Public_Domain Public_Domain:
You are terrified of an imagined threat you've distilled from batshit blog posts. Privilege, the way I throw the term around at least, is being brought into ideal living conditions. It has been extended into meaning the ignorance of those that have privilege when they speak shit about the unprivileged. When men talk about "whores" having abortions, or the rich talk about the lazy poor, or whites talk about ghettos and reserves, and then judge the lives of these unprivileged as if they were just on your level of gumption then they'd have nothing to bitch about. That's privilege to me, and this place oozes with a whole fuckton of old white men who abuse the shit out of their privilege to cut down anyone they view as inferior.
You can twist it into some progressive "cut the tops off the trees" crap but for the most part it's about racist/sexist/classist/homophobic people treating others like shit, or making assumptions about their struggles.
It aims to keep people in their place. Worry about your yacht, stop calling poor people shitty names.
If the concept of privilege was just about "walking a mile in someone else's shoes before passing judgement on them", I wouldn't have a problem with it. But I honestly think that the way the word is used by the academic left is more insidious than that, and Xort or I could easily come up with examples that aren't "some batshit blog", unless you consider mainstream publications like The Guardian to be such.
People generally wind up in bad situations in life as a result of a combination of bad luck and bad decisions. If you don`t like my use of the word "luck" here, think of it as "external circumstances beyond one's control" or whatever kind of systemic *ism, *phobia or other form of oppression you feel applicable. The point is that we all begin at some basic socioeconomic starting point at birth and are dragged upwards or downwards through our lives by things that happen to us and by things that we choose to do.
Sometimes it all nets out to zero and we end up pretty much in the same social condition in which we started, with our children sharing pretty much the same starting line as us. Sometimes one's overall fortunes improve or diminish over the course of his/her life.
Some of us are born in a hole so deep or fall in one due to later circumstances that no number of good decisions on their part will allow them to emerge. Some are so deep in the hole due to their "luck" that their decisions have little effect on the outcome one way or the other. I don't believe that these scenarios constitute the majority of those currently living in poverty, but I'm prepared to consider the possibility that I'm wrong.
I think there's a danger in telling people that individual choice has no role in play in improving one's material condition, just as I'm sure you'd say that there's one in telling people that it's their own fault if they're poor. The truth is somewhere between these two extremes.
Yes, there are people who are "born on third base and think they hit a triple". They're not in a hole, but rather on top of a hill that they didn't have to climb. Inherited wealth plays a large role in the creation of this class. Unlike their parents or ancestors who went from flat ground or even a hole to climb the hill, those who inherit wealth cannot full appreciate what it took to ascend to the heights that they so effortlessly occupy, and how precarious life can be for those downhill.
Should such people refrain from passing judgement on the behaviour of those less fortunate? Probably. I think it's fair though to point out when someone is engaging in behaviour that is not helpful to him/herself. And let's face it, we all engage in such behaviour to some degree.
Unlike many of my contemporaries on the right, I'm a strong supporter of single-payer health insurance (what we call "Medicare"), but one of the negative consequences of it is that some people now feel they have the right to judge and micromanage the lifestyle choices of those around them. "Hey, I'll be paying for the heart bypass that fat guy is going to need, so I have the right to tell him to start exercising and lay off the McDonald's."
I think in general we need to mind our own business more and that of others a lot less. As you say, the rich guy should worry about his yacht (or how his investments are performing), and less about what the beneficiaries of his taxed revenue are doing.