2023-10-04_Embrace_your_Privilege
00:00:00.000 | With Kroger Brand products from Ralphs, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season.
00:00:05.200 | Because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.
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00:00:14.800 | ♪ These are a few of my favorite things ♪
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00:00:30.300 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,
00:00:37.900 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:40.500 | My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host.
00:00:42.700 | Today on the show, I want to talk to you about the concept of privilege,
00:00:46.900 | and why privilege, in the modern usage, is something that you should embrace and that you should seek for and develop in both yourself, your family members, etc.
00:01:00.300 | I've thought a lot about this over the past decade because of the growth of this term "privilege."
00:01:08.700 | The word "privilege" is something that we all use, and I think used quite rightly.
00:01:13.900 | I think of myself as a very privileged person. Always have.
00:01:18.100 | I encourage my children to recognize how privileged they are.
00:01:22.900 | But this word has become somewhat hot, somewhat debated in terms of its application.
00:01:32.900 | There's been a countervailing cultural force of people talking about privilege in a negative term.
00:01:39.900 | You hear this and things that are evidently said among people in college, such as "check your privilege."
00:01:46.500 | Basically, it means you should pay attention to the fact that you're speaking from a privileged perspective and you should stop.
00:01:53.100 | And as I've thought about this over the years, I have come to realize that it's very important that we have a clear and proper ethical understanding of the responsibilities that privilege entails,
00:02:09.400 | so that we can behave properly when we are the recipients of a privileged position.
00:02:17.300 | This is very important and germane to the topic of financial planning, because virtually everything we do in good financial planning is going to result in creating additional levels of privilege for you and for your children.
00:02:35.200 | Virtually every good, smart life decision, even though it's not in the personal finance domain, is going to result in additional levels of privilege for you and for your children.
00:02:48.900 | And if you feel bad about that or you feel like that's a negative thing in some way, then you're creating a friction.
00:02:54.000 | You're creating something that may keep you from doing those things that are positive.
00:02:58.500 | This week, I've been reading a book called "The Two-Parent Privilege, How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind" by author Melissa S. Kearney.
00:03:08.500 | And this book has been published some weeks ago. It's been making the rounds in the news and whatnot.
00:03:13.800 | And as I understand the basic thesis of the book, I'm about a quarter of the way into it.
00:03:18.800 | As I understand the basic thesis of the book, it's simply that the distance between children who are raised in a two-parent household by a mother and father who are married, as compared to every other segment of society, children who are raised by single parents, children, everything, everything that's not that,
00:03:39.100 | the distance between the natural achievement and the natural success factors of those children is just night and day different.
00:03:50.400 | And what is interesting is this is following a trend that I've talked about for quite a while on Radical Personal Finance here and there, which is simply that there's a difference between what people say and what people do.
00:04:02.400 | And this trend is one of those things that is likely why it is widening income inequality, wealth inequality, etc., because the wealthiest among us, those who are college educated, those who come into family wealth, etc., live their lives and their lifestyles in a very traditional fashion.
00:04:21.400 | They get married, they stay married, they have children, whereas other people who are not so privileged, do not have high levels of income, do not have significant wealth, etc., are increasingly not marrying, not having children in marriage, etc., and this is creating just kind of a knock-on effect.
00:04:44.400 | So we'll cover those topics on another time, but I was thinking about the use of the word privilege, the two-parent privilege.
00:04:52.400 | And it's one of those things that is a pretty good indication of a good place to start.
00:04:59.400 | I myself come from a very privileged background. I was raised by my mother and my father, who loved each other, loved their family, and worked hard to maintain a strong and stable family and to give their children what they were able to give their children.
00:05:17.400 | My parents were not wealthy. My parents, my family was certainly middle class, but they had seven children and that. My dad was a professional, my mom was a stay-at-home mom. My dad never made nearly as much money as his potential would have seemed.
00:05:33.400 | He didn't have me career coaching him into the highest paid job because money was never his primary priority, but he was able to provide for his family, etc., but on a single income with seven children, we didn't have a lot of fancy stuff.
00:05:47.400 | Our vehicles were bought, used, and driven for a very long time. I saw the inside of a restaurant about twice a year, I would guess.
00:05:56.400 | We just didn't have a lot of things. When my family and I went camping, my dad bought a $500 camper and towed it across the country and that was it. So we didn't have a lot of the consumption things from a wealth perspective.
