The Futility of Comparative Suffering
A Neurodiverse Perspective
Being left-leaning politically speaking, everyone in my tribe minds our p’s and q’s when it comes to acknowledging whatever privilege we may have.
Acknowledging privilege is ceremonial and perfunctory but still completely necessary. Even if it has devolved into a sometimes meaningless gesture that we apply with a performative bent when we speak of personal issues causing us pain, our society expects us to be sensitive to those historically denied different advantages in life due to human oppression. And we should display this sensitivity.
Neurodiversity itself falls into a left-of-center paradigm; thus, this topic is ripe for discussion among our population. Autistic people can fall on various branches of the political spectrum, no doubt, but honoring differences and the value of community is traditionally a left-of-center kind of politics. It’s the kind of politics I subscribe to: Egalitarian, against hierarchies among people, and fearlessly fighting against systemic injustices.
I am approaching this discussion with the premise that the privilege issue is more useful when applied in a sociological context than a psychological one. Ignoring privilege at the macro level isn’t just insensitive; it makes one look like an intentional jerk. Those who relish their privilege to the extreme with no outward awareness towards others are the same ones who are deeply inwardly afraid the very privilege they have could be taken away from them someday. They would rather not speak of their privilege or even acknowledge its existence lest they find themselves on the other end of the stick. Politicians who claim that racism does not exist in our country are a clear example of that.
Yet the notion of privilege on a psychological level can restrict one’s ability to express their pain and be heard. We all remember, as kids, being told when we did not like our food that there were “starving children in Africa” and that we should be grateful for what we had. While startling truths like this are meant to wake us out of a stupor, many people find this comment quite alienating. The comment is intended to diminish and minimize our struggles while sorely lacking in empathy.
These diminishing comments are prevalent on the political spectrum’s left and right. On the right, people will tell you to be grateful for what God has given you regardless of what you are experiencing. They may point out the example of the biblical Job and that even after all the hardships God put Job through, he remained loyal to God. They may remind you that there could never be an Easter Sunday without a Good Friday. They may say that “everything happens for a reason” and that we cannot possibly know God’s plan before it unfolds. It’s been shown that individuals with high authoritarian beliefs may possess a “just-world hypothesis” of the world, meaning they believe people get what they deserve. This belief aligns itself neatly with concepts of karma and God’s will.
The quandaries those on the left have with expressing their pain have less to do with metaphysics and more to their relationship with humanity and other community members. On the left, it can be insensitive to say what your pain is when others may have it much worse. Ironically, though the incarceration setting has many right-wing individuals with tribal mentalities, they use left-wing tactics to silence complainers. If one inmate is in for two years, one better not complain about that out loud because others may be in for relatively longer terms. Everyone faces the same hardships in jails and prisons; therefore, there is no such thing as personal hardship. The mere act of crying will exile a person into solitary confinement.
The left recognizes the community and is acutely aware of how individuals’ actions can affect that community. Marginalized members of various communities want to minimize further fragmentation and isolation. Using autism as an example, the reason why “aspie supremacy” is such a turn-off to members of the autism community is that it flamboyantly exhibits privilege, reverse engineers the concept of “supremacy” that comes from a historically sinister place, and models behavior that is incongruent with the larger group. As an example, some people actually believe autistics are aliens who are here to help the world ascend to another dimension. According to the link above:
A lot of people diagnosed with severe autism are Crystal children.
They are operating at a much higher frequency that doesn’t require verbal communication, so we assume they are just autistic or misunderstood.
There is no empirical evidence for this, and it is arguably toxic to make this claim since it supports more division: Us versus them. “Autistics are highly evolved and operate at a quicker frequency, while neurotypicals do not. Therefore, we are superior.”
Since the left is community-oriented and against hierarchy, it makes sense that the privilege of those at “the top” would not be amplified. If members of a particular group have historically marginalized others and then complain about circumstances in their lives ailing them from their penthouse suite, the “complainers” may seem out of touch at best and trolls at worst. The tendency for white people to express their economic anxiety is a prime example of this because it is the flip side of the same coin of racism.
Yet, while this is true, my concern is that some “privileged” individuals may face catastrophic circumstances in their lives and may not feel comfortable speaking about them because they know others have had it much worse. I cannot tell you how many TikTok videos I have seen that begin with “apologies” because they feel ashamed they are talking about a terrible episode in their lives and think they are not worthy of talking about it because of their privilege.
This, I think, is not healthy.
Take this TikTok video. This autistic creator, who is also a therapist, points out that many of her clients get triggered when they see autistic people in the world unmasked. It’s triggering to them because many of her “high-masked” clients work so hard to remain that way because of their trauma, and therefore, they project their trauma onto those autistic people. Thoughts like “these people feel safe enough to be unmasked, but we never felt safe to be that way” begin to enter their minds.
