What I Can’t Believe
Privilege, truth and lived experiences
Last week, I said that one of the things this blog is about is how societies come to some kind of public understanding of truth. That’s rather vague, so consider this post an example.
As WaitButWhy’s Tim Urban nicely illustrated last Thursday, you have a lot in common with every other human, but there’s also a lot about every other person you’ll never fully understand.
As a consequence, I might be unable to grasp certain things others experience, or see certain things apparent to them.
For example, I’m a white male and have lived a relatively sheltered life. This makes me privileged, and as Paul Graham notes:
“There’s something to the idea that privilege makes you blind — that you can’t see things that are visible to someone whose life is very different from yours.”
So privilege leads to some blindness, but blindness for what?
Often, the things that are — it is claimed — invisible to me go beyond me not knowing ‘what it’s like’ to be someone who is different from me. It’s not just about me not grasping some phenomenological features of their subjective experience. It’s also about me not having access to facts about objective reality (not about the phenomenology of their subjective…
