage above, some selectivity in where to drop the bombs would be advised. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" comes to mind. Identifying cases of privilege is in my [public relations/strategic] opinion best reserved for those cases where that privilege is the driving factor in the outcome and those who lack the privilege essentially have nothing to gain from whatever ideas are being promoted. Basically don't bomb potential allies in the name of purity, consistency, or awareness, because the second-order effects might make the cure worse than the disease. (Cf. indiscriminate warring on terrorism having the side-effect of generating more terrorists than it kills.) It's good to keep in mind that when pulling simple levers on complex systems (like humans), one can never do "just one thing". Therein lies the problem of simple lenses.

[Alphaville]

@Alphaville - I get that. Picking berries or dumpster diving should probably come with a disclaimer, but that's different that describing the entire concept as an example of privilege.

i’ve tried to make the overall point that more than a mere disclaimer the exercise requires a DO NOT ATTEMPT WHILE BROWN IN AMERICA warning label, because being taken by the police while being a person of color with no fixed address, no money for cash bail, and no money for lawyers, is a recipe for abuse and possible death.

i’m not trying to describe *the entire concept* as an example of privilege. i’m trying to say that i see high barriers to entry plus a sharply increased cost of doing business for minorities attempting similar feats of letting go of these particular conventions. to appropriate from orwell, “all animals are equal, but some animals are mor equal than others.”

if i do this clumsily it’s because this is the first time i’m broaching the subject, and i process ideas better via dialogue. i often have to write to discover what i’m thinking, and i felt compelled to say something about this subject. maybe i felt it was my moral duty. even if i’m proven wrong in the end, i had to speak up. actually if i’m proven wrong it’s even more worth it because it means that i learned something.

for me it all started with reactions of astonishment watching the videos, and wondering where his sense of security comes from. whenever i meet someone living in such precariousness in real life, they’re desperately trying to get away from it.

i know that i keep bringing up the notion of the dangers of poverty and/or homelessness in multiple threads (the guy who slept outdoors in new mexico, the new dutch board member who wanted to do ERE without the cash pile, the hardships of peasant life), but only because i’ve seen the disasters first-hand. i’ve attended funerals, i’ve seen the prison tattoos, i’ve witnessed the arrests, i’ve given rides to the stranded, i’ve seen the sick die, etc.

so it occurs to me that only a person who has never gone hungry or been treated unfairly can walk so confidently naked into the wolf’s mouth.

and i know that nothing is going to happen to him precisely because of that confidence, and the support of the public, but it takes having a lot of security to develop the kind of confidence that enables one to walk on water and dazzle the public.

which, again, said sense of security tends not to be available for the non-voluntarily poor or minorities.

furthermore, i confess to not understanding what the entire concept is. i get his morality, but i don’t get what his work is about.

if he’s doing personal experiments that apply only to him, like an athlete or an entertainer, as a proof of concept, then great, he proved he can do it, congrats, i see you atop the everest but i’m not climbing that frozen morgue.

if he’s trying to come up with a system that can be adopted by others—then i’m not seeing it. please note—i see his morality and moralizing, but i don’t see a working system.

i concur with ertyu in not seeing the model as scalable, because a performer carrying out feats before a large audience or a preacher preaching to a congregation requires few performers/preachers and many audience members to support them.

on the other hand, i see ERE as independent of audience. one of the things i like about your system is that a) you expressly dislike being a public figure, and b) your system can be implemented without being a public figure or commanding an audience. hence i also cannot see the comparison with you, because i’m looking at the work product, not the internet celebrity aspect of it, or even the moral content displayed. ERE is practical and workable.

re: picking the disagreeable aspect of the strategy: i’m aware of all that and i’ve heard all the criticisms of you plus some others that you probably haven’t seen. but after consideration i don’t agree with them. not because a cult of personality or anything, but because i find your arguments more convincing than theirs.

also i think a side of your own work that might not be so visible to you is that there are people who can actually never retire, and never will make enough or won’t find cheap housing or whatever. but parts of the ERE system can offer ways to make involuntary poverty more prosperous, more dignified, more enjoyable, and more secure. your work is inclusive, not exclusive.

re: FIRE as the province of tech bros, i’m also aware of that and i think there’s a grain of truth to it. not because the work is done for their benefit, but because either through loudness or numbers or something else there’s a tech bias in that culture. but again, i don’t see the work product as exclusive.

