Privilege breeds privilege. Once you have at least a little bit of it. You can generate a little bit more with it.
The bar that you get to grow up in a relatively safe place, with non toxic friends or parents is quite high already. I haven’t been lucky to have grown up in a safe place or in a good family, but I did manage to make good friends, and if I had not been lucky enough to have positive experiences with some real smart resourceful people, I probably wouldn’t had been alive today. Not to sound too dramatic.
Every time I visited the US it was mostly to visit people who were in a very privileged position. They either rented an expensive apartment in new york city in an ok neighborhood, or they owned a 3 story house in the suburbs. When we drove to walmart I could already see in the parking lots the stark differences between people who called this country home.
Next to us parked a family, 3 kids, a car that looked like it was falling apart next to my friend’s huge modern SUV. I wonder if any of them will ever br able to afford an SUV, I wonder how many of them will be able to go to college. The father and mother were yelling a lot at those poor kids. Everyone looked overweight(no offense), the father literally obese. And we went on with our day. I bought a bunch of random stuff I didn’t really need and ate a lobster sandwich. And I kind of forgot for a long time that family ever existed, except for the couple of times I randomly remember them. Hope they’re alright.
I don’t think it’s helpful to talk about it in terms of “privilege.” It’s not about being lucky enough to be born into privilege, but not being unlucky enough to be born into structural dysfunction.
If you compare income mobility between parents and adult children in the U.S. versus Denmark, it looks quite similar for the top 80%. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012.... Someone raised in the second lowest income quantile in the U.S. has about the same chance of ending up in the top income quantile as someone in Denmark. It’s the bottom 20% where Americans are twice as likely to get stuck there in comparison to people in Denmark.
Activism was a big part of my life, even full time at times, from 1991-2005 and I spent a lot of time going into rooms inhabited by different groups building bridges not to mention tabling, going door to door, getting signatures for political candidates, you name it. So I've had a lot of experience to how people react to different messages when I deliver them and when other people deliver them and I've got strong and grounded opinions about discourses that are counterproductive and make me wish I could use a hook to shuffle people off the stage.
The word "privilege" and especially the phrase "white privilege" is at the top of that list.
There really are some privileged individuals who are entitled and could use some bringing down but if you're speaking to a group you really don't where people are coming and frequently when I talk to an individual I find my expectations about their history and point of view are completely wrong. In particular I know a lot of white people who have black problems including the meaningless-but-fatal confrontations with the police. For the most part [1] black people are more concerned about racism in America than white people, but know many black people who resent the idea that they are first-and-foremost descendants of slaves and victims of racism and it's such a strongly held feeling for some that if you give them a choice of a strident "anti-racist" and a flagrant racist they'll pick the latter.
People have been so hung up on this idea of intelligence being heritable or not heritable that it's almost forgotten that severe mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar, major depression) is highly heritable -- and there are few things that can sidetrack your life like that.
How's your self-object breakthrough? Okay, I might be jealous that you found a foolproof(?) way to have it published :)
Ofc I'm still mostly bouncing between the top 2 boxes here... (Being aware of it maybe makes that less concerning?)
(Pleasantly) surprised-- but maybe shouldnt have been-- that Chandrasekhar opened with thermodynamics
Heads-up. Regarding the self-obj. Might try to set up a three-way to sync with aeb* when I can tria(ge/ngulate) the relevant emotions better (modulo whatever mental resources my own PRE-breakthroughs require)
This turned up the other day and explains the overarching framework of how my practice (symbolic, embodied) fits into other approaches to facing the world
and i think communicates the sense of urgency in terms of the current crises such as the crisis of object relations, crisis of energy and the environment, crisis of political legitimacy, etc.
Yeah I saw that post and was going to try to kick off the thread from that very stub.
I do feel the urgency, so a thorough read is warranted.
Thoughts after the first pass, though, "rationalism fails because humans learn that fast-think responses are better for dealing with chaos", what's your succinct summary of the "crisis of object relations"
Instead of relying on real science, magic has become the sole foundation of expertise for the technocratic elite and the professional managerial caste—culminating in the legendary powers of the High Mages of the Central Bank, the Priesthood of Think Tanks and the Sacred Policy Institutes.
