If You Are A High Achiever, You Must Be "Privileged"

To think of some people as simply being higher achievers than others, for whatever reason, is a threat to today’s prevailing vision, for it implicitly places the onus on the lagging group to achieve more — and, perhaps more important, it deprives the intelligentsia of their role of fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.  The very concept of achievement fades into the background, or disappears completely, in some of the verbal formulations of the intelligentsia, where those who turn out to be more successful ex post are depicted as having been “privileged” ex ante.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.411