so in my objections to rob i’m not trying to bomb a potential ally here. i see from my perspective someone who without a special talent or circumstance or advantages would be eaten by bears. am i being paranoid or negative here? maybe. do i have reasons to be paranoid or negative? well, i think i do. i’ve seen actual misery in both the third world and the third world that exists inside the first world, so i’m not ready to embrace the gospel of voluntary destitution and recommend it to others who are already at risk.

which is not at all the same as living frugally and resourcefully while sitting on a pile of investments for backup.

now if i am misreading the guy, and his work can bring actual prosperity and security to the masses, then someone kindly explain how it’s supposed to work. i’m not trying to murder baby jesus in the cradle, i’m just honestly skeptical.

[Frita]

In the context of culture, why do terms like “privilege” and “retired” shift semantically into signals for dualistic and/or pejorative lenses? I observe that when that occurs, the conversation derails and a new term is used until it goes into the semantic shift doghouses. I think this is often to avoid feeling discomfort, especially shame, and not unpack situations through dialogue. Personally, I believe there are so many interrelated problems that it’s beyond repair.

[Dave]

@Alphaville

It seems as though you have limited understanding of what RG is suggesting – you’re making it seem as if he’s advocating everyone go 100% to the extent he has and that it’s a requirement to be a transient, homeless, dumpster drive, and forage, when in fact he is generally just trying to be a model for people to take what they can and improve on the dimensions of reducing consumer purchases/resource usage/dependence on the industrial agricultural system/waste and improving self-sufficiency skills to the extent it makes sense in your geography, while also building stronger social ties to your immediate community rather than strict dependence on the global market economy.

In fact, as theanimal said above, RG is advocating for many similar things as ERE, just in a different package. This is documented extensively on his website in both video and blog post format. That’s what it seems like you’re missing, and I'm with bigato that if you're serious about learning more you spend some time perusing his materials as they are extensive, educational, and motivational.

I will say that I don’t at all disagree that those with less privilege would find certain of his actions incompatible or at least risk-increasing. But in my opinion RG is a remarkable human with a lot to teach many of us, and the privilege he has does not make his message of limited value for those who do not share his demographics.

[jacob]

@Frita - Yes, it happens when a new complex and technical concept is rolled out (by experts) to the general public (non-experts) using the single short-hand without an accompanying explanation of what the word now means instead. Humans in general grow very very attached to their words.

This was the case with "retirement". I've previously said that using the word "retirement" was the biggest blogging mistake I ever made. It's a mistake because I introduced a new concept using an existing word that to almost everybody else implied something different. Each generation seemed to have their own idea of what retirement meant and I quickly found myself in unproductive debates with people insisting that I use the dictionary definition because that was the only definition they could or rather would mentally process.

This is why when writing the book I had to explain what I meant by "retirement" in a more philosophical sense. Philosophies tend to be simple but that is if and only if the philosophy is well-known to its user at which point it becomes like water to fish. A new philosophy book spends 90% of the time trying to define and redefine how the author will be using words and only towards the conclusion are these new definitions put together into a coherent new way of thinking.

In short, words and frameworks are individually loaded and it those promoting a new concept don't realize this (because they're so used to thinking about them in a particular way that they forget that others use them in different ways), the concept gets lost in the translation. A literal example might be easier. When I first got semi-famous in Denmark we had to somehow translate "financial independence/retired early". "Early retirement" is at least known in the US, but in Danish some (government minister) translated it directly to "foertidspension" (lit. "before time pension") which in the US corresponds to "social security disability benefits". Obviously, we had to make sure that this connotation would be entirely avoided, so instead it became something like "economic independence" + a description of how people had "pulled back from the job market", that is, a longer phrase was substituted in.

OTOH, "financial independence" saw few such issues, because most people did not already have a working definition in their head about it because most people do not achieve it ever whereas most people eventually get to the point of retirement. There was, therefore, no resistance to it because people did not have to question their existing values and operational frameworks. The most push back I ever saw about this was some one thinking that "financial independence" meant that they were paying their own expenses instead of their parents.