There's this sock-puppet on HN who I might have otherwise written off as a conservative but the way he writes is stimulating so he seems to be just one of these technocratic elite according to the above (albeit I credit him for the "insight")
"object relations" is the ability to express love.
In higher ed we are already facing a crisis because people slowed down having kids 20 years ago. The hysterical right is talking about the crisis, the left cares about the welfare state which needs working-age people to fund it but it still fantasizes that billionaires can pay for it all without the recognition that billionaires need working-age people and an expanding economy to be billionaires.
Young men immediately around me are desperately struggling in various ways, which makes the problem intensely personal to me.
20-30 years from now though the hysterical right will seem prophetic, but for now the responsible right and the literate left share in the "individual uber alles" ideology that problematizes everything.
There's a take that revolutions only happen right after things get slightly better, like spring for the suicidal.
(Have been trying to link "individual uber alles" to the macro-nihilistic core of liberalism but nothing has been clicking, including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346958 [0])
At the risk of overgeneralizing, women tend to make a healthier (more functional=better moral-injury-compensated) tradeoff between value or values. For men, the "trades" come close to women's Goldilocks zone, but "trading" (finance) will always be the devil. A man will rather be seen in the company of high-class "Trading" than be married to "the Trades".
(Within the technocratic elite, VCs try to make a better tradeoff than Jane Street/RenTech etc, but the national ideology is such that followers of Warren Buffet can still accuse them of leaving value on the table. PG used to talk of "rapacious" finbros but he & Jessica doubling down on Altman is your "supply-side socialism")
[0]top comment: high risk high formal value politics ("war") beat high _informal_ risk high _informal_ value building, family, community ("love"). like how Taleb only gets love (sycophancy, but not really?) from low-bros of the global South-- too much testosterone to make a healthy tradeoff.
Development of selfobject images I've been chewing on it and think the best thing is the "emotional preparation" used in the Meisner techniques of acting. Images that really activate the real self are very personal and archaic and could be embarrassing. It would not work if I were to give you one as a guru [3], and if were to have you describe them as a guru you I would be inclined to judge them and you'd be inclined to be dishonest because you'd be afraid of being judged.
In the case of Meisner you go into the repetition exercise having done an emotional prep and your "guru" observes how it affects your behavior and can tell you "that was amazing, that really worked for you" or "that fell flat" and the one thing they'll tell you is that you have to imagine something rather than recall an experience. You aren't expected to talk about what you used, you're getting feedback about the effects.
The other thing I want to suggest is the Bandler/Grinder kind of content-free exercise where you are told to evoke an image but not expected to describe it, I think that's less effective than the Meisner training because it is presented as something you can do out of a book or in a large group and you don't have the closed loop that monitors behavior and physiology.
I've lived in about every demographic area of the USA and the only thing that would have gave them away to me as poor in your SUV/walmart story is that they were all fat. Being fat is the best marker of poverty in the USA. The rest just sounds like the lifestyle of Warren Buffett which isn't terribly unusual as the comfortably rich generally only worry about flashy cars if they're a motorhead and often get there in part by being thrifty.
Buffet is well known for "slumming it" at times. He drove a clapped out hail damaged ~decade old mass production model Cadillac like everyday through McDonalds. This is pretty inline with stuff I've seen from comfortably rich families.
>edit: oh fuck me its this goddamn bot poster who just lies to your face
“Gas Station Sushi: Fresh one day a week, but no one knows which one…”
I read the post as involving seeing the other family at Walmart, but the buying of things not needed and consumption of lobster as happening elsewhere.
The walmart experience is so wildly different depending on who they're catering to.
When I lived in poor areas, I've literally been shaken down by gigantic bouncers in the parking lot for "stealing" (but not) a bag of $5 cat litter. Why on earth this is even worth the liability of sending bouncers is beyond me. And everything even remotely valuable and easy to steal is behind locked showcases, but no one gives a fuck to get it out to help you buy it.
