Lately, I have sort of been developing a new peeve. It is quite pervasive and I notice it very frequently. At work, on television, social media, pretty much anywhere where people interact.
This psychological epidemic, (for lack of a better term) seems to have rendered every person in the world intellectually inferior to the person speaking!
I have even noticed myself falling into this habit occasionally, much to my own chagrin.
As a case in point, I was driving this morning, and as I exited the freeway, I had to make a right turn onto a busy street, and cut across three lanes to make a left within about a half of a block. As I waited, it became clear that there was a white SUV lagging behind the rest of the cars, approaching me in the farthest right lane. As I saw the window of opportunity to enter the street shrink, a subtle thought crept into my head.. "This imbecile is going to screw up my chance to get through before the next light!"
How incredibly disgusting of me! I had nowhere to be after all, and, much worse, I had just done the very thing that I had been thinking to post about this afternoon!! For all I knew, an astrophysicist or microbiologist could be driving that car, and I'd just degraded his intelligence to a level far beneath my own.
As I got to my destination, I was hyper aware of this, and I overheard one of the people there discussing the mental ineptitude of another employee that had just been relieved. Since the previous employee and the current one were both doing the same job, It was not very likely that their intelligence quotient was different in any significant way, and the work they were performing requires at least a four year degree.
Several months ago, I ended up in a conversation with a coworker. He was "feeling the Bern" pretty hard last year. His justification for intervening in such a big way in so many people's lives was that the people were too stupid to be able to live freely, and that it was only heavy regulations, taxes, welfare and police that kept the masses of bumbling buffoons from destroying the world. I argued that those people would take responsibility for themselves, rise to the challenge and find a way to make it work absent the current nanny state. He said no way they would die if given that freedom, because they would not know how to handle it, and they need the state to help and guide them. So... they are too dumb to take care of themselves but they would know how to handle taxpayer funded college somehow? Yeah right!
People are stupid, they need smarter people (like my co-worker) to make decisions for them. This seems to be a major underlying point behind many legal restrictions, government programs and even school systems.
I reject that. People are NOT stupid. They are brilliant and it pains me endlessly to see that light dimmed by the dense fog that is the state. The humblest of people has infinite potential to effect the world and all of us in such a meaningful way.
I really hope that I can break this habit, because I want people to be able to voluntarily interact and self govern. This will be be very difficult if a large percentage of people subconsciously believe that all of their fellow man are not capable of making good choices for themselves.
We need to love and respect our fellow brothers and sisters. Please join me in being a little more cognizant of the way we view our fellow humans so we can uplift and build our free society!