So here we are 10 years later. "Retirement" (the word) has basically been dropped from the description of the concept. "Financial independence" stayed. And the "philosophy" is now like water is to fish and most neophytes wonder why we spent so much time discussing it ten years ago.

With using the word "privilege" you're essentially telling the fish that the water they swim in is privileged when most of the fish don't even see the water. This will continue until the water is explained to them and explaining it will require more words. For example, it adds a lot of meaning to say "lack of disadvantages" or "certain advantages" instead, just like "pulled back from the job market" is more accurate/meaningful than "early retirement".

If you want to see an even bigger clusterfuck of wording that turned out to be bad when rolled out to the greater public, consider "global warming". This had the unfortunate consequence to drawing the attention to temperature, so laymen ignored everything else. It was then replaced with "climate change" which had the problem of focusing on change ("but things have always changed"), so now it's "climate breakdown", and that's likely not the final word (pun intended) on that.

It is of course had to know what the final/best term is in advance. It's a learning process both for the educators and those getting educated.

[ertyu]

BLANKET DISCLAIMER ON THIS POST: people may find the opinion below controversial. Read forth only if you are reasonably willing to keep your reactivity in check.

That out of the way:

"Privilege" isn't a bad term, @jacob. In my opinion, it is a very good term.

I will explain using the specific case of "white privilege."

"Privilege" is a bad term only if you assume that the default experience is the white experience and that the default reference point in the white point of view. If you explain to a white person that their privilege is a lack of certain hurdles, they will not understand you. Nobody is giving them anything special for being white, so how are they privileged?

Now consider the same term from the POV of a black theorist. The black theorists' default experience is that when you go, you may be stopped and frisked; you will be suspected just for the color of your skin; you will be treated with default suspicion; you will be obstructed. This is how life is, for you. Therefore, when you observe that the white person walks through the streets undeterred, that does look like a privilege to you. The white person has the privilege to walk freely, whereas your default experience, your "water," is an omnipresent threat of possible obstruction.

Yes, white people misunderstand the term. But in choosing this term, you have re-claimed your right to theorize with your experience as a center. You are doing 2 things: you are theorizing about how the world is, and at the same time, you are implementing a meta-change *in how theory is conducted* - who gets to have their experience recognized as default, and who gets to have their experience recognized as other. "White privilege" is thus an excellent term if you want to both talk about racism and claim that your voice and your "water" have just as much right to being centered as white people's. The way out isn't to scrap the term white privilege, it's to realize that it's all water. I personally am unwilling to scrap the term because some white person needs to be talked down to on a second-grade level. This, too, assumes that theory is to be done for white people - it must be understandable first and foremost to them, and they should be the criterion. I am with those who think that it's on white people to round up their two brain cells and give them a shake.

Disclosure here: I'm white-passing.

[jacob]

@ertyu - I think we only disagree on which is the most effective strategy.

[7Wannabe5]

One reason why I find Rob Greenfield interesting is that his core problem is the same as Jacob’s core problem, but his personality type is almost entirely different (EXFP? daylen?) As an eNTP, I grok Jacob’s solution better logically, but I grok RG’s solution better intuitively or maybe spiritually. For instance, market production isn’t favored over market consumption in RG’s model, and I think that is kind of a huge difference in philosophy.

[Alphaville]

on a busy morning again so briefly:

i realized today that he's an epicurean who doesn't live hidden (epicurus recommended living hidden: no doxing!)

was a bit of a "d'oh!" moment for me, because his marketing experiments are stunts meant to bring attention to issues.

i was misguided to think that he was proposing marketing stunts as a lifestyle. he's not. but it's easy to get that impression from the videos.

i found some of his writing and i found them nice. better than the videos in fact.

i realize that he went from being drunk on wine to being drunk on virtue-- baudelaire famously wrote that you had to be drunk on something. vritue is fine! rob is a nice kid.

but anyway, i'll have to unpack that later cuz the clock is ticking (and unlike baudelaire, i now like the clock: it lets me do things, which is delicious.)

thanks everyone for the feedback. will continue later.

ps- i'm afraid to offer an explanation to @Frita because i fear more explosions. but i'd like to not ignore her great questions. explonations! xD

[Loner]

@ Ertyu : Much of what you say is true. But your choice of words will be better or worse depending on what you are trying to achieve.

