Idolatry, Superstition and Fetishism

You hear a word like "idolatry" and it has a reserved spot in the parking garage in your head. It slips right in and it has nothing to do with you. It's not your spot and probably not in your building. This is one of the intangible elements of privilege. Privileged people don't have the cause to doubt themselves. Not the way other people do.

Because they have won. Life has judged them right by the outcome. If this has the ring of something other than honest self-assessment I'm with you, but it's natural as hell. Let's say someone is one of the few survivors in an accident and they know, more than anybody, that it was nothing but luck. It still has cachet. They appear special and chosen.

Here's the point: I think those "chosen" persons know better than the outsiders that it's invented. It's a question of where they go from there, acceptance and admission or denial and defensiveness. But they know, at least in a crevice in their consciousness. It's superstition to think otherwise: invented, metaphysical causation.

I think I remember Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart being interviewed, and others of their generation, and saying that they had been unbelievably fortunate. They recognized that, whatever else, the opportunity had to be there and that luck was involved, but they were incredibly talented. They can afford the admission, but not our guys.

Our guys, the new privileged class, know somewhere down deep how utterly unworthy they are. That's why they're so defensive, but we're accomplices and responsible as well because privilege can only apply to a minority or it becomes the norm. If a majority of people survive an accident there's no cachet. They weren't chosen.

A majority has to buy into it or it doesn't work. This is the link with birtherism, climate-denial and creationism, all forms of invented causality or the denial of actual causality--not of an instance of causality but causality, period. They are in a full flight from and fight against reality and end up in idolatry, superstition and fetishism.