"First World Problems"
Do people remember when many of the problems considered a "priority" to social justice zealots today, were rightly acknowledged not so long ago as "first world problems"?
FWP as a term, was a tacit admission among good-humored folks, that the little inconveniences of life for a person (not of color or of gender, but just anyone lucky enough to live in a safe/civilized country) were just that: little things that people couldn't really complain about seriously, because life could be much worse merely by living in a less safe or civilized country.
Things like not having a close parking space, getting mean comments on your blog, and McDonalds only having the McRib for a limited time-- these were very shallow issues and society largely acknowledged that those issues were minor. The 'playful' term for such minutia was "first world problems". Things workers in offices or female friends would post to each other to have a little laugh at small, unimportant or easily resolvable issues that only mattered to them because they had the luxury of living in a first world country.
"First World Problems" was a term where people directly acknowledged that simply having clean water, a functional government, and being able to walk down the street in broad daylight without gunfire in the distance, meant that the problems of everyday living were much pettier. Being able to complain about dumb things that didn't matter was a privilege in itself, inherently born to us not because of anything physical, but simply because we are in a first world country that's been largely detached and separated from real war or real poverty like you would see in a third-world country.
I think the internet has fundamentally altered what people perceive as 'important' or 'trivial', since the days when people laughed at themselves for caring about irrelevant things in the face of global struggles, in impoverished parts of the world.
Twitter and Facebook sped up this process of blurring the line between "shit that matters" and "shit that will never matter" until people felt like every single belief and opinion they held was extremely important, even on a global scale, because they were able to instantly declare these things to a huge audience which only grew over time. Imagine protest rallies having a full, enthusiastic audience to chant with, at any moment, just one blip away on their phone.
"First world problems" have become the problems that seem to matter the most online; Even the mainstream media is doing it. Where before their understanding of the internet was laughably uneducated and therefore harmless, it's climbing high enough into the mainstream to become a political campaign topic now. These aren't considered "first world problems" anymore-- they are considered more important than giving hard examinations of our society, our laws, our rights. Pepe the fucking Frog was placed on someone's desk at CNN as a story that needed to be told, regardless of them not understanding or even passively investigating the information. That is madness. These are the very definitions of first world problems. Except now they're problems of the whole world somehow.
And interestingly enough, you don't see so many people trying to make that "first world problems" argument anymore. It's been years since I've even seen anyone use the term...
Posted Sep 19, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC · edited
Mockery of first world problems went away because trivial people don't like having their triviality pointed out, and trivial people turn out to be emotionally abusive narcissists unduly often. It's the narcissism that makes them so trivial in the first place, y'see.
Also, the phrase "fallacy of relative privation" got popularized as an excuse to get angry about shit that doesn't matter. It seemed to take over the mindshare that previously went to caring about issues more serious than "first world problems".
Twitter was clearly a mistake, then...
Sure was, but at least some cheeky bugger managed to sneak a joke about it into a standards document:
With its drive for censorship and megaphoning their causes, very likely it was.
Unfortunately, this seems to have been the case.
I think you touched on something really key about "the fallacy of relative privation." I think that got popular more because sophists want fancy sounding terms to make them sound intelligent. I've been noticing a large upswing in the past few years of people's arguments basically being one word quoting of a fallacy and I have to say, whether they're anti-feminists or feminists, I don't think that makes for a good argument.
For instance, people just say "strawman" or "no true Scotsman" as if that ends everything because they've identified a logical fallacy when it may not even be the case. What irritates me even more is that it's easier for the average person to follow if you just say, "You're misrepresenting their viewpoints/opinions," or in the case our Scotsman, "You're using subjective means to make objective statements." I think for the uninitiated, these are easier to understand that quoting a whole bunch of logic jargon.
Because the problem for instance with Scotsman arguments isn't so much that they're necessarily wrong, as that they are mixing subjective criteria with objective criteria often with some wishy washy definition of what "true" is. You know, "No true feminist is a man hater. Therefore, feminism isn't about man-hating." The first sentence is just a subjective standard that anyone can hold and even though it's not born of reason, I think many people find it a reasonable thing to say, if you catch my drift. The second sentence is trying to objectively define what feminism is or isn't by your own personal standards, which is retarded. It would be just fine if they said, "My feminism isn't about man-hating," and obviously much better if their actions and words supported it, but they seldom do, do they?
"True" is an unbelievably tricky concept to prove when it's so subjective in many cases. So I see people focus on this fallacy as if it's a problem like one of the many fallacies borne out of comparing A and B in invalid ways, but it's more a problem of the subjective world vs. the objective world. For instance, you can definitely make an aesthetic argument based on such criteria, because a lot of subjectivity is involved and the criteria for good arguments isn't reason as much as it is a convincing discussion, and appeals to things like emotion are valid there because often emotion is the whole point. You could definitely say, "I don't consider paintings that seem to have little effort to be true art and the people who paint them to be true artists," because it's not dependent on facts in the first place. People might really disagree with you, but few people can agree on what art is anyway. But I see people just point and say, "Scotsman!" no matter what. That statement, for instance is not trying to establish an objective criteria for art is.
I like to encourage students to think about just typing out a few extra words if they can, because I believe this is another rhetorical trick feminists are using to get people to undermine themselves. Feminists are the ones who started pulling logical fallacies in places they don't belong. Don't believe me? Read some the mid 1900s books written by feminists around or after World War II. It's tortuous. There's so much technical language about logic that just isn't well thought out, your brain is going to seep out of your ears. (Simone de Beauvoir comes instantly to mind.)
I have searched and I have searched and I have searched and I received an education primarily based around criticism, real criticism, not critical theory and I had never heard of a "fallacy of relative privation" until recently when the whole critical theory/feminist/post-modern stuff started showing up. I have to say their stuff doesn't tend to be very good. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and I've missed something, but it doesn't seem to have much sway outside of feminism-related spheres of discourse.