As you say, if you (as a black person) want to feel like your worldview if validated, then “Privilege” is an excellent word, for all the reasons you mentioned. OTOH, if you want whites to understand your viewpoint (and fight on your side), it’s a bad word. When communicating, you cannot just expect (or rather, naively hope), as you do, that people will just “round up their two brain cells”. Reality is how it is, and it is stubborn and ineffective to hope it was otherwise. In a way, when you do this, you are doing the same thing that you stand accused of, i.e., being unwilling to take the others’ perspective. If you want to make allies, you have to take people from where they are. You have to understand their viewpoint, and explain them what it is that they are not seeing from where they stand. It’s frustrating, of course, but I believe you will achieve much greater results. If you go back to the cave (Plato’s one) and you start explaining everything that’s outside the cave, from your perspective, you stand no chance of having your friends understand you. But if you start with their viewpoint, and explain what a shadow is, etc., you still aren’t sure they’ll get it, but you maximize your chance of getting them to understand what you saw, and what is.

If the word “Privilege” is so unliked, I’d wager that it’s precisely because it feels like an attack since many white people, as Jacob explained, have had hard lives, too, and just don’t see how they are privileged, and what hurdles they didn’t have. In terms of strategy, it doesn’t really matter whether it is, or not, the case. I cannot prove it, of course, but I’m sure that many more (white) people would be willing to support back people’s fight, or at least acquiesce to the reality they describe, if the discourse felt less confrontational to them.

As for Rob, well, for sure, it must be easier for him to do what he does. I still wish I had a garden as nice a his.

[ertyu]

THIS IS THE PRIVILEGE DERAIL SKIP IF UNINTERESTED.

@Loner: this is not about wanting to feel like my worldview is validated. This is about restructuring the way we make truth because we recognize that the way we make truth necessarily come with particular power relations embedded in them.

Also: "wanting to make allies" and taking "where they stand" is (1) patronizing to white people. (2), we can question why "making allies" should be my goal in the first place. Could be that orienting my thinking around how i can change yours is still putting -you- at the center. How about we put the responsibility back with white people? If you are a decent human being, you will be an ally when you see injustice. If you are a decent human being, you would intrinsically be interested in educating yourself about how to be a better ally. If you are not an ally, because your immediate knee-jerk reaction is to get defensive rather than to understand (*), then can we really make an ally of you by talking down to you low enogh?

(*) whether your knee-jerk reaction is to get defensive because you're K2 (self-limited) or K3 (group-limited)

Basically, it seems to me a person at > K3 would naturally be an ally, while a person at <= K3 cannot be made an ally because their lack of ally-ship isn't due to lack of proper understanding of the terminology but because of lack of sufficient advance in personal development.

Edit: It now strikes me that there is probably a level of integration above my argument. Like that black dude that went around befriending KKK members.

[Loner]

Well, I guess we disagree.

I think it's just as exactly as true to talk about white privilege as it is to talk about black disadvantage. They are both defined relatively to the other. It's the flip side of the same coin. It's just that one expression(white privilege) is (I believe) more likely to make (some) whites recoil, and stop listening. I don't think that truth depends on power relationships. Actually, I admit that I'm not sure I get what you mean by that. I could see how mainstream views depend on who's got the power, in a vague sense, but the underlying truths remain unchanged.

If you are a decent human being, you will be an ally when you see injustice.

This is part of my point. There's many people who are good people, but cannot see the injustices given how the reality is presented to them (or who are just reluctant to discuss the reality because they feel attacked).

If you are not an ally, because your immediate knee-jerk reaction is to get defensive rather than to understand (*), then can we really make an ally of you by talking down to you low enogh?

Again, it's not about talking low. It's talking another person's perspective to help them see things they cannot see very well from their vantage points. I'm not saying it's easy, or it's nice that it's like that. I'm just saying that it'd possibly be more effective.

[ertyu]

PRIVILEGE DERAIL

I think it's just as exactly as true to talk about white privilege as it is to talk about black disadvantage.

Yes, and a person at K2 will say, "blah, blah, blacks are disadvantaged, well, am I not disadvantaged?" A person at K3 will grock that blacks might be disadvantaged, but be perfectly fine with this because he wouldn't want to sacrifice any of the advantages of his own group (in fact, he might have narratives about why it's ok that the blacks are disadvantaged, and that it's their fault they're disadvantaged so they deserve it anyway). Also, that they aren't -really- disadvantaged and it's not so bad and if they only exercised some agency instead of complaining, their lives, too, would be good.

