Orthodox Privilege by Paul Graham
There has been a lot of talk about privilege lately. Although the concept is overused, there is something to it, and in particular 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.
But one of the most pervasive examples of this kind of blindness is one that I haven't seen mentioned explicitly. I'm going to call itorthodox privilege: The more conventional-minded someone is, the more it seems to them that it's safe for everyone to express their opinions.
It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone. They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble. (Or, when there's a dispute between two orthodoxies, they can only imagine statements that are currently accepted as true being outlawed.)
Many of the most serious political arguments, both in the US and the UK, hinge on this. It's the cause of most fights over whether what someone said was a good idea, whether they should apologize for it, and whether they're a terrible person for it. Often the statements in question aren't even important in themselves. If people could imagine a version of events in which they did believe them, then they'd be arguing about the difference between a bad idea and an unacceptably bad idea, or a public figure who made a mistake and a monster who's never fit to be a public figure at all. But they can't, so they're not.
An obvious question is how people who believe the orthodox ideas of their age could ever imagine that anyone could believe anything different. Here I think the "slippery slope" metaphor is really useful. It seems to many people that there's a slippery slope from disagreeing with them to attacking them, from arguing against their policies to wanting their entire world-view to collapse. It's only a matter of time, goes the logic, before some fanatic kills them in the name of their beliefs. But this is easy to see if you stop believing in a slope, and look at the road in front of you.
The conventional ideas of a society are just that: conventional. They're not true or false in some absolute sense. They're not written in stone tablets. They don't matter because some authority says they're right. They're right because most people believe them. If you disagree, you're not going to be able to enforce your ideas on them. You can try. You might succeed. You might even end up dominating the society. But that's all it will be — your society, based on ideas that almost no one agrees with.
The orthodox views of a society are not like the Laws of Thermodynamics, which really do forbid you to get more heat out of a system than you put into it. They're like the rules of driving. They're general, and there are some situations where you can safely ignore them, and others where they really do apply, but they're always situational. There's a crucial difference between believing that something's right and believing that it can't possibly be wrong. And if you believe in the second kind of belief, it's a hell of a lot easier to slide down a slippery slope than you might have thought.
Paul Graham [www.paulgraham.com] is an early stage investor in startups. His interests include programming languages, the design of cities, and meditation.
Published in The Huffington Post, February 25, 2014