I think as a meta level the relocated comment is still important.
People who are systematically oppressed, might have a different perspective than Jacob, who has been transiently hurt. For example, I have seen several different black people with an audience support contextual victim-hood, but the stance from white men is almost all in agreement with Jacob.
As someone with neither history, I won’t further speculate.
A systematically oppressed group can still be wrong. Being oppressed gives you an experience other people don’t have, but doesn’t give you epistemic superpowers. You can still derive wrong conclusions, despite having access to special data.
Anecdote time: When I was a kid, I was bullied by someone who did lots of sport. As a result, I developed an unconscious aversion to sport. (Because I didn’t want to be like him, and I didn’t want to participate in things that reminded me of him.) Obviously, this only further reduced the quality of my life. Years later, I found some great friends, who also did lots of sport. Soon, the aversion disappeared. My unconsciousness decided it was actually okay to be like them.
Maybe I am generalizing my experience too much, but looking at some groups, it seems like they follow the same algorithm (sometimes except for the happy ending, yet). At some moment in history, your group happens to be at the bottom of the social ladder. Others—the bad guys—have the money, the education, the institutions, etc. Your group starts associating money, education, and institutions with the bad things that were done to them. The difference is that when this happens on a group level, the belief gets reinforced culturally, because your friends and family all had the same experience.
A few decades or centuries later, your group also gets an access to education, money, and institutions. (And I am not necessarily talking about equal access here; just about some access, as opposed to your ancestors who had none.) But now everyone knows that these are things your people traditionally don’t have, and whoever aspires to get them is perceived as a traitor, as someone who wants to join the bad guys. You cannot discuss rationally whether getting more education, more money, and more of your people in institutions is actually a good thing for your group, because it increases your individual and collective power. The group as a whole is flinching away from the painful experience in the collective memory, and the individuals who go against the grain get punished.
(An example would be black people policing each other against “acting white”, but a similar mechanism applies in situations where one group of white people was historically oppressed by another group of white people, because of different language or religion or whatever.)
But of course, there may be also legitimate reasons to distrust strategies that work for other people. For example, education means acquiring debt in return for higher expected income in the future. If you know that the “higher income” is not going to happen, e.g. because of racism, then education is not as profitable for you as it would be for the majority.
Yeah, I have first-pass intuitions but I genuinely don’t know.
In a era with both more trustworthy scholarship (replication crisis, etc) and less polarization, I think this would actually be an amazing topic for a variety of longitudinal studies.
I think as a meta level the relocated comment is still important. People who are systematically oppressed, might have a different perspective than Jacob, who has been transiently hurt. For example, I have seen several different black people with an audience support contextual victim-hood, but the stance from white men is almost all in agreement with Jacob. As someone with neither history, I won’t further speculate.
A systematically oppressed group can still be wrong. Being oppressed gives you an experience other people don’t have, but doesn’t give you epistemic superpowers. You can still derive wrong conclusions, despite having access to special data.
Anecdote time: When I was a kid, I was bullied by someone who did lots of sport. As a result, I developed an unconscious aversion to sport. (Because I didn’t want to be like him, and I didn’t want to participate in things that reminded me of him.) Obviously, this only further reduced the quality of my life. Years later, I found some great friends, who also did lots of sport. Soon, the aversion disappeared. My unconsciousness decided it was actually okay to be like them.
Maybe I am generalizing my experience too much, but looking at some groups, it seems like they follow the same algorithm (sometimes except for the happy ending, yet). At some moment in history, your group happens to be at the bottom of the social ladder. Others—the bad guys—have the money, the education, the institutions, etc. Your group starts associating money, education, and institutions with the bad things that were done to them. The difference is that when this happens on a group level, the belief gets reinforced culturally, because your friends and family all had the same experience.
A few decades or centuries later, your group also gets an access to education, money, and institutions. (And I am not necessarily talking about equal access here; just about some access, as opposed to your ancestors who had none.) But now everyone knows that these are things your people traditionally don’t have, and whoever aspires to get them is perceived as a traitor, as someone who wants to join the bad guys. You cannot discuss rationally whether getting more education, more money, and more of your people in institutions is actually a good thing for your group, because it increases your individual and collective power. The group as a whole is flinching away from the painful experience in the collective memory, and the individuals who go against the grain get punished.
(An example would be black people policing each other against “acting white”, but a similar mechanism applies in situations where one group of white people was historically oppressed by another group of white people, because of different language or religion or whatever.)
But of course, there may be also legitimate reasons to distrust strategies that work for other people. For example, education means acquiring debt in return for higher expected income in the future. If you know that the “higher income” is not going to happen, e.g. because of racism, then education is not as profitable for you as it would be for the majority.
Yeah, I have first-pass intuitions but I genuinely don’t know.
In a era with both more trustworthy scholarship (replication crisis, etc) and less polarization, I think this would actually be an amazing topic for a variety of longitudinal studies.
Alas, probably not possible right now.