In rich areas, it's lobster sandwiches and no one even bothering you for your receipt on the way out, and maybe someone might even help you find something in the store. Nothing you want is behind glass, except maybe something unusually valuable by walmart standards and miniscule like an SD card.
I spent a couple of years in the States before returning to Europe. I really had no idea what happened to people - what they became - if they weren't fed and watered properly. I had always assumed that the way people were was just how people are. Scary how much we take for granted.
This is true when you look at raw numbers but you'll still get some pushback on this fact since the pace of USA's drop in median wealth has been so sudden. As in my home country of Australia now has ~2.5x the median wealth per capita compared to the USA. This never used to be the case at all. Australia still has a lower average wealth but this is just telling of the extreme inequality. The median and averages aren't meant to be this far apart.
Sort by median and compare to average wealth to see the issue the USA has right now. The USA's median wealth in 2007 was $173,151 in inflation adjusted teams for some reference, it dropped in 2008 and never really recovered. It's now well below many other Western nations.
Isn't this an artifact of using the median when the majority of families in both countries own a home, and housing prices in Australia are somehow even crazier than they are in the US?
When housing prices are high, anyone who can't afford a down payment is completely screwed, because they're paying the high rents which inhibits saving, but the high rents they're paying aren't turning into principal. So the savings of most of the people who can't afford a home end up being ~0 or negative (in debt). But this will be worse, i.e. more inequality, in the country with the higher housing costs.
It just doesn't show up in the median when the median is a homeowner and then the higher housing costs increase their number.
But the "extra" wealth is mostly on paper because you have the house but you also need somewhere to live. If you sold it to get the money you'd have to pay the crazy rents, so all the value really does is give you the capacity to borrow against it, which is only useful if you wanted to borrow more than a smaller amount of equity would have allowed you to, which most people wouldn't. And if they did they wouldn't have that "wealth" anymore because they'd have borrowed and spent it, and would then be paying interest on the debt.
It's inflation adjusted to 2022 though, not 2025 (hopefully at least that's still in ballpark though). There was a slight spike upwards for median wealth during the pandemic fwiw. This seems to have entirely corrected though.
I'm not sure why that 2022 number is so much higher than the previous years listed.
I guess the stimulus checks and stock market movements during the pandemic brought the median and average closer together for a year? Regardless it didn't hold, it's back below 2007's level again today by any measure.
Nomadland the book documents this for a lot of Americans surviving in the brink in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, turning to living in vans and RVs, a less glamorous version of van life, barely scraping by and eventually bad luck or circumstance of some kind of another just crushes individuals. Even in Silicon Valley just a few streets from Google HQ in Mountain View on Longhorn and other streets there are several blocks filled with RVs of folks I assume like the ones in Nomadland. https://maps.app.goo.gl/KQY2AWL2sNfGem44A
The bar that you get to grow up in a relatively safe place, with non toxic friends or parents is quite high already. I haven’t been lucky to have grown up in a safe place or in a good family, but I did manage to make good friends, and if I had not been lucky enough to have positive experiences with some real smart resourceful people, I probably wouldn’t had been alive today. Not to sound too dramatic.
Every time I visited the US it was mostly to visit people who were in a very privileged position. They either rented an expensive apartment in new york city in an ok neighborhood, or they owned a 3 story house in the suburbs. When we drove to walmart I could already see in the parking lots the stark differences between people who called this country home.
Next to us parked a family, 3 kids, a car that looked like it was falling apart next to my friend’s huge modern SUV. I wonder if any of them will ever br able to afford an SUV, I wonder how many of them will be able to go to college. The father and mother were yelling a lot at those poor kids. Everyone looked overweight(no offense), the father literally obese. And we went on with our day. I bought a bunch of random stuff I didn’t really need and ate a lobster sandwich. And I kind of forgot for a long time that family ever existed, except for the couple of times I randomly remember them. Hope they’re alright.