I am very skeptical of its application, because OF COURSE it's a very valid and logical thought process to question whether the argument is even worth having relative to another one, which is what this "fallacy" does. I'm very much afraid that if it catches on too many people will just scream that out like they do strawman or Scotsman whether it applies or not and I don't actually see how it doesn't work logically.
It's not so much a case of replying to, "I hate this ice cream." to "Why don't you care about Cubans?" We already have a term for that. It's called a non sequitur. It's been used for centuries upon centuries and is a much stronger term than this.
Now of course, it is vital to establish what one means by important or critical in terms of the weight of problems before you assert that one is more important or another, but once you've established that, I can't think of a reason why that wouldn't be a valid argument. If the argument is what we should care about in terms of equality, because equality in social terms is not a hard, objective scientific fact, it has to be somewhat based in a certain amount of subjectivity. That opens up the argument to what is and isn't important and makes its discussion quite valid.
Who on Earth would criticize somebody who brings the topic back to a very important discussion in a parliament or congress of politicians when they've derailed into something less important?
The fallacy of relative deprivation has a point. I can be worried about my driveway having a bump. Of course compared to Somalia that is not a big problem, that does not mean I should not try to fix it.
In the case of feminists though it's not about caring, but magnitude of the reaction. If I react to a bump in my driveway by screaming how social order has gone down the drain and our civilization is no more because of the bump, people will laugh at me with good reason.
Similarly, the fact that women are very oppressed somewhere else does not mean feminists can't worry about inequalities in the west. However, reacting to a minor social inequality or inconvenience like women are second-class citizens is stupid and were one to say "i agree it sucks but in the great order of things is not a life-rending tragedy", that would not be a fallacy of relative deprivation.
The thing is I don't know that it needs to be such a specific fallacy. Your example about Somalia is covered by what I mentioned as non sequiturs. It does not follow that your driveway having a bump is not important to fix because Somalia is having problems. They're unrelated. Even if they were related, the difference in locality makes the jump a non sequitur. Similarly if a feminist had absolute proof that something like Rotheram rape scandal was happening in a cultural or location-specific context that was closer to them, hence being easier to fix, it would be a non-sequitur bring up the need to fix Somalia, because fixing one in that specific case does not necessarily relate to fixing the other (unless there was a similarity in how to fix the situation and that was the reason it was brought up).
If you make a fallacy term for every kind of invalid argument, you start to get so specific that you start to invalidate valid arguments. It's much like the privilege thing. Privilege as a concept certainly exists, but straight privilege, white privilege, male privilege? Well ...
Also, you're saying relative deprivation, which is a different concept from relative privation. What's the difference for you?
Essentially, they're misusing the term. The argument against this feminist stuff is "This isn't important." The fallacy of relative privation (which was covered in the college logic class I took a few years ago) is when you try to say something is false because something more important is true. Otherwise, it falls under non sequitur, red herring, or ignoratio elenchi.
In some cases, they're right to call relative privation, but then they fall victim to the fallacy fallacy, which is the idea that something must be untrue because somebody used a fallacy to support it.
But you're right in that a lot of people keep trying to pull out logical fallacy names to mock their opponents when they lack any kind of knowledge of what the fallacy actually means. Just the other day, I had some a-hole accuse me of No True Scotsman for stating that a government could be acting against its country.
Context: Somebody was trying to call a second amendment advocate an idiot for honoring the American flag while stockpiling guns and ammo in case he needed to overthrow the government said flag represents. I tried to explain that the flag represents the country and that the government is not the country and can, in fact, be acting against the country. Cue LOL NO TRUE SCOTSMAN LOOK AT THE LINK I POSTED TO SNARKY WEB SITE DESCRIBING NO TRUE SCOTSMAN FALLACY!!!
No difference, I just fucked up and meant relative privation.
And AFAIK relative privation IS a form of non.sequitur, yes. If you complain about your twisted ankle, telling you "hey, don't complain, at least you have legs" has nothing to do with the conversation at hand.
I can see why a feminist can get annoyed if they point out for example a shitty stereotype in a movie and people go "hey, but women in Saudi Arabia can't drive cars, so why are you complaining".
But they tend to apply it when they go "this blonde woman in this movie is proof of the untold oppression we face! Women lives in the US are so tragic and full of constant suffering!" and someone tries to put the problem in perspective.
That's the "fallacy fallacy!"
I always figured the "fallacy of relative privation" only applied to things that weren't objectively comparable.
Like, feminists complaining about sexy girl ads in the UK subway as a "real problem women face" is just simply objectively less of an issue (and thus less important and not worthy of complaint) than something like 3rd world sex trafficking. So saying one isn't as important as the other doesn't truly fall under that fallacy.
Where as comparing 3rd world sex trafficking to female genital mutilation in the 3rd world are both serious issues, so someone trying to argue one is more important to focus on than the other would fall under that fallacy.
That's just my own personal take on it, though, I suppose.
In logic classes, the fallacy of relative privation is attempting to disprove a statement by pointing to a related, more important fact. In this case, pointing out third world sex trafficking does nothing to disprove the statement "This ad causes mental problems for women who see it, and it should be pulled" It just points out some other problem that's objectively worse. What does disprove that statement is the statement "The fact that self-conscious women exist is not grounds for violating the speech rights of women who are not self-conscious."
You could also go with "Regardless of the truth value of your statement, this problem is too petty to warrant my attention. Go away," and not be guilty of relative privation, since you are not challenging the truth value of the statement.
As a rule, informal logical fallacies try to prove or disprove the truth value of a statement with things unrelated to whether it's actually true.
Thanks for the clarification!