Future Here Now: Saviors fail most of the time (or, Your Privilege Does Not Mean You Have the Right Answers)
Try It On
This week's series focuses on one of the key foul-ups many of us make in this transition to the Fusion Economy - especially those of us who have been part of the majority most of our lives.
Many of us were taught from a very early age that people like us were supposed to be leading the world. Sometimes we call that Euro-centrism, sometimes patriarchy or privilege. It’s generally the purview of people who have access to formal education, who aren’t struggling to find food and stable income, who benefit from a society and set of cultural norms that assumes that they know what they’re doing.
One outcome of this system is that many of us got the message that we had a responsibility to solve the problems facing less fortunate people - that our book education, our relative privilege, our know how, meant that we were going to be the ones who could fix it — it had to be, it certainly wasn't going to be those poor unwashed that we were doing all that fixing for.
This was a major part of the legacy of the early 20th century Progressive movevement. Throughout that time period and through the Great Society program era and beyond, we see comfortable and educated people who are concerned about the plight of those less fortunate…and impose the solutions that they come up with onto those people, often with damaging, if not disastrous, results. We don't seriously think that people who are poor or uneducated might actually know what they need, do we? We’re a little more subtle about it now than we were 100 years ago, but far too often, we fall into that same misguided assumption. Far too often, we still do our problem-solving to them, instead of doing it with them. But in the Fusion Era, we will pay for those kinds of mistakes in new ways.
In earlier versions of this First Principle, I referred to White (elite) saviors. That was an awkward way to try to get at an important differentiation:
Historically, the Saviors who have done most of the failing have been people of European descent and appearance and corresponding privilege. The 20th centry is loaded with the debris of white do-gooders, from Pruitt Igoe to downtown shopping malls. But it's also possible to make this mistake if you are a relatively privileged member of a historically disadvantaged population. The key isn't the color, it's the belief that I Know Best.
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Try It On
Think about a time when you were sure
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