Money is the first and most conspicuous form of privilege, though I will end up thinking it the least sufficient. If you are rich, you can buy whatever you want to get your way to pursue your passion, can you not? If my passion lies in music, I can buy the piano. I can pay someone to teach me how to play it, because I can afford one. I can afford to sit my ABRSM or Trinity College London examinations. I can enrol myself in the best music school, because I can afford it. Sounds neat.

But money does not fall off a tree, and it is surely not easy to make. Were it easy, everyone would be rich. So I think of something even money cannot buy, which is time.

Suppose my passion lies in music, and suppose that making it happen requires money. Out of a desperate wish for the most insufferable but most lucrative thing available to me, I become an investment banker. Bankers are notorious for slicing off hours of time. So I have money as a means of access to my passion, and the long hours have taken my creative freedom with them. I need the money and I need the time, and the occupation I chose in order to secure the first is precisely what consumes the second.

Isaiah Berlin, in his 1958 lecture on the two concepts of liberty, separated the freedom that consists in nobody obstructing you from the freedom that consists in your actually being able. Nobody is obstructing me from the piano. I simply have no hours in which to sit at it, which amounts to much the same thing from where I am standing.

I have been working as an investment banker for three years now (below the age of twenty five, of course, breaking into private equity at Goldman Sachs right away). And what if I start enjoying it? That is good. I do not even hate it sporadically anymore. I settle for the fact that music will not be one of my passions. I settled for being an investment banker, and I was content.

Here is the part that unsettles me. It is tempting to say I had a passion and relinquished it, though that account flatters me considerably. What happened is that the wanting itself adjusted to what was available. Jon Elster called this sour grapes in his 1983 book of that name, after the fox who decides the unreachable fruit was sour anyway. From the inside, the revision is experienced as a discovery about what one truly wanted. So I cannot offer my own contentment as proof that nothing was forfeited. I am satisfied, I mean it sincerely, and that is precisely what the theory says a person in my position would report.

Money and time still do not cover it. Consider Albert Camus, who kept goal for the junior side at Racing Universitaire d’Alger and loved the game, until he contracted tuberculosis at seventeen in 1930 and football was finished. No amount of money could buy back a pair of lungs (at the time), and no amount of leisure does either. He did receive something in exchange. He had a philosophy teacher at the lycée, Jean Grenier, who turned him towards books, and one capacity closed while another opened.

So privilege to pursue a passion means having the ability to pursue it in the first place, and having the opportunity to pursue it. Opportunity is a long discussion, and there are a lot of circularities in the reasonings of opportunity, which I intend to take up in my next article.

One more thing, since somebody is bound to raise it. My banker earned that money, and three years of misery paid for it. He holds it all the same, and the man who holds none of it did not work any less. Privilege as I am using the word describes what a person has. Whether he deserves it is a separate question, and I have been quietly running the two together.

So I think of privilege as money, time, and ability. Do not get me wrong. There could be an investment banker who is also a part-time pianist, and in that sense he is more privileged than the rest of us. None of this is an accusation.

What I find unfair is that privilege can be an enabler of passion and the absence of it is a barrier. And the worse of it, the part I keep returning to, is that when the barrier stands there from the beginning it does not look like a barrier at all. It looks like an ordinary life, and the person inside such a life adjusts his wants until they fit it, and reports himself perfectly happy.

Arya Utgi

One of the most important things my professor taught me in economics was the concept of relativism, not the one Einstein is famous for, that is relativity and an entirely different matter, though of comparable importance to understanding how the world works and whom it chooses to work for. In economics, almost no quantity is intelligible in isolation. Six percent growth, relative to what? But what about people?

We have this fidgety little habit of comparing one thing against another just to establish how much better or worse it is. The comparative form in English grammar holds as much importance in this world as the theory of relativity, you see what I did there? Now you understand how much we depend on expressing one thing in terms of another before it means anything to us.

