I am a fraud. I feel so strongly about inequality, especially economically. Growing up with parents on both ends of the political spectrum gave me an interesting insight. I aggressively encourage those around me to vote, to care about progress, but deep down I have feelings that contradict this. I lack the hope and confidence for the world around me. I’ve always been one to speak up loudly about my beliefs, but what does it say about me that I speak these beliefs boldly while internally questioning if it’s even going to make a difference? What does it mean when I am so aggressive and passionate while also feeling insecure and unsure if trying to make change even matters? In a philosophical sense, this internal conflict does not undermine my beliefs; rather, it may be the very source of my conviction. By questioning my right to speak on inequality, I am forced to refine and justify my stance with greater rigor. By examining the tension between my outspoken commitment to equality and the privileged position I occupy, this piece argues that confronting one’s own advantages is a necessary ethical step in understanding inequality.

Inheritance, Merit, and the Myth of Self-Made Success

I sit here knowing in my heart that I want to make positive change for the world around me, but at the same time, am I part of the problem without even realizing? I feel this way because of how I was raised and who I was raised by. My father owns his own company, multiple companies, actually. What started as his own roofing business as a young kid has evolved into a multimillion-dollar construction and demolition company. He owns millions of dollars of equipment, has hundreds of thousands invested in the stock market, and most recently buys homes, flips them, and rents them out. That doesn’t even touch on everything he inherited. My dad definitely isn’t Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, but we don’t struggle, even if my dad likes to say we are “on a budget” when his kids ask for money for food and groceries. My father may not be part of that top 1% people talk about, but he is wealthy. This accumulated wealth has made him money-hungry and greedy.

When I look at my father I think to myself: well, he earned it, right? He really did work from the ground up, but I don’t think that tells the whole story. There were advantages my father had, whether he had the pride to admit it or not. My father was an addict and on and off the streets for a few years in his late twenties. It was my mother and grandmother who pulled him out of that situation, physically and financially. My grandmother loaned my dad $50,000 in secret from my grandfather because of how bad he had screwed up. My dad had a safety net, someone to help him in his time of need. He may not like to remember that story, but I do.

With all of this being said, I will never discredit my father’s hard work. I have watched him wake up before the sun daily, year after year, working hard to support himself and his family. As Kramnick observes, “The inequality derived from labour and successful enterprise, the result of superior industry and good fortune, is an inequality essential to the very existence of society” (27). That framing praises his “superior industry” while simultaneously requiring “good fortune.” The idea that he did it all on his own with no help is not something I am willing to accept, he was provided a crucial advantage. As Kramnick argues when discussing the race of life, you do not take a person who has spent years hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, and then say “you are free to compete with all the others” and still justly believe you have been completely fair (36). My father is the poster child for the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative, but he refuses to acknowledge that maybe he didn’t achieve everything completely on his own. When your dad tells you your whole life how much of a hero he is, you start to question the validity of what he’s saying. I think part of life is being able to take accountability, acknowledge your own faults, and acknowledge the help you have received. That is something my dad has never been able to do, and probably never will.

The Logic of Wealth

My father’s entire identity is his money and what he has, materially and financially. My whole life I have been threatened with money or materialistic things being used as a pawn to get me to do or say what he wants. With as much money as my dad has, he acts poor, he’s cheap, and he hoards his money. My father is the type of man that would jump over a dollar to save a penny; more money is always his end goal. I truly believe this behavior gave me a resentment toward the greed of the wealthy.

As Adam Smith writes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “Wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility, no more adapted for procuring ease of body or tranquillity of mind than the tweezer-cases of the lover of toys” (183). The relentless pursuit is essentially pointless on a spiritual level. I’m not mad that people are wealthy, I’m mad that people can get as rich as my father while others live on the streets, struggling for basic necessities. While people like my father think they are above others because they have more money, or because they worked harder, they fail to realize that other people work just as hard. Those people may never succeed financially, but that doesn’t make them lesser. They just maybe aren’t as lucky.

As Inayatullah observes, “The tendency to claim exclusive knowledge comes, I think, from a need to claim such superiority” (47). This directly diagnoses my father’s moral posture: his financial success grants him “exclusive knowledge”, he knows how to succeed, others don’t, which fulfills his need to claim superiority. I think part of the reason I notice and call out these inequalities is because of how easy it was for my father to ignore them.

I believe in equality, I truly do. I believe in equal opportunity while also understanding how unfair and unforgiving our society can be. There are so many disadvantages people face across so many categories. We as Americans preach “equal opportunity” without acknowledging the inequality already baked into the race of life. The idea that people can hold a mass, ungodly amount of wealth and feel no obligation to the world around them is unsettling to me. I know wealthy people exist who do donate, who invest in programs to help others. But that’s not the common reality of the top 1%. It makes me angry, and honestly resentful. How much money should one person have before the wealth disparity becomes alarming? I believe we have already reached that point. Greed is all around us, not just among the mega-wealthy, and it has changed how we treat each other. I think greed stems from fear, the fear of losing what you have, the fear of ending up like those you view as “below” you. As Kramnick puts it, “The anxiety over failure in the race of life, over becoming invisible, haunts today’s marketplace as it did the world of Smith and Adams” (40).

