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Comment by markx2 | Hacker News Reader

"And my main point is that poverty and privilege are largely accidental. You don’t choose to be born into an income bracket, a country pile, a housing estate, a double barrelled name or a damp tenement bedsit. But ignorance is a choice. And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice."

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> But ignorance is a choice.

No, it's not always a choice.

You might be born in a family and community that actively brainwashes their members and prevents you from coming into contact with conflicting information.

This can even be true in less severe circumstances, such as being bombarded with propaganda on social media, which essentially hacks your brain.

I too disagree with that statement. Ignorance is just ignorance. What would make the GP's comment more accurate would be willful ignorance, but even that is stretching. To me, willful ignorance is just a sugar coating for a much more accurate/harsh description of what is actually happening.

I had a friend from a rough upbringing who called it, "poverty mindset".

Eg you have a success in your life? Prepare to be shunned and thought of with disdain by your community.

It's good to be humbled.

Envy is far from a virtue.

We can't choose how other people behave. We can choose how we react to their behavior.

And what do we call it when somebody loses status, and are shunned and thought of with disdain by their community?

If it's because of their achievements ? Misplaced jealousy !

The flip side of this is privilege mindset: you have success in your life? Your upper middle class upbringing, social safety net, financial security and financially successful peer group played no part in it, it's all because you worked hard (or smart) and now enjoy your just desserts, might as well kick down the ladder behind you so those lazy bums don't get a leg up.

Arguably this is more common among privileged folks (including those fleetingly getting a whiff of privilege, aka "temporarily embarrassed billionaires") than "poverty mindset" is among poor folks. And of course the accusation of "poverty mindset" usually isn't what you hear from the kinds like the author who actively take time and money out of their meagerly successful lives to help those worse off than them. It's instead something you're far more likely to hear from those who "made it out" (often "against all odds" without any consideration what the idea of "odds" means in this context) and incidentally don't believe they "owe" anything to those they "left behind".

When you're a public figure, you hopefully do not have those issues. Any isolation or ignorance is a choice you're making. The author is very obviously not talking about people who are in a cult, or even the average person on Facebook.

They are talking about public figures lecturing poor people on how they should behave.

Yeah, a very interesting piece of cognitive dissonance is when people are all "a person's behavior is a product of their environment, which they can't be held fully responsible for" until the person in question holds views or engages in behavior that we want to hold them personally accountable for.

I know neither the "product of environment" or "personal responsibility" view is absolute with anyone, but I've noticed that different people draw the line in widely different places.

How is that what this author is doing? Did you read the article?

How is behavior NOT a product of ones environment?

One only has the information to make decisions about the world they have gathered from their environment.

No one is born knowing correct way to behave.

As an example do you think everyone in the Middle East is Muslim because they've made the decision to be? Or because that is what their environment has taught them is correct.

> And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice

Not sure how that way of thinking is productive. Patronising people is bad in itself. Thinking that people you perceive as "privileged" can't comprehend you is a choice too and a form of ignorance.

She didn't say they "can't", she said that they "don't."

"Beyond your experience and comprehension" doesn't preclude the acquiring of more experience, it just suggests they don't currently have it.

She's pointing specifically at the people that are patronizing, and explaining why specifically their words are patronizing, not saying that nobody with any wealth could ever understand her - if they couldn't, what on earth would be the point of her blog?

The author did not say can't. In the entire piece, the only person the author used the word can't in reference to was herself, when she was poor. Choice implies a don't and a won't.

But, y'know? When those self-same people go on about how You Can Just Cook when--and this is a keyhole view, a single strand of a very nasty knot, don't you dare well-actually on the vertex and not the shape--poverty is directly tied to mental health problems and the attendant executive dysfunctions that frequently come with? It's reasonable to assume either ignorance or malice (or even, though the author does not, the incapability of can't).

And adjusting one's pince-nez to hmm-hmm-hmm about perhaps it's actually the poors who are ignorant is, to put a point on it, gross.

Especially considering what the author's been through with vindictive council busybodies making her live even that much more difficult out of sheer spite - like when they cut off her bennies before her first check even came in because they'd read about her deal in the paper - I think she held back rather more than I could in such a situation.

> Thinking that people you perceive as "privileged" can't comprehend you is a choice too and a form of ignorance.

You've kinda proven their point with this statement, no?

She's obliquely referencing Jacob Reese Mogg's sister who grew up in a Grade II listed home in Somerset, overlooking the medip hills. Her life experience is only slightly more relevant to the poverty crisis than the Salman of Saudi Arabia. There is no fucking perceived.

> Thinking that people you perceive as "privileged" can't comprehend you is a choice too and a form of ignorance.

In my experience they can't, and I do have experience in this.

In one example, a few years ago I worked with some extremely rich people. I mean, exceedingly rich. Once kept negotiating on everything, even if it was to only save a few pounds. I asked for a little cash advance (£180) to allow me to do some work for them (I was very skint then). The guy said he would give it to me - provided I committed to working for them for six months.

