I will really try hard to not make this feel like a personal attack as I don't think you have bad intentions at all, and as you admit, you didn't flesh out this idea. But the above reads with so much complicated and murky language and the subsequent child posts have similar ones which makes it a very nervous read. (sorry, this will be a wall of text since for me there's a lot to unpack in this discussion)

The point of this post is that I think it's wrong to assume we can perfectly define a system of privileges and rights because it's so wildly inconsistent in everyone's understandings. We debated such things for literally thousands of years with some fairly prestigious minds and the best we can do is just try to fix the issues introduced by previous attempts, and that is getting more and more difficult each year. Worse, monetary influence acts outside of the societal system and the desire for improved revenue/profits has undue power over that of an individual participating in society.

How exactly do we define or quantify a proper amount of responsibility and privilege? How do we define the proper threshold of such things? How do we explain comparisons to other societies where the threshold for such privileges is far lower or even non-existent, and they _don't_ have the troubles that are prognosticated during discussions on social policy?

Society is a very tricky subject I think and the fact that collectively humans have been debating it since we figured out how to communicate to each other tells me it's not such an easy issue to solve, and more like something you just need to constantly be revisiting and fixing/improving.

Societal judgements on responsibility is wildly inconsistent and I find it exceptionally challenging to even refine a lot of privileges and responsibilities that a given individual has. I'm relatively successful in a technical career; I take on a lot of responsibilities (person management, policy making, judgment calls on constant grey-area situations), and I'm not sure what privileges I actually have that many of my staff or that a sandwich maker at a corner shop doesn't have in most cases. I have more money, sure; socially, I'm more respected because it's a "respectable" position, I have more opportunities because I tend to meet a lot more people in places of power who see results and want the results. But is that actually my privilege or is it the choice and privilege of others who grant it to me? That is, can I actually enact such privilege or is it exposure to opportunities that others wouldn't get? What exactly is privilege in practical terms, not dictionary definitions?

Conversely, the sandwich maker arguably makes more people happier and society better on a day to day basis than I do; a lot of my job is telling people either what they did wrong or just flat out "no", and that leaves a lot of people unhappy, while not really making anyone else happier. After all, I didn't really make their lives better directly, I just fulfilled a role in a process which has a neutral outcome for most people. Isn't the sandwich maker far more important in their role in society than I am? Is this responsibility on their part that they bring more overall good to society by working a difficult and low-paying job? What exactly is responsibility in practical terms, not dictionary definitions?

I'm not just trying to muddy the waters with semantics; I think these are real things you need to consider if you want to start a discussion to attribute privilege to responsibility since there is a very wide gap in understandings here and often I can't really fault the logic.

My personal take is that society at large works because collectively most people realize it doesn't and by all means it shouldn't, and that society requires constant maintenance and evolution to keep it running. Don't forget the classic xkcd[0] about modern software dependencies, as I think this is a fairly apt comparison for society. One of the ways that technology _does_ address this is that it constantly evolves, and the former pillars of society end up becoming vestigial and eventually dropped.

In society, much happens the same -- previous "givens" that were logically and heavily debated by some pretty smart people end up being completely dropped as new advances come.

> "representation without taxation" in a large portion of the population.

The issue I have with this is that the opposite is also true -- governance without representation is increasingly becoming more and more common for reasons that have very little logic behind them. In the US anyways, a few grams of weed in many states is enough to remove your representation. Having a lower class job or not enough money is enough to remove your representation. Living on the wrong side of the street after rezoning a district is effectively enough to remove your representation. Laws I consider to be woefully outdated/misinformed or laws that are actively hostile towards populations are a far bigger concern for me than "are the lazy stoners Bob and Alice responsible enough to vote on issues."

And I don't think the answer is some council that arbitrates and thinks on these things, as it seems our willingness as humans to worship such entities is just too built-in, and furthermore, I think it's not really reasonable to claim that we can have objective systems in such a matter. The US Supreme Court is under fire for this right now (and has been from basically all ideologies for awhile), and they're suppose to be the highest court in the land [1] that are practiced and careful logicians and reasonable persons. The US still has complete worship of its constitution and its authors, despite the fact that mostly the constitution was a brainchild of a few individuals, and they borrowed a lot of it from earlier works. The original intent of design to change and be rebuild/revisited was attempted to be done with amendments, but even that has a glacial pace, with the most recent amendment taking 202 years to come to fruition [2].

Even if we did have a perfectly working council that was constantly, it doesn't really address the fact that so much of society is influenced and controlled by non-governmental entities. Remember, it as an abhorrent idea for most employers to hire people who use recreational drugs besides alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine. The horror stories of what might happen were paraded around for decades, right up until a global pandemic happened and suddenly the workforce vanished, and suddenly all those stoners destined to destroy society seemed to be acceptable candidates to drive trucks. Seems the stoners have been doing pretty alright with their new jobs and none of the doom and gloom came to be, and arguably it was good for society that a lot of these services kept working. But this wasn't legislated or governed societal advancement, this was that revenue lines wouldn't go up if businesses didn't change their minds. Corporations having "rights" is a very strange concept to me, as I'm not sure what responsibility they actually take on that contributes back to society; an exchange of services is not a responsibility, and demonstrably throughout history, businesses and corporations have fought for the _right to not be responsible towards certain persons_, and many times they won. Nevermind that corporations are awful at judging what is a needed responsibility as we saw during the pandemic (think of how many "essential workers" had to go to work during the early parts, holding advertising signs and wearing costumes for shops that no one could go to anyways)

It's wrong in my opinion to think about this in terms of quantifying contributions and required responsibilities versus privileges, because when we see what actually happens and how society actually works, there is not even a passing correlation between the two, with extreme power imbalances and responsibilities and privileges that fall far outside the realm of government and society.

[0] - https://xkcd.com/2347

[1] - I'm not interested in discussing Supreme Court decisions, so I'd rather people read this and just agree that the court makes contentious decisions, perhaps by design.

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Unit...