00:06:10.400 | And so this can cause you to go in two directions. You can say, "Well, I didn't come from much," and yet you can also recognize, and you should recognize as I do, that I come from a very privileged position.
00:06:22.400 | Because when I compare my life course and the things that have happened in my own life, I can see that the psychological stability, the relational stability, the values that were held in front of me, modeled in front of me, the understanding of the world, the religious ideology that was taught to me, etc., all of these things have contributed to my personal privilege.
00:06:48.400 | So should I check my privilege then? Or should I do something else? I think there are two extremes when we talk about the word "privilege" that are both flawed.
00:06:57.400 | The first is the extreme of denying that privilege or advantages exist. Sometimes I think this is especially true as a counteraction to the "check your privilege" folks.
00:07:10.400 | That we want to say, "Well, I'm not privileged," or "I did this myself. I built myself from nothing. I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps."
00:07:19.400 | This is largely nonsense. While all of us have worked for what we have, there are so many layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of benefits, of resources, of privilege that we have all inherited, that it's insane for any of us to say, "Well, I can pull myself up by my bootstraps. I'm the one who can and who can do it all."
00:07:46.400 | It's a crazy comment. I think about this a lot when I experience some kind of health event. I think about this when I experience something where I'm sick.
00:07:57.400 | I realize how huge of a portion of my success has been due to simply generally feeling good.
00:08:06.400 | When I'm sick and I have no energy, it's so hard to work. Yet, I have many friends who are sick. They suffer from chronic conditions, debilitating, disabling back pain, debilitating, disabling diseases that cause chronic fatigue, etc.
00:08:27.400 | I remember when I had COVID and had several days of chronic fatigue, it just made me appreciate how little you can do when you don't feel good. Yet, all my life, I've generally felt good.
00:08:40.400 | The benefits we have of our inherited intellectual capacity, you realize sometimes, I used to think everyone was intellectually equal and that I'm the same as everyone else.
00:08:51.400 | Then you meet people and you say, based upon the person's actions, "I don't want to say it, but this person is genuinely kind of dumb. He or she doesn't seem to have the intellectual capacity to do something."
00:09:04.400 | It fills your heart with compassion when you recognize that and you then have to figure out, "What do I do with it?"
00:09:11.400 | Then things like all the little things. We talked about health, but physical attractiveness. Physically attractive people have enormous advantages.
00:09:21.400 | I never thought much about physical attraction, but I always recognized I'm very tall. Tall men have it easier in life. They're automatically respected. They're automatically looked up to, etc.
00:09:32.400 | The circumstances that you were raised in, being the inheritor of a system. I grew up in the United States of America, one of the most remarkable free and open societies in the world in which you can pretty much become and do anything that you want to become and do.
00:09:49.400 | It's an egalitarian system, a meritocracy, a system that relies upon your ability to work hard and to produce results rather than your connection, your family birth, etc. That makes an enormous difference.
00:10:07.400 | We are the inheritors of all of the work that our forebears have done to create a peaceful and stable society. If you look at the history of the world, the normal condition of humanity is that of war, of violence, of infighting, etc.
00:10:31.400 | To live in a peaceful society is something that our forebears worked and worked and worked and worked to create. To try to find a way to bring people together and find common sets of values that lead to social peace so that you can do more with your life than think about building walls around your compound and protecting yourself from invaders.
00:10:53.400 | The list goes on and on and on and on. I think the first extreme reaction could be to deny privilege and that would be completely foolish.
00:11:04.400 | The other extreme reaction would be to use what I'm going to characterize as the "check your privilege" approach, which means that privilege is something that you should basically try to get rid of.
00:11:18.400 | I understand that that's a little bit more extreme than a lot of people would say, but in essence, I think that is the message that is often heard. To say, "I'm a privileged person, so I should try to get rid of this privilege in some way."
00:11:34.400 | This is a very classic common thing that happens among societies. We don't like it when other people are successful and we're not. We generally want to tear those people down.
00:11:46.400 | All of us experience this. I experience jealousy and frustration when someone else is successful. Unless I'm very diligent to train myself to rejoice with those who rejoice and to intentionally celebrate their success, it's so easy to just want that person to do worse.
00:12:04.400 | If a fat person is surrounded by his fat friends and he starts to go on a diet, his fat friends will try everything they can to try to get him to eat stuff that is going to keep him fat. He has to get around different people who are going to build him up.
00:12:20.400 | Check your privilege, or the concept of getting rid of privilege, or acknowledging it and then limiting your actions because of it, is a toxic, completely toxic ideology.
