privilege as a Jungian shadow

The following thoughts are not intended to be mean spirited, or condemning of anyone. If you, dear reader, find yourself offended, please know that is not my intention. I see through my filters something I feel compelled to point out. If it doesn't resonate with you, then you could tell me why and we could come to a clearer picture of our common reality together.

Also, I'm not trying to MAKE someone feel guilty, as are many SJWs. My guess is that we all feel guilty at a subconscious level, not for things in the past that our ancestors may have done, but for things that are happening in the present, that we are complicit with, despite trying to do "good works". The question to ask is are these works going to make it possible for anybody who wishes to participate in our privilege, or do they just make us feel better and offer bandaids to some people?

The greatest privilege is not wealth, or being able to get certain high pay or high status jobs. It is being in charge of one's own time and having the resources to do something uplifting with it--not having to work a soul-draining job, or a back-breaking job, or having to answer to a boss. Being able to work on what one loves, as the spirit moves one. Or to just be and not do. It is the 1% who have this privilege, usually white, though asians might have higher average incomes.

Given our social nature and the fact that we evolved in small forager bands, we also have an innate sense of justice, or trying to distribute wealth to everyone in the band and not tolerate gross inequality in that distribution (though some inequality based on who produced or obtained the wealth, or experience can be tolerated). So if we ourselves are privileged in some ways that others are not, this privilege could be a shadow, only barely visible to our conscious minds. It might threaten us to know it is there and we might take all sorts of tactics to bury it deeper. Or we could confront it, shed light on it and integrate it into our psyche, possibly by creating the socio-economic-psychological conditions that remove the gross inequality from our social body.

What is a person who has this privilege to do? We could just enjoy the benefits and ignore it, but then we would be no better than all the privileged people throughout history who got murdered after the revolution for not caring about the 99%. Oftentimes a social shadow that is repressed comes out in violent ways.

We could try to justify our privilege by giving money to charities, in effect saying that we're helping others, but we are only helping them not starve, we are not helping them have the same privilege. There is an irony in that many of the people or earth served by charities are hurt by the ways the money which comes to the privileged is made. The shadow is not really brought to consciousness this way, but further repressed.

We could try giving up the privilege by working hard at a job in the system supporting our families, but that doesn't help anyone else, including ourselves, enjoy the privilege, with rare exceptions. We could try to justify it by saying that we are doing God's work trying to live more simply and sustainably, or providing hospitality. We could even deprive ourselves of many of the modern luxuries, consume much less than the average and experience some redemptive suffering. But that does not change the fact of our privilege and that most people don't have it and can't live like us either because they would lose their little measure of autonomy or because our pork barrel is not big enough to support too many others. We could change that by producing much more so that new people could live for a while on the fruits of our production and produce more themselves in a feed forward way. But most of us don't. We focus on how little we consume, while most people on the planet can't afford to consume so little. Those who are the customers of our hospitality are themselves mostly privileged. If not, they can only stay for a while and then go back to the real world. The shadow is still repressed.

We could share our privilege by sharing our land and houses in a way that does not give us control, but we know that doing so would just prove the republicans' claim that most non-privileged folks nowadays have feelings of entitlement, and given the opportunity, would take those resources for themselves and their families (or identity group) without wanting to pay it forward or participate in a productive economy rather than a pork barrel economy built on slaves (the rural "deplorables", the illegal immigrants and the factory workers out of sight out of mind) and non renewable resources. The attempted sharing might result in losing one's own wealth and privilege.

We could contort ourselves in all sorts of philosophical ways to justify a gross inequality and injustice (that we have time to live as we please, to teach yoga and permaculture, to take workshops, to take the time to bike to town, to not depend on a soul draining job away from home etc, while the 99% don't) by projecting the privilege shadow onto others. Some have earned that privilege by working within an unjust system that promotes inequality. Some have been born into it, and are passive recipients of wealth. Here are the philosophical contortions: we'll feed the homeless and the hungry, we'll visit the prisoners, but we won't work towards creating the conditions where the homeless and prisoners can feed themselves through their own efforts and contribute towards not only their own welfare, but the welfare of their communities. We'll confess to being privileged and oppressors, like those catholics who think the goal of confession is to feel better and look better to others around us rather than changing our behavior.  We say in effect: it's not us that's the problem because we confessed, or we are materially poor, or we feed the hungry and offer hospitality to the homeless. It's those white supremacists or those wealthy people or those republicans who are the real problem. Please oh christian masses, don't kill us with those oyster shells like you did with Hypatia. We are good--we live simply and sustainably. We show symbolic solidarity to the illegal immigrant meat packing factory workers who mysteriously prefer to work under inhumane conditions than join us on our homesteads, even if we truly wanted to share our homesteads (which we don't), even if we had enough money from our wealthy donor network to support all of them as well (which we don't). Maybe they WOULD join us if they could retain a measure of autonomy and wouldn't have to be our apprentices and depend on us financially, or if we created the conditions where we and they would not need money because we are all producing for each other what we previously had to buy from the system?

We have guilt buried in our subconscious which is coming out in putrid ways and causing us much suffering. We do not believe, as the Republicans and libertarians claim, in equal outcomes, we know people have different gifts. But we have a deep sense of justice and we know at some level (whether conscious or not) that the current system will never be able to provide justice, or even the holy grail of the Replibs: equal opportunity. Opportunity for what? Opportunity to rape the earth, waste our non-renewable resources, work at soul-numbing jobs (you think everyone can be an engineer, scientist, home-maker, yoga instructor, therapist, stay at home mom or dad or artist for sugar cubes?) We know that we are not working hard enough or at all to create an alternative, but are smug and comfortable in our eco-homes. We know that there is not enough concentrated, low entropy energy to support industrial civilization and to share our privilege within it with more than a small percentage of the population. And if we have kids, any energy that might have been used to create an alternative system is now being used to keep the kids happy, to keep us sane. Or we develop physical or mental illnesses that keep us in survival mode, with barely enough energy for ourselves. Now we are suffering as much as anyone, and we don't have to feel guilty anymore.We might support BLM or even Antifa to bury that guilt further.


But we also know that there has got to be a way to share the privilege of using our gifts to edify ourselves and our community, to have some autonomy and time to be and wonder and celebrate.

The only ethical thing I can think of is to work along the 99% in a way that brings the privilege to everyone who wants it. Not in the offices and factories and stores because doing so does not help create an alternative and bring the privilege of managing one's own time to others. But sharing one's privilege in a way that new people retain a measure of autonomy, and having enough resources to support them in a scalable way. There are several ways to accomplish this latter goal. One way is to have industries that employ people in worker-owned/managed coops, or facilitate (e.g. through gifts or loans) their own cottage industry. The industries would have to be such as to progress towards a world in which power and the means of production are decentralized and personalized, otherwise we end up with the gross inequalities we have now, but they would leverage the current wealth of the system.

Another way is to find some eccentric wealthy persons to heavily fund a research and development project for localizing technology and economy.