Privileges are Evil

Privileges are definitely the biggest mistake of mankind of all the time. I would define privileges as a condition that gives individuals power over others. Our culture, which we inherited, teaches us that power over people is a value so that privileges become values as well. The word privilege immediately reminds us of people who have power or the very successful people, but privileges are far more widespread. Almost every person is somehow privileged, and that is not good. This article mainly presents the sources of privileges, the reasons why they are not good, and how they can be removed.

Talents a man himself possesses should not be considered as privileges, but skills in the alienated society easily earn privileges. Ability should not be considered a privilege, but if ability gives people power over others, then it becomes a privilege. Work should not be considered a privilege, but if the job gives people control over others, then it becomes a privilege. Achieved material wealth should not be considered a privilege, but if it gives people power over others, it becomes a privilege. Beauty should not be considered a privilege, but if beauty gives power over others, it becomes one. Hope you get the point.

Most people, by their subjectivity, consider privileges as overcoming their own powerlessness in nature. Privileges can easily create to the man the illusion of power in nature and then it gives him great happiness that looks like the real overcome of his powerlessness in nature. Such a man tends to start admiring himself greatly and creates a narcissistic feature of his own character. This feature of character glorifies the subjective vision of conscience, which develops the alienation of man from objective reality. A narcissistic man is so burdened with himself that he is not able to notice anything valuable besides him exists. He loses respect for people, and that prevents him from reaching natural benefits in relationships with other people. He loses respect towards nature as well. Legend says that Narcissus felt so in love with himself that he did not manage to learn to swim, so he drowned in the lake where after a fall while he was watching his reflection.

A man objectively does not need privileges, but subjectively they easily bring an illusion of power in nature, fool people and become a significant value. However, privileges bring happiness to the narcissistic man coming from the subjective vision of power, and therefore he invests a great effort in maintaining the survival of his own privileged status. But normally, it does not matter how much a narcissistic man tries, nothing can overcome his weakness in nature. Obviously, it is not possible to keep beauty and youth, and everyone who tries to do so is their own worst enemy because they are condemned to lifelong suffering. Other alienated needs are more challenging to identify, but the final result is the same. Privileged people in real life must encounter conflicts with objective reality. Then they necessary suffer. Pain destroys the souls of narcissistic people, and they very often find escapes from the painful suffering in the perversion of their own sensibility.

Narcissistic people, by their subjective consciousness, may identify the loss of privileges with the loss of their existence, so that any threats to their privileges causes them to panic and fear, and they desperately seek salvation. Hurting someone’s narcissism provokes hatred that cannot forgive. Nothing attacks people as much as someone’s injured narcissism, nothing destroys marriages as much as someone’s injured narcissism, nothing kills people as much as someone’s hurt narcissism, and nothing provokes wars as much as someone’s wounded narcissism. Injured narcissism is the leading cause of destructiveness in society. All evil in the history of humanity comes from narcissistic forms of the character.

Privileges corrupt people. People that privileges cannot spoil are so rare that they can be considered nonexistent. I am not sure that privileges would not be able to corrupt me at least a little bit. Privileges should be prevented as a requirement of establishing a constructive orientation of people. Preventing privileges means overcoming narcissism and destructiveness in society.

Powerless people tend to reach privileges. The higher the feeling of the weakness of a man in society and nature, the higher is his need for creating privileges. With this in regard, the more we overcome the weakness of people the more the problem will be solved. The powerlessness of people will be overcome by using the system I have proposed.

Privileges may be developing from childhood

An exaggerated concern for children may be a more severe problem than the neglecting of children. I will try to explain it with the example of the upbringing of Adolf Hitler. The mother of Adolf Hitler admired his son unconditionally. She did everything she could to please him. She did all his chores instead of him. Psychologist Erich Fromm believes that this is not loving because of the lack of responsibility for the future of the child, and I agree with him. Adolf Hitler grew convinced that he was perfect without the investment of any effort. In this way, he developed his extreme narcissistic view of the world. The world for him existed only as far as he could subjugate it to his needs. His mother was just a maid for him who fulfilled all his wishes and pulled him out of unpleasant situations. This made him irresponsible towards life and incapable of loving.