00:12:34.400 | It's something that strives to make people feel bad about things that they can't control, things that they didn't do. It's something that tries to cause people to discard all of the things that their forebears worked for and struggled for and developed, etc.
00:12:56.400 | We have to be careful that we can be toxic on both sides. What's the right solution? I think the right solution is to recognize that to whom much is given, much is required.
00:13:07.400 | And the reason that we are fundamentally given benefits in life is so that we can help to spread and expand those benefits. And the ethics of privilege are perfectly encapsulated in that sentence I just said.
00:13:23.400 | To whom much is given, much is required. A man who has been given much, of him much will be required on every single level. Think about something like physical strength and superiority.
00:13:43.400 | A man who has physical strength and physical superiority is expected to use that to help those who have less physical strength and less physical superiority.
00:13:53.400 | This is why men must protect and care for women and children. A man, a large, strong man, should be the primary defender and caretaker of women and children and those who are less physically strong in order that they succeed.
00:14:13.400 | Somebody who comes from an intact family, grows up with his mother and father and knows what family life is like, has a responsibility to use that for the benefit of others.
00:14:28.400 | I grew up in a close, loving family. I cannot remember a single holiday meal where our family was not enlarged by the presence of various other people who didn't have family.
00:14:43.400 | We normally had three to five single men and women, old men and women, people who didn't have their own family to celebrate with, sometimes many more at our holiday gatherings, simply because these are people who need family.
00:14:58.400 | And so you have a responsibility to use your family to take in the orphan, the wayfaring stranger, the strays from the streets. That is our fundamental responsibility.
00:15:08.400 | So if you're wealthy, what is your responsibility? Your responsibility is to use your wealth and to invest it for the good of those around in whatever way seems appropriate.
00:15:19.400 | If there are people on the street who are hungry and in need, you must feed them. If there are people on the streets or people, your neighbors who are in want, you must provide for them.
00:15:30.400 | And we have, that is your fundamental responsibility, your responsibility to do that. If you are well-educated, it is your responsibility to help and use your education for the benefit of others, because we are all part of our local communities, our broader community.
00:15:51.400 | We are humans, we are brothers and we have to work together. And so the ethic is that we have to embrace privilege and yet use it for its positive ends. Privilege is something that we want to see more and more of in the world, not less and less.
00:16:11.400 | If we tear those who are privileged down and we try to cut them down to size in any way, shape or form, if there's anything we do that causes someone to feel ashamed of where he's come from or ashamed of who he is and what he's achieved, etc., we are creating the seeds of misery and despair.
00:16:38.400 | The proper ethic is to recognize these things, understand where they have come from, understand the benefits and the privileges that we have, and then seek to increase them for our children and for our fellow man.
00:16:57.400 | It's really interesting when you think about having children, because when people—I don't know a parent of any political or philosophical persuasion that doesn't try to give his or her children the very best life and lifestyle that he or she is capable of providing.
00:17:20.400 | I don't know a parent, I've never met a parent, I'm sure there's some out there, but I've never met a parent who hasn't been focused on giving his or her children everything possible, every possible advantage.
00:17:34.400 | And that's a really illuminating idea. It shows us that we can accurately identify those advantages that people have, and then we can seek to pass them along if we focus on them.
00:17:51.400 | And with children, we generally feel more altruistic, we generally feel more willing to provide for them without getting benefit for ourselves. But it ought to be the same thing with anybody around. We should be seeking the best for others continually.
00:18:09.400 | There is a term that I myself use that's different than "check your privilege," and that term is "embrace your privilege."
00:18:22.400 | Those who have come before you, those who have been around you, those who have loved you, those who have worked for you, and though you be the orphan who was raised on the streets, you are still not exempt from this.
00:18:38.400 | Even if your parents hated you and your neighbors hated you, etc., you are still the inheritor of a system that has been built systematically, step by step, over many generations, with men and women laying down their lives for your good.
00:18:55.400 | And we will continue that system in our generation and through the generations to come. Rather than despising what those people have done, rather than despising the great gifts and benefits and advantages and privileges that you have inherited, you should embrace them.
00:19:16.400 | Embrace every single one of them. If you were raised in a two-parent privilege lifestyle where your mother and your father were in your home caring for you, etc., embrace that. Reproduce that. Share it with others.
