Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

It’s misguided and toxic to center your worldview around the “most marginalized” or to think that focusing on them somehow gives you the moral high ground or frees you from the obligation to play by the meta-rules of society and its institutions. Or to think that your worldview somehow has a monopoly on helping marginalized people. You invoke “rationality” but as Spock would say, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

View on HN

That Spock quote is from Star Trek II, Wrath of Khan. Later, in Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home Chekov is in grave danger but to rescue him would put their mission at risk which would endanger many more people. This conversation occurs:

      UHURA'S VOICE
  They report his condition as critical;
  he is not expected to survive.
  
      BONES
  Jim, you've got to let me go in there!
  Don't leave him in the hands of
  Twentieth Century medicine.
  
      KIRK
  (already decided, but:)
  What do you think, Spock?
  
      SPOCK
  Admiral, may I suggest that Dr.
  McCoy is correct. We must help
  Chekov.
  
      KIRK
  (testing)
  Is that the logical thing to do,
  Spock...?
  
      SPOCK
  No, Admiral... But is the human
  thing to do.
  
      KIRK
  (takes a beat)
  Right.

I trust you’ll maintain that view if and/or when you become a marginalized group, and the dominant group shifts the meta-rules of society and its institutions in ways you don’t like?

This view usually strikes me as hypocritical because it’s almost always paired with a paranoia of becoming a marginalized group and a belief that maintaining majority status for their group is “right” in some way.

It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.

"Marginalized" groups have not been helped in any way by any of this. Lumping everyone together into a group who is not a white straight man diminishes everyone's individual material problems into a generic "marginalization," and unfairly centralizes white straight men. It's something that wealthy powerful people do in order not to have to discuss their wealth and power, and the fact that they all grew up in sundown towns.

This wave of wealthy white people screaming "bigot" at other white people without health care hasn't raised the condition of the descendants of slaves at all. Instead it's been an expansion of welfare for well-off white women and affluent immigrants. Everybody has been oppressed like black people except for the descendants of slaves, and everybody has been stuck in a caste system except for Dalits.

"Marginalized" people want to be addressed as individual humans with material problems like other humans. Instead a bunch of people so wealthy and comfortable that they are almost completely detached from the material world and have never missed a meal treat everyone like symbols and try to read the world like literary critics.

> It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.

Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.

Refusing to address the shared material hardships diffuses responsibility to the point where the hardships can be dismissed. There are too many branches on that tree to address, which makes it very easy to just do nothing. No one but celebrities get their individual hardships addressed, it just doesn’t scale to this size of a country.

> Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.

I don’t think it’s a wild presumption that most people in the few aren’t terribly excited about being asked to pay the cost for the many again. “Please lock us in another generation of poverty” is not a political slogan I hear very often. If that’s what you want to stand on, go ahead I suppose, it’s a free country.

Not to mention the fact that heterosexual, cis-gendered, christian, male is about a quarter of the US population[1], so categorizing it broadly as "many" vs "few" is already over-simplifying.

Intersectionality was intended to add nuance to discussions of discrimination (e.g. a black woman's experience is not reduced to "sexism" plus "racism"), but it seems to have popularly had the opposite effect of reducing everybody to a demographic venn-diagram.

1: If you exclude "male" and "christian" from the criteria, you do end up with a majority. If you switch "christian" to "protestant" then you make the minority even more stark, but anti-Catholic sentiment among protestants has significantly declined over the past few decades, so I don't think that historical division of categories makes sense anymore.

That’s an invitation to think emotionally rather than rationally. (And not that it matters, but I recall white people literally crying back in 2016 that a certain president would put me and my kids in an internment camp. I’m glad I kept thinking rationally rather than emoting.)

Not to mention that Spock is consenting to his fate in taking on the role of "the few... or even the one." He's clearly rationalizing, not stating a universal constant.

Agreed and also it's rarely the case that the "most marginalized" who are elevated in public discourse genuinely are the most marginalized. More often it's just invoked to make some untrue political point. Kind of like how accusations of genocide are thrown around so freely these days. Typically it's rhetoric with very little substance.

Spock's entire character was the marriage of purely logical Vulcans and emotional humans and the necessity of having both. You fundamentally don't understand Star Trek's themes.

>“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

The brewer, the baker and the candle stick maker need a new kidney, liver and heart. Thank you for volunteering to be killed so we can harvest your organs and keep the many alive.

Alternatively don't base your world view on a TV show from the 1960s.

Even in the movie's own terms, that's an ethical aphorism spoken by a character to justify his act of self sacrifice, and to comfort a great friend that he's coming to his unfortunate end on his own terms and for his own reasons and, in Spock's way, as an act of love, in a sense.

It's not, like, "go shit on minorities if it makes the majority's utility-units increase".

There was a story in Analog a few years ago called "Dibs" if I recall the title correctly about a world that worked like that.

Whenever someone could be saved by a transplant they would find possible donors and send them a notification that one of their organs could save someone. Usually after a few weeks the potential donor would get notification that the person who needed the organ has died. During the time between those two notifications the dying person was said to have dibs on the organ.

Occasionally someone would get a second notification about someone having dibs on another one of the organs while someone already had dibs on one of their organs. Again what usually is that those people would die soon and the person would go back to nobody having dibs on any of their organs.

Sometimes though a person with people having dibs on two of their organs would get notified that a third person now had dibs on one of their organs. That was enough that the needs of the many thing kicked in and they were required to give up those organs, which would usually be fatal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com