sinisterporpoise

If there’s one thing left over from my Mormon background that I wish I could fully overcome, it’s succumbing to elitist attitudes. As much as I hate this behavior, I still engage in it. Perhaps I hate it because I know I’m prone to it. The reasons for this behavior do not matter. No one is better than anyone else because of their religion, because they are better at sports, because they are more intelligent, because God loves their religion more, because their country is exceptional, because they are stronger, or because they have more money. An infinite number of items make up this list. Someone may be better than someone else in a given area. We all have different talents or abilities. Realizing the truth of this situation does not change attitudes that were ingrained during hours of religious instruction carefully given to me each Sunday morning. It is not an easy attitude to overcome even when you know better.

Sometimes I think I’m not as hard on myself about this as I should be, but I realize as a human that I am going to make mistakes. Because this behavior represents some of my earliest training, it is much hard to divest a person of these attitudes than someone would expect. It takes time to evaluate statements of others to figure out if there statements perpetuating elitism or not. It’s easy to accept that American Exceptionalism, for example, is a bad idea, but thinking that the people who believe in it are in some way inferior to those who do not only perpetuates an elitist attitude.

If I were to think about my problem in terms of elitism I don’t really use, I would describe it as othering. It separates people into us versus them categories. Naturally, I, like everyone else, want to be one of us. Most of my life people placed me in the them category whether I wanted them to or not. I know what it’s like to be one of them. It’s not a fun experience. Because I know what it feels like, I do not want to do it to others. No one should have to go through the experience of being told daily that they are worthless or that their lives are somehow less valuable.

Despite my often displayed attitude, I do not know everything. If someone were to ask me about the value of someone’s life, my answer would have to be “I don’t know.” Perhaps priceless might be a better answer. Plenty of people already make this determination. If I were a manager or a supervisor I might be forced into this position. Those higher on up the chain of command make these decisions in mass. Politicians who enforce workfare requirements are seeing only numbers. The same is true for downsizing CEOs. These people are isolated from the very real human costs of their decisions. As long as they are doing well, it does not matter how many other people are suffering. It is the them who suffer. They have learned to see people as things that are capable of increasing their bottom line.

And as one of my favorite authors said in one of the Discworld books, evil begins when you start seeing people as things. The fact that this line is delivered by Granny Weatherwax, who I happen to identify with, makes it even better. (As a side note, I also identified with the faith-doubting priest character in this book.) And it’s the tendency to see other people as things that makes me despise elitist attitudes the most. Now, if I could just purge these attitudes from my own mind...

As a completely unrelated side note: Screw Indiana Governor Mike Pence.