Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 128
Last week’s show introduced the challenges of Privilege. I am an ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’ populist in my heart and soul, a Creative Populist in my work, and confess to having more than a bit of prejudice—gosh, I’m sorry, sometimes even resentment—again ‘the privileged.’ My eyes were opened by research I stumbled across showing that when any of us are selected at random and put in a privileged position we quickly become blind to how we got there and take on the view we earned our privilege.
So it’s not them, it’s us.
I am an optimist about the human condition and this challenges that optimism. So I did more digging to see what neuro and social scientists say about why it’s just about inevitable privilege is blind to itself and its causes.
Social psychology finds that folks attribute their successes to personal effort, incapable of see the systemic advantages they enjoy and that they did little to nothing to earn—wealth, race, gender, education. Their theory is we like thinking life is fair and it’s very difficult to see evidence confronting that.
Privilege for those who have it operates as a default setting; we don’t notice it until we see an example of the disadvantages of others—someone in a wheelchair in a setting surrounded with stairs. And we are rarely without our privilege, so we don’t have helpful vantage points.
Perhaps the most depressing finding is that privilege can interfere with the brain’s ability to perceive others’ suffering. Wealth, power, privilege can weaken the neural pathways used for empathy; there is evidence that the more resources I have the less my brain prioritizes the needs of others.
Some research reveals ways to minimize this privilege blindness. When exposed to counter-narratives, like stories of folks struggling with systemic barriers, this blindness is lifted, at least for a short term. And when approached on behalf of the disadvantaged as allies new understandings of privilege emerge.
Our Neolithic ancestors, around the world, showed great political imaginations in the way they structured their societies to keep power and privilege at bay—there was much less concern about wealth accumulation than there was about that wealth becoming power and privilege.
I’ve just decided to make this the topic of my next show.
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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