Living Inside the Inequality

As much as I care about this inequality, I know I am not the victim, not even close. I am actually part of the group that benefits, from whatever this is: capitalism, economic inequality. My father fully funds my education at this university. In the summers I go down the shore and stay on my uncle’s three-bedroom yacht, tanning on the bow, smoking a joint, drinking Surfside’s. At night we walk the boardwalk and take long walks on the beach. In the winters I go to New York City, not just for the day to see the tree, but in luxury hotels provided by my aunt and uncle, who now own two connecting apartments in Manhattan worth over three million dollars each. This is by no means a brag. This is me rationalizing what I have and confirming that I am not the victim, and I never will be. If you were taken on extravagant trips to Vail, Cancun, Punta Cana, would you say no? I sure wouldn’t, and I don’t.

But shifting back to my point: just because I was dealt these lucky cards, does that mean I shouldn’t enjoy them? If I sit here enjoying these luxuries, does it make it more ridiculous that I speak so boldly about injustice? Maybe. I’m really not sure. I want to believe I can enjoy these luxuries while also knowing how lucky I am and acknowledging the unfairness others face daily. I know people who don’t face these problems still care about them, because I am one of them. I don’t think you have to be a victim of these problems to care about them, if anything, only caring when you are the victim may be the bigger issue.

Sometimes I feel guilty about the luxuries I get to experience. But why? It’s not about being a “bad person.” It’s about acknowledging that by existing within a system, you are an active participant in it, and that your moral work lies in how you use that privileged position. Since I have this, what is my unique responsibility in challenging the system that gave it to me? I can’t change the cards I’ve been dealt, just like I can’t change others’. But knowing how lucky I am and keeping my perspective clear, that is the difference between my father and me. In his story, he is the victim. In my story, I know I am not.

Privilege as Ethical Responsibility

I think the “fucked up truth” is a paradox that sits at the center of my identity: I am a product of the very system I critique. I believe strongly in equality, yet I move through a world designed to cater to my specific hierarchy. I have been given opportunities, international travel to over ten countries, a debt-free education at Virginia Tech, and a professional safety net that would not exist without the economic disparities I critique. There is an unsettling irony in the fact that the “global perspective” I use to argue against inequality was given to me through that same inequality. This is a hard pill to swallow because it suggests that my moral clarity is a luxury item.

If I remain paralyzed by my own advantages, I fail Inayatullah’s test of “grasping one’s own lack,” because I am choosing to obsess over my surplus rather than using that surplus to address the structural deficiencies in the world around me. True ethical responsibility begins when I recognize that privilege is not a “reward” for my family’s hard work, but a loan taken from the collective equity of society. If the “race of life” is rigged, as Kramnick suggests, then my lead in that race isn’t just a stroke of luck, it is a structural mandate. My responsibility is not to apologize for my head start, but to acknowledge it, and to redirect the energy I don’t have to spend on survival toward advocacy.

I enjoy and am grateful for the life I have, and that gratitude is exactly what creates moral obligation. Inayatullah’s concept of “grasping one’s own lack” suggests that because I lack the lived experience of scarcity, I hold a surplus of social and political capital, and that surplus is my ethical responsibility. Because I don’t have to worry about my next meal or my rent, I can take professional risks. I can speak truth to power in spaces where others might fear for their jobs. I can use my voice to amplify the needs of those whom the system renders invisible. In this light, privilege is not a source of fraudulence; it is a resource for subversion. If I am a participant in this hierarchy, I must be an active, disruptive one. My story shouldn’t end with “I have enough,” but with “Because I have enough, I must ensure others do too.”

Instead of viewing my privilege as a source of guilt or fraudulence, I want to reframe it as a resource for the change I desperately speak of. As Inayatullah writes, “Donors may need to motivate their giving not by locating the receiver’s deficiency but, paradoxically, by grasping their own lack” (12). My unique ethical path requires me to reframe privilege not as guilt, but as a resource for action, a process that demands I consciously acknowledge my own “lack,” the absence of struggle or vulnerability, which is the prerequisite for genuinely moral engagement. I have the ability to take risks, advocate loudly, and pursue less lucrative, public-oriented career paths that others cannot afford to consider. I have the opportunity to study these topics deeply and articulate the problem clearly. I want to use my privilege to hopefully make a difference, maybe offer a perspective someone didn’t have before, or be a voice for someone who doesn’t have the abilities I do.

To stay silent just because I feel bad would be a waste of the hand I was dealt. My education in International Trade and Development gives me the words to explain these problems, and my background gives me a seat at tables where these issues are decided. I’m not trying to fix my “guilty conscience.” Instead, I want to use my position to speak up in rooms where others can’t afford to, and to challenge the idea that people like my father did it all on their own.

Works Cited

Inayatullah, Naeem. “Falling and Flying: An Introduction.” Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR, edited by Naeem Inayatullah, Routledge, 2011, pp. 1–12.

Inayatullah, Naeem. Pedagogy as Politics: Objectifying Lived Experience. Routledge, 2011.

Kramnick, Isaac. “The ‘Idea’ of the Self-Made Man.” The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture, edited by Sam B. Girgus, University of New Mexico Press, 1981, pp. 24–44.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge University Press, 2002. (Original work published 1759).