Well, nice try but I had my pride so it was a No anyway.

It was not done in any way nastily, to him it was a game and he didn't mean to hurt me, but he literally had no idea of how things could be to other people. He had never in his life had to live off loss-leader baked beans and bread. I've a fair number of rich people and they can't understand the struggle it can be for others. This is first hand experience and multiple data points.

Edit: the ££ involved corrected

Adjacent point based on your comment: I want to emphasize that this is not a difference in understanding between the rich in the traditional sense and the poor in the traditional sense, at least in the US. I know people with significant multi-generational family assets that don't call themselves rich. This crowd is largely (obviously not exclusively) white, US-born, and from the upper end of the middle class going up. Based on my interactions, very few seem to have experienced significant portions of their life without basic food, housing and medicinal security.

A whole lot of people within all striations of the middle class assume that they kind of "get it" through osmosis because they're not rich and they were probably friends with poorer people growing up. But barring stereotypes, we always assume other people's lives, problems, decisions, challenges, and affordances are more similar to our own that others. People from the upper end of the middle class are often blind to the difficult realities of growing up lower-middle-class in meaningful ways that create similar cultural discrepancies.

Do the wealthy not read books or newspapers? Watch film? Listen to music? It's unfathomable to me how anyone can grow up without gaining some understanding of poverty. I know it can happen, but I personally think it's more likely they pretend to not understand because it is inconvenient.

Well, a world where wealthy political leaders understand the state that the poor are in and still make statements about how they should just buy raw potatoes is an even clearer example of heartlessness.

Man, so many comments here playing the word dissection game, it's tiresome. The author is responding to a singular person here, a person who basically did say "Let them eat spuds", and based on that statement really does seem to be unable to empathize with people who aren't the children of Barons. Whether or not all people in such privileged positions are capable is irrelevant. Ms. Rees-Mogg has shown she is incapable, by her own words.

> But ignorance is a choice.

Is that true for this case?

Understanding the actual on-the-ground situation for all types of people and situations in the 10 largest countries will probably take up most of a normal human lifespan. And that's assuming they spend several hours a week, 50 weeks a year, learning.

Understanding India and China alone to that level would probably take up 30-40 years.

It seems literally impossible for the vast vast majority of people to have enough time for that ignorance to have been a meaningful choice.

i.e. This is likely the baseline default for nearly everyone, who are not especially interested in the UK or who are not super-geniuses.

When you consider the actual context of the essay and that the person to whom the author is speaking directly is the sister of an MP and herself a MEP, this kind of well-actually does ring hollow.

The sister of a generationally-wealthy MP, both the products of extremely wealthy families who did not have to work for their money (which is why they are both in politics - because they're pretty useless everywhere else).

Sister

When you make an argument in general terms, you can't call no-fair when someone takes it at face value and counter-argues in equally general terms. That's not cheating, it's just assuming good faith.

When people point out that one's counter-argument, by virtue of ignoring the context the original argument is steeped in, is not actually countering any argument, they aren't saying that the counter-argument is "cheating" - they are adding context.

You can call it "adding context" if you concede that said context implies the original argument was badly phrased, in that the most direct reading is not what the writer really meant.

Or I could just call it "adding context". I could also expect readers to not have to be spoon-fed, and to avoid launching themselves into "counter-arguments" before they have understood what they are arguing against.

An argument that doesn't contain adequate context to be understood is a bad argument. You can't expect people outside your exact bubble to have enough context to figure out things you're literally not saying.

I'd say "ignorance is a choice" misrepresents this as a problem of individuals rather than structures. Miss Mogg isn't the problem. The world would not be much better if she took the time and energy to try to learn about the author's life experience and attempt to empathize with it - which is no easy feat given they are worlds apart and each other's life experiences are likely mutually incomprehensible because they lack any frame of reference.

The ignorance is inevitable. The system that produces and enables this ignorance and that allows this ignorance to result in harm (by creating ignorant laws that create ignorant legal structures that ignorantly harm people the people who created the laws didn't understand) is the problem. You can guillotine the entire House of Lords but that wouldn't change anything other than the names and the number of dead aristocrats.

Everything you do is luck starting with the day you were born, you decide to eat an egg? Yeah it’s because you are t allergic or have money, you have money? Your parents had money. You have money? Because you had a job. You have a job? Maybe because you had a functioning brain, good hand/feet. It’s all luck in that sense. You decide to just wait for luck to come after reading this? It was also luck you read this comment

The next sentence is:

> Choosing to use the powers vested in you by the constituencies you serve, to deprive those same constituents of light, heating, food and home security is a wilful and deliberate act. And it has to stop.

It’s abundantly clear that the whole passage was speaking to Rees-Mogg, calling her out for her Marie Antoinette ‘let them eat potatoes’.

This passage isn’t a generalism, is a specific response to the words of a former politician, a former Conservative MP and MEP for East Midlands.

To reduce the articles substance to a specially selected out of context quote such as OP highlighted seems disingenuous.

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