Of course later on in real life, as a result of ignorant upbringing, Adolf Hitler experienced many painful moments. The pain brings most people back to reality but not extremely narcissistic Adolf Hitler. While he was suffering in unpleasant reality, he got into his shell and performed endless internal monologue to himself with which he justified his inadaptability to society. The speaker skills he developed in this way helped him expose himself to the German people during a sensitive political moment. The rest is history. Adolf Hitler’s story is not about criminal genetics but about the very irresponsible upbringing of the child. I am convinced that if his mother did not spoil him during the earliest years of his life and if his father spanked him occasionally, Adolf Hitler would probably became a prominent retailer or something like this, and 35 million people would not be killed in the Second World War. With this respect, even violent parents are not as bad in the upbringing of their children as the ignorant parents who spoil them. They are the greatest enemies to their children while at the same time they do significant damage to society.

Millions of children around the world are brought up similarly as Adolf Hitler, where parents really damage their children with good intentions. Spoiled children are very irresponsible and do not develop their natural abilities. They have big problems throughout life and suffer because of it. A child’s high degree of narcissism can be identified by excessive confidence or by exaggerated fear, and also by strong aggressiveness or extreme isolation. A child’s aggression can only be removed by severe penalties while in the case of excessive seclusion a lot of knowledge and attention are needed. If parents show weakness towards children’s aggression or indifference towards children’s depression, they can easily create very inadaptable children who will be unhappy in their lives and during one moment of crisis they may become murderers. The Virginia Tech massacre is such an example where a student killed 32 people and wounded many others before committing suicide.

If parents do not fulfill their parental duties in the upbringing of children, then it is most likely too late for the productive development of children. Then only psychiatrists or oppressive state apparatus can somewhat help. Now you are probably wondering where is the boundary in upbringing that divides responsible and irresponsible children towards their future. This border is defined by the knowledge that is the fruit of the equal people relationship. This is a state where children will not feel superiority or inferiority. I’ve established a system that will achieve such a society in my book Humanism.

Economic privileges

The owners of the means of production realize the most widespread form of privilege today. In a society where there is high unemployment of workers, employers are especially privileged. Unemployed workers are forced to accept low-paying jobs to feed their families. The privileged owners of the means of production exploit it by abusing workers giving those poor wages while accomplishing higher profits for themselves. Then, employers develop narcissistic traits that make them insensitive to the needs of workers. In this manner, the exploitation of workers occurs; the foundation of today’s problems in society.

The solution to these problems is straightforward. All that needs to be done is reduce privileges of employers. Their privileges will be reduced by abolishing the unemployment of workers. This can be done by reducing work hours proportionally to the unemployment rate. Once unemployment is removed, employers will have to compete with each other to hire workers by increasing the incomes of workers. Workers will achieve a higher purchasing power and will buy more, which will help the capitalist economy produce more and profit more. The problem is that the increase of workers’ rights reduces the privileges of employers and the latter vehemently oppose it. This problem must be resolved because only the equalization of the rights of people can build a good future of humanity.

In the final stage of the development of the new humanistic system, I have proposed the complete abolition of employer privileges by introducing a system of work competition in public companies. I have proposed a work competition among workers in public companies. Each work post will be taken by a worker who offers the highest productivity at any time. No one position in public companies will be privileged any longer.

In the new system, each work position will be equally desired. This will be achieved when each work position with defined productivity get a worker who asks for the lower price of labour. Labour price will be one of the factors that determine the height of income, but it can be said that better jobs will achieve relatively lower salaries and worse jobs will be compensated with relatively higher incomes. Thus, the labour market will balance working interest in all jobs.

The new economy will form an advantageous system of accountability for the realization of productivity workers offers so that they would not dare offer productivity they cannot accomplish. Responsibilities of managers and workers will be so significant that they would have to mutually agree on the production and establish a high degree of consensus before making decisions. This kind of market economy will result in co-operation at all levels of production processes and thus, will contribute to the development of a productive society.

