There is a certain kind of power that is given to individuals through social assertion: society telling individuals what they do is good. It is more than often the case that this assertion is not fair. It is the result of expectations. Society expects, and society rewards. Society expects you to dress well, cut your hair, and respect the elderly.. do so = rewarded.

As a result, people meeting society’s expectations, either by desire to do so or just to meet their own personal goals, get rewarded. Usually with acceptance, other times by granting them moral privilege over their peers whose goals and means of self-expression did not meet the society’s expectations.

A mediocre student knows that asking the instructor to postpone an assignment is a request very susceptible to refusal. An A student’s request on the same issue, however, is more probably going to be accepted. This is not only due to the lack of objectivity in an instructor’s (and any human’s) judgement, but also due to the reasoning that says: if the A student found the assignment to need more time, then probably the assignment IS ACTUALLY harder than usual; and needs more time.

One mistake that society makes is: It assumes figures meeting expectations in one aspect, meet them in all aspects and at all times. The instructor, in our example, relates the high-grades property to the student, at all times. Society, as well, autocompletes the image of a philanthropist with modesty, and a rich woman’s image with beauty, and a religious dictator’s image with fairness. This autocompletion is a curse for the underprivileged, and a tool that media uses to publicize whoever.

It is therefore the responsibility of those who are privileged to play this game versus the society: to consciously fail the society’s expectations, for the sake of the underprivileged. To be a representation of the society’s own lack of judgement, in a way that would force society to redefine its norms. And there are many ways to play this game.

Some ways to defeat the society’s autocompletion game would be: one should at least speak for the underprivileged, portray sharing common features with them in conceivable ways to the society, and try to spread diversity through ways that do not necessarily contradict with social norms, but are at least diverse enough to expand their tolerance.

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• One question that could arise is: I assume that the privileged people should be convinced with the motives of the underprivileged, enough, to want to represent them. I believe they need not. They only need to do what they believe is a good representation of diversity in their fields. This movement from a still position is enough to make the norm-change everybody needs.

• If you believe the A student example is a false analogy, I would argue that the same logic followed by the instructor incentivizes the normal-distribution of the grades as a metric for how hard an exam is. A metric that is used in almost all universities. It builds on the fact that if no one could score a good enough grade on the test, this means it is probably harder than usual. This implies that, if the A-students (students usually at the higher scoring edge of the normal distribution) think something is hard, it’s probably actually hard, only waiting for the normal-distribution curve to prove it later; after the assessment is taken. This assumption: that the best-performing is consistently so, is what must be used in the game to play against society.