Elitist Gentlemen Racists vs Fair Minded Failures

There are a number of ways people can sell their souls for some material benefit – and usually people realize at some level that they are acting from over on the dark side, as business men and mobsters apologize by saying “its just business”. But sometimes evil is more insidious, especially the sin of Pride. Indeed, a lot of people think pride is a good thing.

But, concerning Pride, perhaps no other sin has such a great pay off. You see, nearly all access to great wealth involves having some ease with exploiting others, and in this regards, pride can be a great asset, a great lubricant. If one is sincerely convinced of one’s superiority over others, then placing one’s self in charge is no reach at all. One may even see taking charge as one’s responsibility. For instance, European World Conquest was once seen, by Europeans at least, as “the White Man’s burden”. They honestly thought they were doing everybody a big favor.

Also, this sin of pride, and the material advantages thereof, accrue to Cultures as a whole. Where it becomes a matter of cultural identity for people to suppose themselves better than the rest of humanity in general, then, perhaps not surprisingly, this increases expectations and actual performance. Where pride is ingrained into Character, people automatically tend to live up to it and become people that one can have pride in.

Inversely, where it becomes a cultural priority to notify all people, even the children, or especially the children, that everybody is a blend of the same bland mix of mediocrity, then it can’t help but to relax expectations. If nobody is conditioned to believe themselves superior, then nobody will act in a superior manner. ‘Good enough’ really isn’t good enough and it tends to continually spiral downwards, lower and lower.

Examining pride, we can take a look at Jewish Culture for a first ‘for instance’ – Jews are taught on their mother’s lap that they are the Chosen People of God, the rest of the World to be eliminated by genocide whenever convenient and their Lands usurped, being annexed to an ever expanding Promised Land. As dangerous and violent as this Ethnic Pride is manifesting, still, on the other hand we have to admit that they do very well in school and then push into almost any career field most comfortably snatching every bit of other people’s Free Will that may come within their reach. But Jews are not alone in this, while many Nations teach their children that they are inherently superior to everybody else. Or within homogenous cultures, certain Classes of the population condition themselves to a superiority of self expectations – in England, for instance, where all people are ‘Englishmen’, we have an Aristocracy that is convinced of their superior ‘breeding’.

Conditioned Superiority can lead to serious conflicts, especially in cases where two ‘Superior’ Groups collide, the best example here might be to mention the collision between the Nazi Master Race and the Jewish Chosen People of God. God did not prove to be overly supportive of His Chosen People, but somehow nobody’s faith had been terribly shaken. The Master Race might have been more humbled if it were not for the fact that they were stopped only by their own ethnic cousins (Aryan Germans defeated by Aryan Russians and Aryan Anglo/Americans… demonstrating only that Aryans must have some War God Religion of their own). Also, in the Far East it has been a problem where each Nation, convinced of their own superiority find it difficult to extend diplomatic equality to any of the others. It seems that Superior Groups more or less expect that the other groups will automatically accept the inferior role that is projected upon them, and calculations are seldom made in quantifying the opposing culture’s own collective Self Esteem. Zionist Jews are surprised when Palestinians are not happy to lie down and die at their feet, willingly handing over the deeds to their land as their last dying gesture. When the Japanese invaded China they were puzzled when they were met with contempt and condescension as well as with armed resistance.

Then we have cultures that are conditioned to inferiority. They have nothing to live up to, and they certainly don’t. Ethnic groups that had filled inferior places in society tend to stay down. We see this where slavery had once been endemic. We also see it in former Colonies, where the subjugated native ethnic groups continue on, well after their political liberation, in having no expectations for themselves. The problem of low expectations is largely self-perpetuating. Parents convinced of their own mediocrity will communicate no high level of expectations to their children. And the Teachers who are supposed to inculcate abilities and aptitudes, well, they are simply culturally conditioned to think that almost any level of performance is good enough. It is simply not in their cultural inventory to care whether the kids ever really do well or not. If one day follows the next without the roof falling in, they think they are doing fine. Indeed, abilities are often discouraged when high achieving students are reprimanded by their very Teachers for acting better than everybody else, and C level students are praised for so conscientiously fitting in, as though it took some great effort NOT to study.

But, yes, it does present a tricky ethical problem. Teach our children that they are all equal and that nobody is any better than anybody else, then we will have children with no will to succeed in a very competitive world, or who will not have sufficient skill or abilities to compete even if they wanted to. But condition children from their infancy to believe in either racial, ethnic or class superiority, then, at least in the World as we presently know it, they will succeed as though, well, as though they were conditioned to succeed. Do we want our kids to be good or do we want them to be successful?

It reminds me of India, where the mothers pray that their children NOT become Saints.