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One of the byproducts of power is not having to perceive all the adaptations that people with less power are making around you. And when our temperament, communication style, values, working habits… | John Cutler
One of the byproducts of power is not having to perceive all the adaptations that people with less power are making around you. And when our temperament, communication style, values, working habits, background, or status happen to fit the prevailing environment, many of its constraints can become invisible to us. We enjoy a form of implicit power simply by fitting the environment. Someone sufficiently different from us can work in the same company and experience an entirely different organization. They’re more likely to learn firsthand what happens when those norms are transgressed. They are “disempowered” by the environment’s default settings, not necessarily by anyone deciding to treat them as less than. People who repeatedly encounter a system’s boundaries often become much more fluent in them than people who rarely hit those boundaries at all. Researchers have a useful term for part of this: hypocognition of privilege. The basic idea is that when you are spared from repeatedly encountering a constraint, you may never develop the mental categories and models needed to notice it clearly. The people navigating the friction are forced to develop that vocabulary and those distinctions. The people insulated from it may barely know there is something there to name. Travel gave me a very literal version of this lesson. I have a U.S. passport, and thinking back over a lifetime of travel, I have almost never had to think seriously about visas in advance. I mostly just assumed I could go places. Even looking through my passport, the stamps felt like cool mementos of where I had been, not evidence of some hard-won bureaucratic process I had successfully navigated. I remember traveling with my two-year-old from New York to Portugal and discovering, at the last minute, that Portugal had different rules about how much validity needed to remain on a visitor’s passport. So I did what, in retrospect, is a pretty revealing thing: I pivoted on the spot and headed to London, basically assuming we could work it out there. And lo and behold, we could. Because we were U.S. citizens. We went to the U.S. embassy, got his passport renewed quickly, and moved on. What stuck with me was seeing all the people from other countries waiting with folders and forms, navigating visa and entry requirements that were clearly far more consequential to them than anything I had ever had to deal with. For most of my life, the lesson I had absorbed was not “I am unusually privileged by this system.” It was simply “international travel is pretty easy.”