00:19:36.400 | If you were born and raised in wealth, embrace that. Reproduce that. Share it with others and teach others how to do it. If you were given intellectual capacity, embrace that. Use that. Share it with others.
00:19:52.400 | If you were able to grow up free of racism and discrimination, embrace that. Share it with others. Use it to help others. Embrace your privilege and recognize that with great power, with great privilege, with great advantage, comes great responsibility.
00:20:14.400 | To whom much is given, much is required. And you and I, to whom much has been given, we are morally responsible to use that for the benefit of our fellow man.
00:20:30.400 | You and I are morally responsible to recognize those things that have contributed to our good fortune, to our good situation, and to build systems that will result in the continuance of that for others and the expansion of that for others.
00:20:49.400 | Not only must we recognize the benefits that we have been given, but we must embrace them and we must expand them so that the next generation, be it a generation that issues from our loins with a generation below us, or the next generation rippling out to the side from us, to our fellow man walking through life with us,
00:21:14.400 | the next generation must be put in a better situation than we are. That is our responsibility as humans.
00:21:24.400 | So, on the topic of privilege, embrace your privilege and expand it to others.
00:21:33.400 | Thank you for listening to today's podcast. In closing, speaking of privilege, if you want to understand how privileged you are and to embrace that privilege and appreciate it for all of its good things, I want to encourage you to sign up for my Panama event that I'm hosting in January of 2024.
00:21:51.400 | One of the things that's fascinating to me, having traveled around the world quite a lot, has been how said travels have transformed my understanding of my advantages in life.
00:22:05.400 | Though you be the lowest person in American society or French society or some wealthy Western country, which is where most of my listening audience comes, though you think everything is against you, spend a little time outside of your normal areas of hanging out, your normal walks of life, and things will transform for you.
00:22:34.400 | This event that I'm hosting in January of 2024 will be in the nation of Panama. Panama and the places that we'll be going will be very high-end, very luxury, etc., very developed. Panama is a wonderful country.
00:22:47.400 | Yet, one of the benefits of going and doing business in Panama or going and using a place like Panama or many other countries is that you get to see what it's like to be rich.
00:23:00.400 | Because on a global scale, every single one of my listeners, every single one of us is extremely wealthy. And it's often hard to realize that when you're in the United States.
00:23:13.400 | Because you're surrounded by so much wealth, it's easy to focus on what other people have and not on what you have.
00:23:20.400 | But when you go to places where the wealth is less visible and less broad in its presence, it changes you. It changes you in a deep and fundamental way.
00:23:30.400 | I remember the first time I spent a couple weeks in Nicaragua years ago. And I lived with a very poor family out in the countryside.
00:23:40.400 | And it challenged fundamentally much of my ideology. And I realized that I had an ideology that was appropriate for the United States of America.
00:23:52.400 | But the ideology that was appropriate for the United States of America was not the ideology that was appropriate for Nicaragua.
00:23:58.400 | That was not to diminish the benefits of my own American ideology. But it was to say that there was more texture and more nuance and more need.
00:24:10.400 | I'll leave that for another day. But I would love to invite you to come and see how internationalization can serve you.
00:24:17.400 | If you'd like to do that, go to expatmoney.com/radical. Expatmoney.com/radical. Link in the show notes. Sign up to come to the event in January.
00:24:27.400 | Hang out with me, with my friends Mikkel Thorup and Gabriel Custodiat. And up to 40 of your fellow listeners.
00:24:36.400 | We're going to have a great event in Panama where we're going to discuss Panama specifically.
00:24:40.400 | We're going to do an investment tour of Panama and talk about residency options, banking options, all kinds of the options, the things that Panama offers, lifestyle options, etc.
00:24:50.400 | And then we're going to discuss internationalization much more broadly. It's going to be a private event.
00:24:55.400 | We're going to talk in detail about all the different topics of internationalization and basically just hang out for a week.
00:25:01.400 | So if you'd like to come and hang out for a week with me and with my fellow co-hosts, then sign up today. Go to expatmoney.com/radical. Expatmoney.com/radical.
00:25:11.400 | With Kroger Brand products from Ralphs, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season.
00:25:16.400 | Because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.
00:25:21.400 | And with a money-back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite.
00:25:26.400 | These are a few of my favorite things.
00:25:29.400 | Whether you shop delivery, pickup, or in-store, Kroger Brand has all your favorite things.
00:25:36.400 | Ralphs. Fresh for everyone.
00:25:38.400 | [MUSIC PLAYING]