Regardless of how you put it, you won't get through to people because for them to understand you requires that they've already independently achieved a certain level of personal development.

I get what you're saying: you hope that if we explain things to people well enough, people will understand. And I am not sure they will. Kind of like you can explain to people that global warming refers to the increase in the earth's average temperature, and that this doesn't just stop at the climate staying roughly the same, just warmer, and then having your president tweet, brrrr, where's that global warming they keep harping on about, sure can use some of it now. I think you are more optimistic about people than I.

About truth and power relations: unsure how to explain in a way that will make this clear. People contest whether we can legitimately do this, but let's for simplicity separate knowledge into knowledge about the natural world, which you can measure, calculate, etc., and knowledge about the social world. When I try to produce a truthful narrative about "how the social world is" or "what this family is like", often you can't make statements about truth without implicitly assuming a certain distribution of power. Let's say a woman says, "I'm a bad housewife, I don't do enough housework." You can measure how much housework she does objectively - but this number wouldn't mean anything without some idea of how much work a good housework "should" do - and that idea is dependent on relations of power in society and the family. You can even say, well, I measured how much work she does and how much work he does, and she does more -- but in that, there is still the assumption that the work shares should (or should not) be equal, and that depends on relative power and what is seen as "normal" ---- and how do we, as a society, decide on what "normal" is? Or on the concept of normal for that matter - the idea is that what is common for most is what is right/acceptable. There is an implicit assumption of the power of the majority to dictate social truth already implicit in the very concept of normal. Etcetera.

Power relations are embedded in the implicit assumptions we hold when we theorize about the social world. For example, when one says, "this privilege talk is confusing can't we just use a term that makes sense" they implicitly assume that theory should be made for them in mind - it's others who should work to make themselves understood by them, it's not them who ought to work to understand others.

When one dismisses arguments around this term, or some other term, with, "well it's just semantics what does it matter" they say, "it doesn't hurt me, thus it's not important, even if it matters to you and it hurts you". Even if that's not exaactly how they mean it, the judgment of what is and is not important to understand ultimately comes down to relative power.

[Alphaville]

WARNING: MOLOTOVS

i grew up with class and “race” privileges. while race is a stupid invention with no scientific basis, it holds power over the masses and thus becomes real. socially real.

being part of a multiracial family, this was evident to me, because my lighter skin got me higher social ratings than my darker skin siblings, even though they were nicer people, and i was the asshole. eventually that got sorted out, thankfully. but it took a while.

also: growing up being upwardly mobile middle/managerial class in various third world settings conferred a number of privileges, and having servants etc was, ooof, “nice” but psychologically damaging in that it’s an ugly privilege to have, ruling upon other human beings as a bratty kid. and i’ve warned about this in the.. moving to another country thread (or something).

also, our lower middle class and proletarian origins were not far away, and in classist settings... imagine the tensions, hyacinth bucket!

anyway, here’s an explonation that might trigger some folks here. please note this is not intended as trolling but as an attempt at anchoring the conversation around a workable concept:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fragility
eta: or better yet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_defensiveness

[Jin+Guice]

I'm pleased to see a discussion of privilege in an "extreme eco-lifestyle" debate, but I disagree with how it's being discussed.

Does Greenfield have white privilege? Yes. The motherfuckers is white isn't he?

Would people of color generally experience many more challenges than Greenfield does? Yes.

Would the assumed criminality of people of color make living Greenfield's pseudo-illegal lifestyle more challenging in particular? Yes.

I don't like the implication that acknowledging Greenfield's privilege invalidates his way of living. I don't like the implication that acknowledging his privilege means that nothing he does is possible for people of color, or women, or poor people, or homeless, or handicapped people.

The same arguments can be levied against Jacob and ERE.

A more interesting discussion would be how does being a person of color (handicapped, female, old, etc...) effect the opportunity to do what Greenfield (Jacob) is doing? What extra barriers are added? Are there any advantages?

It would be nice if Greenfield (the FIRE movement) did a better job of acknowledging their privilege and discussed in greater detail how their ideas could help those less fortunate than themselves (particularly by finding and interviewing members of those groups who are doing something similar).


