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supremacists
genkaku
Northampton, Mass. U.S.A. Veteran
Just a little noodling:
A strange trait among overt and covert supremacists:
How can they be as good as they are if they spend their time talking about being better than someone or something else?
Is there a tribe anywhere -- and I mean anywhere -- without this characteristic?
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Comments
That would be a tribe of enlightened ones having collectively extinguished innate deceptive self.
The whole thing of being better by comparison, which is what supremacists purport to be, is a breeding ground for jealousy and conflict. At the end of the day, white males tend to be better chess players, South Koreans make the world’s best StarCraft 2 players, and black men and women the best athletes, on average. People and races are unique, with individual strengths and weaknesses.
I doubt you could find a group of people where comparison is not a popular pastime. Perhaps Bhutan?
Self-aggrandizement is a survival tactic, though frequently not an intelligent one - inflating the ego in response to a perceived threat, girding one's loins for battle, pounding spear against shield - even apes do it. You could look at it that way, perhaps. It is also a readily accessible method of dealing with fear without the necessity of having to think about it.
I think this is an important point. Listening to a podcast today on human's tribal tendencies and social structures the point was made that we can value our own tribal group's qualities (be it cultural, political, ethnic or other), even hold them as sacred, without deriding others by holding at least a neutral attitude if not recognize their equal right to value their own qualities.
I've heard elsewhere that often those who do value their own in group will do so without putting others down unless they feel threatened or attacked by an out group.
In this view the solution to this increasingly tribal climate is to turn down the demonization and rhetoric aimed at increasing fear and separation.
How about dissing the unenlightened and elevating the enlightened?
Yeah, I think that is an important in-group/out-group dynamic to point out on a Buddhist forum.
The question to me is can one value enlightenment as a goal and ideal without devaluing the unenlightened? According to my previous post I guess I think it is.
Its an area I'm trying to gain a better understanding of. How can we communicate across differing and often conflicting value systems with empathy and respect? I haven't investigated sufficiently but the notion of non violent communication seems to hold an important piece of an answer.
I think we would find people tending towards that mindset in any tribal group.
I've always found this interesting... the distinction between being awake and being enlightened and what they mean to me. I don't know anyone personally who is awake all the time nor do I know anyone that is enlightened on every topic but I seem to notice different degrees of wakefulness and the ability to enlighten.
If I look down on the unenlightened then I look down on myself and if I elevate the enlightened I out them out of reach.
Something is good, relative to another position - there's no Saint George without the dragon.
To be in a tribe is to take part in a non-zero game.
To the extent that converging interests outweigh individual ones, individual interests are subservient and the group grows.
When individual interests outweigh converging ones then the group breaks down into smaller constituents until the converging interests of that new group again outweigh the individual interests.
At this point, any party not in the new group is playing a separate non-zero sum game and the two smaller groups interact in zero sum conditions.
At the root, we subjectively experience reality.
You might find the podcast I linked earlier of interest, the guest Nikolas Christakis talks about this. He talks about our evolutionary tribal instincts but then says that we also have 2 other innate traits that we can use to overcome those zero sum group conflicts and hopefully be of benefit to one another. We can go up a level and consider our larger group that we may share together, which often happens naturally, for example, when conflicting political tribes find unity in the face of a man made or natural tragedy. Or we can go down a level and relate to each other as individuals, such as MLK did when he asked us to judge each other by the content of our character (individual) rather than the color of our skin (group).
Seems like a good hobby
The enlightened (bless there awakened tootsies and noddle's) elevate the snoozing, drop them on their Heads and how about turn ...
Up the Enlightened! z z z ... zenith ...