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Comment by jjj1232 | Hacker News Reader

Tangent, but characterizing privilege as “that modern sin in the church of social justice” is a strawman.

Privilege at the individual level isn’t inherently bad or good, it just is.

For example, say you had a privileged upbringing: you were never hungry, didn’t have to work in highschool, and had money to participate in after school activities. That made it easier for you to get into a top school compared to someone without those advantages. That is not a sin or a flaw, and it doesn’t make you a bad person.

Now you can (and I would) say that this kind of privilege should be counteracted at the systemic level, by better funding public schools for example.

I don’t think those two ideas are in conflict.

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> Privilege at the individual level

> ...

> Now you can (and I would) say that this kind of privilege should be counteracted at the systemic level

I am probably dumb, but I can't help but regard the society as a large collection of individuals. If we accept the unfairness at the scale of a single individual, at which scale do we start getting troubled by the unfairness, and why?

Further, there are numerous occurrences where "the systemic level" and "the individual level" collide. Perhaps the most familiar examples are hiring, admissions, or promotion practices. For every given instance, you are hiring (admitting, promoting) an individual. So to "counteract" the unfairness at the systemic level you might have to be actively unfair at the individual level. It's a bit like the infamous trolley problem all over again.

Individualistic thinking is a hallmark of american culture, so I don’t blame you!

You’re right that society is made up of individuals, but it’s also made up of rules, incentives, and resource distribution that influence the behavior of those individuals. That’s what I (and most SJWs or whatever you want to call them) want to change.

We want to change the systems over the individual for two reasons: 1. generally, changing the systems is more impactful 2. changing individuals’ behavior en masse without touching the systems that influence their behavior is next to impossible.

For an example of trying and failing to do #2, look at how unsuccessful we’ve been at trying to save the planet by altering consumer choices. It’s been 20+ years and what do we have to show for it? Compostable straws and reusable bags? Compare that to something like a carbon tax which attacks the problem at the systemic level and would start making change immediately.

As for your point about the systemic and individual levels colliding and causing unfair effects at the individual level, I’d guess that we have different perspectives on what is fair at the individual level.

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