Ad Hominem
A while back, I came across a YouTube short. At first, I thought there wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about it. She is speaking—not even anything I would regard as complaining—about the disadvantages of the upper middle class compared to those in the highest echelons of society. The main lesson of the video was simply that money grants you ever-increasing freedom to take risks, but it can also change our perception and shield us from facing the daunting realities of life and the lessons learned from suffering. Nothing unreasonable or controversial, I thought. Honestly, it’s good advice for those that come from a background not constrained by a lack of money.
But after watching her subsequent apology, as well as witnessing the deluge of outraged comments attacking her character, I realized what was going on. People were absolutely incensed with the fact that as a member of an already highly privileged class of people—someone who had purportedly regularly taken business flights around the world, graduated from an Ivy League school, and has several million subscribers on YouTube—she had no qualifications to speak about a lack of privilege.
Let’s take a step back and imagine this. Let’s merely change the premise of the video—no changes to the content, tone, or phrasing of the voiceover whatsoever. Imagine that instead of a Korean woman cooking a luxurious Japanese curry in an upscale apartment in Seoul, the video portrayed a black woman cooking a burger in a dilapidated house on the fringes of Chicago. Suddenly, the video doesn’t seem so controversial. But all we did was change the apparent identity of the person speaking. The argument is exactly the same, except now instead of the top 1% of society discussing the privileges of the top 0.1%, we have the top 10% discussing the privileges of the top 1%.
It is clear we are obsessed with questioning who is speaking, and not the ideas themselves. But we forget that in order to advance ideas and make progress as a society and as humanity, we have to learn to avoid the trap of the ad hominem—the inability to extricate the idea from the person speaking about the idea. Whether it’s the asinine presidential debates we’ve had in the past or the average job interview, it’s evident that far too many of us are guilty of weighing our personal impressions of someone over their actual merit. We constantly fall into this trap, but we’ve done a terrible job at calling each other out for it.
To what extent and through what method should those more privileged help the underprivileged without being supposedly “tone deaf”?
Is it required for anyone speaking from a position of higher privilege to a person of lower privilege to demonstrate their humility before discussing anything remotely related to hardship?
At what point can we define someone to be “qualified” to complain or even speak generally about a particular struggle?
The truth is, if we draw this absurd conclusion—the dangerous notion that if you haven’t experienced something yourself firsthand, you are not qualified to talk about it—then we play an equally absurd game. In this game, you can endlessly go down the rungs of the privilege ladder in human society; if the top 1% of society are not qualified to speak about how life is harder for them than the top 0.1%, but if I’m in the top 10%, am I now qualified to complain about the privileges of the hyper-rich? If I am living just barely past the poverty level in the United States, am I qualified to speak about the struggles of being poor when simultaneously there are many people in Africa that live in flimsy shacks with dirt floors, barely muster enough food for one or two meals for them and their family, have no access to clean drinking water or any healthcare whatsoever, and have a life expectancy of less than forty? If we’re continuing with this inane train of thought, all those berating her in the comments section—those claiming they “have it hard” when the fact that they possess the time and the capacity to watch videos and comment on YouTube automatically puts them among the most privileged of human beings to ever exist—can seem equally as tone deaf.
We cannot demand that someone should have experienced hardship firsthand or sympathize with it before speaking about that hardship. This is an incredibly dangerous path for us to take. If it doesn’t directly undermine free speech, it sabotages our ability to connect with people of different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds than our own. Out of impulse, we try so hard to make a point; we want to ridicule someone for being entitled, tone deaf, and insensitive, and make it absolutely clear to everyone else. But making a point doesn’t do anything.
Change comes about when the story the other person tells themselves begins to change. If all you do is make a point, you’ve handed them a story about yourself. When you make a change, you’ve helped them embrace a new story about themselves.
This is the fundamental pitfall of a great deal of identity politics and precisely what is wrong with our political climate today. As Jonathan Haidt argues, instead of focusing on what we have in common as humans to unite us towards a communal cause, we fabricate a common enemy to rally an angry mob.
It’s the rich people that are the root cause of all problems. It’s the white privilege and an oppressive patriarchy that perpetuates all societal ills. It’s the liberals. It’s the conservatives. It’s the corporations. It’s the clueless and out of touch baby boomers. It’s the lazy and entitled millennials and Gen-Zers.
If we choose to play this game, it never ends. But we can choose not to play it.
I wholeheartedly agree that many of those in the upper strata of society can often speak with a sense of entitlement, and they could probably do a much better job at giving back to those less fortunate. But this is a symptom—not the issue. The more mental energy we expend trying to denigrate and rip apart the dignity of those more privileged than us, the farther and farther we get from uniting us as humanity and discerning the nuances that are necessary to understand how to fix our fragmented society.
The truth is that our only common enemy is our ignorance.
It is our arrogance to ignore the fact that complex problems require complex thinking.
It is our failure to acknowledge that in order to solve these problems, we must humble ourselves to do the intellectual heavy lifting through diligent study and civil discourse.
It is our tendency to oversimplify because yes—it’s very easy to point our fingers at the rich and say, “everything would be so much better if they just shared some of their billions of dollars with the rest of us.”
It is our inability to empathize—to look at another human being and have the patience to recognize that, if we can understand them for who they are and help them “embrace a new story about themselves,” they can equally be part of the change that we want to make in the world.
