Category: Reflections on Society

The Elitist Fallacy and Why You Should Watch Out for It

There is a surprisingly prevalent but flawed type of argument you may hear people make that I call the “Elitist Fallacy.” The Elitist Fallacy is a way to falsely position one’s skills, approach, and/or discipline as crucial in a given situation. 

This is how the argument goes:

1) X Skill is crucial or necessary. 

2) I cultivated X Skill through Y Practice. 

3) Thus, Y Practice is the only and/or best way to develop a needed skill. 

People more often invoke this kind of reasoning implicitly rather than explicitly, especially since when you see the argument laid out like this, you may easily spot its flaw. Just because someone developed a skill one way does not mean it is the only way to develop that skill. 

The first two premises may be true: X Skill may be important, and the person in question may have used Y Practice to cultivate X Skill. It is wonderful that they were able to develop that skill in that way. The error comes in assuming that since this was the way they did it, it is thus the only way to develop that skill. There could be many other ways that work for other people, and if you are to present your way as the sole or at least best, you must carefully explain why the others do not work as well as it does. 

People often invoke this argument to sell themselves as the sole or best person to hire to invoke that skill, and disciplines often foster it to institutionalize their way to teaching the skill or conducting that type of work as the only important approach so that they receive more attention, money, and/or following.. 

But, it falsely elevates one’s experiences to rank of the sole experiences in a given matter, making it elitist. As such, watch out for it in others and try to be aware if it creeps into your own assumptions. 

Do you assume your path to understanding is the only way to develop a particular skill, and if so, do you have explicit justifications as to why? Try to engage with others around the world who do something similar to see whether they had a completely different way of developing that skill in their context. 

What Is the Point of Money?

Many spend their lives acquiring money, but what really is money? 

For many scholars, money is the ability to do something – whether that is to eat a sandwich, own a nice necklace, have someone provide a service for you – turned into a quantified unit. By this definition, money has incredible value. It literally is the ability to do or have things, but there are still some limitations to that value. 

First, the capacity to do what? At the end of the day, money is a tool, a way to meet other goals. Capacity makes a very poor goal or purpose in itself. People who pursue money for money’s sake are attaining the ability to do things without a sense of what they want to do in life in the first place. 

Second, as quantified capacity, money becomes less valuable the more you attain it. Everyone has the capacity to do things with their time and energy. Your salary has a certain amount of capacity as well. When you work, you trade the ability to do whatever it is you could do with your time and energy during that time for the capacity latent in your salary. 

Often, this trade may give us even greater capacity, allowing us to do things we otherwise could not do with the time we have. You can use that capacity to meet your needs and pay for the things that you want, and thus help you live a better life. Such a trade may be worth it for you. 

But after you have so much stored, gaining more may no longer add much value to your life and in some cases, may decrease it. Billionaires, for example, have enough to meet an entire life’s worth of needs and wants (and often the needs and wants of dozens or hundreds of more lives after that). 

In such a situation, they do not have enough time left in their life to enjoy the capacity that they would gain from making more money through work. Each day they work, they lose one more day they have spent doing anything else (spending time with family, relaxing on a beach, or whatever makes one happy). Some ultra wealthy still work because they feel their job gives them a sense of meaning in their lives, but from a certain perspective, they are sacrificing their capacity to keep working. 

Billionaires are an extreme example, but this applies to a certain degree to everyone. There is a time to build a base of capacity for ourselves by earning money, but the more one builds up, the less useful any new money we gain becomes. Eventually, that can switch and trying to attain more money after that is actually counterproductive. 

You should evaluate for yourself how much of this thing called money you truly need and when the money you would gain is no longer worth what you would have to do to get it.