I have been dealing with arrogance in my students.
Arrogance is unearned boastful superiority.
Most people don’t know and don’t care because they themselves are not achievers… but you can have confidence that is justified by your accomplishments, your superior knowledge.
To the uninitiated, they look and sound the same. But they aren’t. You only need to scratch the surface.
I have detected a certain ancestral commonality in that behavior.
And have been pondering why and how and for what purpose are certain nationalities arrogant.
Netflix’s Marco Polo series season 2 is starting this week, and so I have been revisiting crucial parts of the first season, in my head, and then I suddenly saw it.
Some nations are trained to be superior, whether the individual has any reason to be proud of themselves or not. (It is as if you thought you were a great basketball player because your favorite team won a tournament…)
This arrogance gets expressed when they pit themselves against the barbarian other… the loser other, the weaker other nation or ethnicity.
China has 1.5 billion people… give or take a few million.
The average IQ of people living in China is nothing spectacular… 100. China was very advanced thousands of years ago, very cultured, refined. Not any more. Moreover the overall intelligence, what I measure, includes social, spiritual, literature, etc. intelligence, and that is 50. Nothing to be proud of. Same as Americans.
So the attitude, covering up almost nonexistent achievements is directed at other nations and based on an unreal comparison.
For example one of my Chinese students is married to a Vietnamese person, whose overall intelligence is 20 points higher… But the Chinese feels superior and feels contempt for the spouse…
Just because your country is big, powerful, you not necessarily are. You are who you are, you are what you are, and you personally need to be worth a damn if you want to have bragging rights…
The biggest obstacle people have to personal growth is thinking themselves better than they are.
Some are delusional and need to come down to Earth. And some are just pretending. Literally lying.
But if you are interested in living a life that is worth living, being a person that is worth being, your best bet is to stop comparing yourself to others, and start to become the best person you can be… whether others are OK or not, better, worse or same as you, is not your business.
It does not matter.
I tell you a secret: arrogant people are not happy. And they are lonely. They need to separate themselves from others.
Here is the opposite or arrogance: Self Love. from Rob Brezsny:
You may not know this, but I am the founder and CEO of Proud To Be Humble, an acclaimed organization devoted to minimizing vanity. It is my sworn duty to protest any ego that exceeds the acceptable limits as defined by the Geneva Convention on Narcissism. However, I now find myself conflicted. Because of the lyrical beauty and bighearted charisma that are currently emanating from your ego, I am unable, in good conscience, to ask you to tone yourself down. In fact, I hereby grant you a license to expand your self-love to unprecedented proportions. You may also feel free to unleash a series of lovely brags
There is another cause of delusional belief of being superior:
Parents, mistakenly believing that telling their children that they are great is helpful.
Children like these grow up to be very unhappy: because they think that their results should be great too… but there is a disconnect.
The three levels of value are not common knowledge.
So children hear that they are great on the systemic and extrinsic level… meaning that they are right, and that they are valuable, extrinsically.
Great is an intrinsic value. Has nothing to do with what you can do, more with who you are… It has no monetary value, not even social currency value.
Extrinsic is worldly value. Usefulness value.
But there is no extrinsic value without skills, talent, tenacity, practicing, and knowing stuff. You need to produce results on the extrinsic level to be considered even acceptable, to be worth a damn.
Children who got labeled great, smart, or pretty by their parents don’t know how to produce, don’t think they have to produce… so in the world they are not worth a damn, so they live being “personally offended” that the world doesn’t give them what they deserve.
A much healthier approach to encouraging children is to acknowledge their results. “This result is good. Do more like this…”
When you think you are great you don’t want to do anything that proves the opposite… i.e. anything hard, anything challenging, anything that you can fail at. So you never become worth a damn… Nothing sadder than that.
This article is a tad disjointed, and I apologize for that. I hope it is still useful.
And I apologize to my students for using their exact example… I mean no harm, and in this particular article changing specifics would have made the meaning false.
So I apologize. You are bigger than being offended, I hope.
I have found that since my health is getting in the 70’s range, it is much easier to be compassionate than before.
PS: As I said before, knowing who you are, knowing yourself accurately is the first and most important step to take to start raising your vibration. Right after you get yourself into the 70’s range with your health… and the 90’s range with your cell hydration.
The range where you can grow as a person.
