The Pernicious Privilege Of Distance

There’s a reason why, 230 years after Marie Antoinette's death, the words, “Let them eat cake,” still resonate with so many people.

It doesn’t matter that none of us are Gallic peasants suffering under her rule. It doesn’t matter that we’re not starving to death in 18th-century France. It doesn’t even matter that she probably didn’t say those exact words. 

The line resonates because it sums up a reality that's as true today as it ever was; the elite don’t care about, or even really think about, the plight of “ordinary people.” 

Marie Antoinette had never been hungry, much less starving. She’d never been poor, never mind penniless. She’d never lost everything (although, I guess, she eventually lost her head).

So when she heard that her subjects had no bread to eat, she offered a solution that she hadn’t thought about, to a problem she'd never experienced, knowing that her life would be totally unaffected if it didn’t work out. 

Marie Antoinette didn’t make this mistake because she was evil or stupid. It’s worse than that. She made it because she was so insulated enough from her people’s suffering that she couldn’t imagine it.

Of course, this privilege of distance isn’t exclusive to French aristocrats. We see it whenever people control policy without having to face the consequences of their ideas.

Defund/Abolish The Police, Just Say No, draconian COVID lockdowns, ideas like these only sound workable if you know you won’t have to deal with the aftermath. 

Or let’s take a more topical example.

If you’re among the 2.3 million Palestinians currently living in Gaza (or if you live elsewhere but possess both a brain and a heart), I bet you can immediately see the problem with asking half the population, over one million people, to relocate to the south within 24 hours or be firebombed into oblivion.