You can see that both sides can legitimately claim privilege and oppression at the same time. On the one side are the “non-maskers” who wish they could mask but perhaps cannot for whatever reason. Then, there is the privilege of the “maskers” who actually can mask but would not survive the work or social world if they removed the mask. This kind of thinking can spiral into a competition of suffering based on who has more privilege and who is more oppressed. This Olympics of suffering is a prime disrupter of intra-minority solidarity.
Why do these types of comparisons exist?
This focus implies that comparisons are central to peoples’ meaning-making of collective victimization, and that groups perceive the victim status as a resource to compete over or as a basis for alliances (e.g., Craig & Richeson, 2016; Noor et al., 2012; SimanTov- Nachlieli et al., 2015; Vollhardt, 2015).
But as bestselling author Brené Brown retorts:
When we practice empathy with ourselves and others, we create more empathy… Love, y’all, is the last thing we need to ration in this world. So, let’s stop ranking suffering. There’s enough love and empathy to go around, putting ourselves down because we’re struggling, but have it so much better than others right now, can kill our empathy for others. What’s helpful is perspective. Complaining is okay, letting ourselves feel these hard emotions is important and mandatory to be empathic people, but we can also piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, y’all.
Comparative Suffering
Acknowledging one’s privilege out of sensitivity towards marginalized groups is one thing. This is a decent thing to do. But allowing your “privilege” to invalidate your experiences is quite another thing.
Let’s take the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire world was traumatized by this event, yes, even the anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers. Some are more traumatized than others to this day. This can be due to a variety of factors, such as barriers to receiving quality healthcare, race, past trauma, biological and environmental risk factors making one susceptible to trauma, etc. But it would be silly to say that a person from a “privileged” group traumatized by COVID should not feel that way simply because they are privileged. While being from a non-privileged group could certainly exacerbate trauma during a worldwide pandemic due to a cornucopia of factors, it does not exempt anyone on the planet from trauma’s wrath.
Many people felt guilty because of their privilege.
By definition, guilt is your conscience’s way of washing over your mind when you’ve done something wrong, a moral method to make you feel remorseful for bad behaviour. But the guilt that I, and many of my friends and colleagues who find themselves in a similar situation in these unprecedented times are feeling, is far more elusive, even sinister. It’s the kind that tickles your tummy with terror and makes you think twice before you share on social media that you’re actually starting to enjoy being in quarantine.
The author continues:
This is also the paradox of privilege, wherein a person’s socio-economic advantage gives them access to their materialistic desires, but also leaves them with an unshakeable guilt for getting these, weighing down on their mental health.
All of this is valid.
But it crosses the line when one’s privilege suffocates that person to the point when one can no longer acknowledge their own trauma out of guilt.
What is comparative suffering?
Comparative suffering is trying to make sense of our pain by comparing it to other people’s pain. People may decide their pain is insignificant compared to others, or that it’s greater than other people’s pain.
Many people have good intentions when engaging in comparative suffering. We might think we’re being thoughtful and keeping a healthy perspective when we recognize that others have it harder than we do. Or we may think we’re being grateful and looking at the bright side — but gratitude is being mindful of our blessings, not diminishing our struggles.
It may sound awfully cliché to say this, but your experiences are valid. Being autistic can be a traumatic experience because of the lifelong misunderstandings we have encountered from others. If you are an autistic individual who has experienced less trauma than others, this does not eliminate your trauma or make it any less real. Try to resist the temptation to feel that because others may have had it worse, this gives you no right to talk to others about what you have experienced.
My personal experiences with people who are so “community-minded” that they cannot “see or hear” my own individual struggles are not because they don’t care about anyone but rather because they have an Aquarius type of personality. They care primarily about big-scale issues designed to create change across large spaces and do not focus as much on individual experience. Some people are like that — it does not make them bad people. But those are not necessarily the people you want to confide in.
But worse than this are people who will compare your struggles to theirs when you come to them with an issue. It is a toxic dynamic to engage with someone who is always careful to remind you how much worse their situation is than yours. It is a way of leveraging power against you so you never talk about yourself and your experiences. While the other person may have a tough time in various ways, those comments are incredibly invalidating and not something you must tolerate.
There have been times in my life when I have masked mental health issues because I know others have it worse. I have immeasurable survivor's guilt in ways that are too traumatic to speak of. This survivor’s guilt has guilted me out, silenced me, and made me feel that my struggles are all small potatoes compared to others and I should keep my thoughts to myself. And I will probably struggle for the rest of my life to realize that my feelings are legitimate, even compared to others. But while guilt is a healthy emotion when it forces self-correction and accountability, it has no value when things cannot be changed or controlled. So, one should never feel guilty for their trauma proportionally to others. It may make you feel more virtuous, but in reality, it does not actually make you a better person. Just a person with more self-imposed guilt.
I think viewing the common bond humanity faces from a bird’s eye perspective is essential to keep in the back of your mind. We all came into the world the same way. We all are going to meet the same fate one day. If you meditate on those self-evident two truths for even a few moments, you realize the interconnectedness of humanity and that we have more similarities than differences. Then, the guilt suddenly melts away, and we are all just human. All too human.