It is all around us. If you are the best student in the school, then your best-ness is determined entirely by the performance of the students you are being compared to, so being the best somewhere does not mean you will be the best everywhere. There is always an unstated comparison contained in such a claim, since “this is the best shop in this town” means “out of all the ones I have tried in this town.” The philosopher Peter Geach drew the relevant distinction in 1956. Some adjectives are predicative, meaning they can be detached from the noun without loss, so that a red car is both red and a car. Others are attributive, where detaching them destroys the sense, since a large flat is not a large building. Geach’s own concern was the word good, which he argued is invariably attributive, so that nothing is ever simply good, only good of its kind. Best is the superlative of precisely this sort of word, and yet it is received as though it were a verdict capable of standing alone.

The question we keep having to ask is, relative to what? If everything is relative, does a true best exist at all? And why do we feel the need to use the word so often? Partly because it is less wordy and less awkward than the nuanced alternatives, for it is true that the “best student award” is easier to say than the “better-than-everyone-else-in-one’s-grade award.” But the greater part of it is that the superlative confers recognition, and recognition is what most of us are actually after. To be told you performed well is a report about an occasion. To be told you are the best is a claim about your nature, and a claim about one’s nature extends forward into every occasion that has not yet occurred. That is precisely how the hope is instated. The award converts a solitary measurement into an identity, and an identity, unlike a measurement, presents itself as permanent. This is why the word is given, and it is given in good faith.

This is, in my very respectful view, deceptive. There are plenty of jokes on the internet about students who peak in high school and then decline in college, and while it is all fun and games, it is an actual problem. Schools will award you the best something for anything, and it says nothing about you if there is no information on the pool. Michael Spence established the condition in 1973, in his work on signalling: a signal conveys information only insofar as the person receiving it can infer something about the population it was drawn from. Remove the population and the signal is empty, however impressive its wording. Would you be clapping if you received the best Spanish speaker award in a school full of German-speaking people? Because you have no knowledge of the others, you are made to believe you are the best there, and for a teenager that is probably the confidence boost they needed in order to believe they are the best in their field, when they could be merely competitively good.

A lot of people call it burnout, but I believe it is something else. When you enter college you enter a space full of people who won the best Spanish speaker award at their own schools, the pool becomes more competitive, and logically that makes sense, does it not? May the best one win. It is only mathematics, really. Any extreme result is part ability and part chance, and the smaller the group the greater the contribution of chance, so a first place among forty was always going to regress towards its true level once the sample enlarged. But no student experiences this as arithmetic. The belief was never arrived at independently, it was conferred, and a conferred belief has no foundation of its own to rest on. The student possessed no measure of ability apart from the ranking, since the ranking was the only evidence ever supplied, so when the ranking is withdrawn the evidence departs along with it and nothing remains underneath. What collapses is therefore not the performance, which was real and is still there, but the entire apparatus by which the student had been judging the self.

Let us say that even in college the student remains the best Spanish speaker at a German university, out of all the other people who were the best Spanish speakers at their German schools. Is that student a better Spanish speaker than a Spanish student at a Spanish university, in Spain, among Spanish people, who grew up in Spain surrounded by more Spanish people? Nothing is truly impossible, but probabilistically speaking, perhaps not.

I have been using the life of a student only as an example, though the idea applies to anything that is framed as the best something. Someone in my past once called me their best friend, and it gave me the false belief that I would be their best friend forever, when it quite literally meant “you are the best out of the friends I have right now, until you are not, or until I find a friend whose best-ness is better than yours.”

So if you are the best somewhere, you are only the best there, at one point in time, and there will always be a potential better than yours. That does not have to be discouraging, it is a grounding fact. Fred Hirsch named the category in 1976, calling them positional goods: things whose worth consists entirely in relative standing, which therefore cannot be extended to more people without being diminished, so that if everyone ascends, no one has ascended. Rank is the purest instance of it. The Spanish you can actually speak is subject to no such constraint. And when you stop believing you are the best, you end up learning more, because the belief pushes you towards discovering your true potential rather than defending a ranking, it releases you from the fear of failure and drives you towards growth and the discovery of interest and self.

This is true of the antecedent as well. If you are not the best something, rejoice, for you are not confined to it. You are free to improve, to explore, to build yourself out of bricks painted by you. An unconditional best, one that answers to no comparison whatsoever, does not exist. What exists is you, and only you can be the best you there is, just as only you can be the worst you, because there is no one else like you and in that one respect you are not competing. So it does not matter if you are no longer someone’s best friend, because “someone’s best friend” was never who you were.

Arya Utgi