Social circles and economic status, like psychological defence mechanisms, are prophylactics against enlightenment.
The underlying thought that prompted this statement was a news article detailing the distillation of privilege at Ivy League schools in the United States. In very broad strokes, the findings of the research for that article showed that many decades ago Ivy League universities had a disproportionately high percentage of students from very privileged backgrounds. Today, that percentage is much higher than it was all those decades ago. The conclusion was that the school system didn’t reflect meritocracy or learning, but rather social codes and systems of privilege. Likewise, economic status shields many people from the problems facing a large portion of the global population. It is not always deliberate, but it does provide a different lifestyle and different expectations about what type of potential life holds. We have seen the effects of this lack of understanding about what life looks like at different class levels, for both rich and poor – things work in reverse and often in a more insidious way for the poor and their social groups. We have also seen the impact of wilful ignorance from ruling social classes (often connected to political interests and incumbents) in the populist responses to the political status quo and the attack on “the elites”, as it were.
The use of labels for social circles is a clue to what’s really going on internally. The combination of distillation of social circles, both rich and poor, and the inability to communicate because of a lack of common experience are difficult challenges, primarily because identity is formed in the process of becoming who one is within a particular social environment. This identity formation complicates and distorts perspectives, making it difficult to accept viewpoints and foster truly empathetic responses to one another. The identity factor means that many things are at stake for people when it comes to class and social position. Challenging identity along these lines creates cognitive dissonance and humans are very good at shielding themselves from cognitive dissonance and creating the representations of reality that best reaffirm safety – I come at this from a perspective that equates threat to identity as existential threat at a psychological level. When safety is an issue, “enlightenment” – or opening oneself up to realizations that contradict one’s views – is perhaps one of the most difficult things that a person can do.
For me, “enlightenment” in this case means the ability to see past one’s characteristics and attributes, past one’s title, position, family lineage, name, race, religion, etc . It means not equating oneself with labels or ideas or histories, but looking deeper into what it means to be a “self”, an existing thing among other existing things. Enlightenment is of course “nothing” – but it is also a shift in perspective that opens a door toward wisdom that binds rather than discriminates between beings. Being attached to a notion of identity, which social circles and economic status quite strongly reify, is the definition of Sartre’s notion of “bad faith”, or in other words, “being what one is not, while not being what one is”. The prophylactic effect is the deeply complex way in which our defences shield us from opening up to losing ourselves and finding others in the process.