I disagree that Greenfield's ideas do not scale. I reject the idea that every "lifestyle design" idea must scale perfectly to all of humanity or be invalid. An idea that is not applicable to everyone can still be useful to millions or even billions of people. Greenfield's ideas and projects would scale to include many individuals. It's more feasible to scale what he is doing to impoverished people than the middle class consumer lifestyle. It's more feasible than ERE for many individuals. It is true that certain socio-political institutions and values that have not applied across all places, peoples and times have to hold to make his ideas possible for people to implement.

I'm not surprised that Greenfield rubs people here the wrong way at first glance. He is a self-pleased sales hippie, a description that to me stinks of get-rich-quickery and bullshit artistry. Shit, I thought Jacob was just a dude who was angry that his PhD only earned him an income equivalent to a toll booth operator, at first glance. However, I would encourage those who are interested in applying ERE ideas beyond only the financial realm to take a deeper look at Greenfield. Unless he is straight up lying about everything he is doing, he is the real deal. His example is not perfect and he is not beyond criticism. He takes a lot of the ideas we talk about and tries them out in a way few others do. He also has a personality type/ style that is the polar opposite of Jacob and most of the FIRE heavy-hitters, which sheds a different light on ideas we are familiar with.

What bothers me about this discussion is not the addition of (white) privilege to the conversation. Frankly I think more honest discussion of various privileges is necessary in the "extreme environmental lifestyle design" area, which is dominated by young(ish) white first-world straight cis men. Knowing how to live on $7,000/ year or grow/ forage/ dumpster dive most of your own food is extremely valuable information for disadvantaged people to have.

What bothers me most about this discussion is the implication that money is the only means of protection from (non-white) dis-privilege and that using money means you are somehow not relying on other people. Wealth can and has been taken away from the less privileged many times throughout history. The emphasis on financial/ economic capital bothers me because I think it is a tragic flaw in both our larger society and ERE in general. Having high social capital means having friends to bail you out or hide you from the police. Having high social intelligence means being able to talk to authority figures and possibly get yourself out of a bad situation. Having the skills necessary to fulfill your needs without money means being decoupled from the larger system and increasing the number of ways you can survive. Money and wealth are certainly valuable tools and increase the safety of disadvantaged people. Financial capital can be used as a tool to insulate them from those who would oppress them. However, it's easy to forget that money isn't real but violence is.

[Loner]

I get what you're saying: you hope that if we explain things to people well enough, people will understand. And I am not sure they will.

That's kind of what I'm saying. I'm really saying that people are more likely to get it. Kegan himself recognizes that it's not easy to get people to a higher level of understanding. Like you, I'm not sure people will get it if you explain better (however you define that), but I think you can improve your chances.

Again, it's a bit similar for the whole "global warming" thing. I think it's badly presented. To many people, it feels like an attack, because often, it is. Look at Greta Thunberg's speech ("How dare you!"). She's preaching to the converted, and taking a confrontative stance. People who already want change will be well happy to see speechs like that ("Up yours, elite!"). Other people, not such much. There's hard science, and there's real consequences coming for most people and their children, etc. I think it'd be better to start from there, but that's another discussion. But yeah, I might be more optimistic. Or more pessimistic, given how I think it's important to take people by the hand. Your call

I think I also grasp what you mean in your last paragraph, i.e., that power relationships will dictate what "normal" is. I can agree to that. I would just be reluctant to use "truth" to refer to this state of normality.

Anyhow, apologies for perpetuating this derail.

[ertyu]

@Loner the thread just happened to land on a thing that I feel really strongly about. I'm from eastern europe, i don't live in the states, but this drives me utter bonkers nonetheless. Peace.

[Alphaville]

What is harder to accept is how basic human rights are being called "privilege". Is it really the best word to describe that? Are we then saying that, for example, the black people are treated fairly, normally, whereas whites have additional privileges? What is normal and basic and should be provided for everyone, like basic human rights, should not really be called privilege.

that is a good point, but unfortunately rights are not equally distributed/applied/recognized in real-world social settings.

yes, some people have full basic human rights and some people don’t, and that creates a privileged condition for the “full citizen” vs the... subordinate subject in the social hierarchy.