No economy can be better than the one where every job gets the best worker available. Such an economy will easily become significantly more productive than the capitalist one so that capitalism will be forced to withdraw. When capitalism ends humanism will begin. It will abolish privileges by creating equal rights relations in society and will build an unthinkably better future for humanity.

My experience with privileged people

The owners of the means of production might be privileged to the consumers as well. The owners of the ski resort, Mt. St. Louis and Moonstone in Ontario are privileged. Their privilege arises from the fact that Ontario is a flat province so that the little hill they possess at a distance of 100 kilometres from Toronto is always full of skiers. This privilege made the owners of the ski resort arrogant.

Last year, I went with my family there to ski. We bought tickets for the ski lift. I placed my ticket in a special transparent pocket designed just for that purpose. When I entered the lineup of the ski lift, the owners told me to put the ski pass on a string or to leave. I answered that I would go if they returned my money for the ski pass. They did not reply to my request; instead, they used force and push me down into the snow. One of the workers jumped on me while the owner struck me with his boot in the ribs. My wife and daughters watched all of this, screaming at them to leave me alone, so they did. I immediately called the police expecting that the police would protect the citizens, but this was not the case. Namely, the police in Canada protect private capital more than people. The policemen told me that I must leave the ski resort.

The privilege of ownership of the ski resort gave them great power, and that alienates those people from their own nature. And so they have built a high degree of narcissism, and as such, they have lost the ability to correctly perceive the natural laws and reach a normal healthy life. They cannot find happiness in their lives. If these arrogant people somehow get unlimited power, they might become some variant of Adolf Hitler. Many arrogant people around the world would repeat what Hitler did if they got the chance. It would be entirely wrong to conclude that such opportunities cannot occur again.

Now, I am living in a big building that has an outdoor and indoor swimming pool. There is a service of maintenance and a board of directors composed mostly of retired people who make decisions of common interest. For a director position in the Board of Directors mostly apply residents who need power over people, and they like using this power. Life experience taught me that people who love power are the worst people because they love to use their power at the expense of others. The Board of Directors has hired a woman who works as a lifeguard at the pools and maintains order. She forbade me from protecting my five-year-old daughter with sunscreen at the outdoor pool because someone from the Board of Directors wrongly informed her that sunscreen damages the pool installation. This was misinformation because sunscreen may be harmful to the Jacuzzi but not for the pool. However, this rule was in force for years and harmed the users of the swimming pool.  The other tenants have told me in confidence that they protect themselves from the sun at home before they get to the pool. I succeed to revoke this stupid decision by writing a letter to the management board. 

I played amateur soccer and basketball for more than forty years. I mostly did it because running is healthy. I was never particularly handy with a ball, but it was always more comfortable for me to run after the ball than running around a stadium. I scored a lot of goals and enjoyed it a lot. One should cheer as much as they can because it is healthy. On the other hand, there are players to whom winning is the issue of “life or death.” They do not show joy in the game, they play very aggressively and cannot stand defeat. These are mainly talented people for sports whose talents build their privileged statuses in games and consequently the narcissistic feature of their character. They bring conflicts into sports. Finally, I’ve escaped from such conflicts by not playing collective sports anymore. The relationship between my orientation and theirs is the relationship between health and illness. People are not aware of that because if they were, they would select good and not evil for themselves. One day my philosophy will solve such problems.

In the system that I have proposed, every man will get an equal right to evaluate any other man. Each positive assessment should automatically bring a small prize to the assessed person. On the other hand, any negative evaluation will result in a punishment of the same form. Let us say that awards and penalties of such assessment would have an equivalent value of one dollar. Arrogant people, such as the mentioned owners of the ski resort, members of the Board of Director, and talented soccer players make a lot of mistakes to many people, and because of that, they would receive a large number of negative evaluations for an extended period. After that, they would no longer dare to create any disadvantages in society. Such measures will definitely reduce the uncontrolled or insufficiently controlled power of individuals coming out from privileged statuses in society. Only then will the destructive orientation of society be overcome.