The less superior my real life, the more intensely I’ve felt the need for a hero system that makes me superior.
Growing up as a believing Seventh-Day Adventist, I felt superior to the rest of the world because I was part of the elect.
Largely outside of my religious world was the power of nationalism. I lived in Australia until age 11. Most Aussies seemed to think that if you weren’t an Aussie, you didn’t matter much.
I moved to California at age 11. Americans were more outwardly patriotic than Australians but they enjoyed less social trust and cohesion. Nationalism ran strong in both countries.
By my teens, the fervor of my religious worldview diminished as my sex drive increased. When I was 14, we got a TV for the first time, and I saw on that screen beautiful women and the type of superior physical and social life I wanted. My religious faith grew cold as my selfish desires for attention and pleasure took over.
I began college at age 19 and became exposed to Marxism at age 20, and I played around with Marxism for a couple of years because it gave me the thrill of being in the vanguard. Then I encountered Dennis Prager when I was at UCLA in 1988-1989 and I became convinced that Judaism was the superior life.
My life didn’t consistently align with my best interests until 2016 (I started my first 12-step program in 2012, and by 2016, I was up to five of them). By the time covid hit in 2020, I was in a good place and now I look back and I respect most of my online work from that date on.
A good tool for analyzing commentators and the world is noting what makes people feel important. What are the likely incentives driving people? After we meet our basic needs, our most intense drive is for status, noted Tom Wolfe.
July 5, 2016, Nieman StoryBoard published:
Wolfe’s refinement was what he calls the “statusphere.” Everyone isn’t directly competing for status with everyone else; rather, they pursue status within a distinct sphere — and regard their own statusphere as the best of all.
“That has more or less been my system of approaching any subject,” Wolfe says. “For instance, ‘The Right Stuff’ is not a book about space, it’s a book about status competition among pilots.”
Today, no less than in Wolfe’s grad-school days, the lure of what Weber termed “status honor” is all around us. If anything, the age of the Internet has opened up frontiers of status competition undreamed-of half a century ago. Thanks to social media, people edit — sorry, “curate” — versions of their lives to friends and strangers and compete for a dopamine-releasing tally of “likes.” And did Victorian England have anything on modern social media in its capacity for enforcing social conformism through shaming?
Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Nanny Mafia”: “Nannies have a higher standing than a nursemaid, since they have the power to impose discipline and manners on the child. But they have a lower standing than a governess, in that they undertake no real education. But mainly, in Europe and the United States, they have become a symbol of the parents’ status. First of all, parents who have nannies to look after the children have to have money. That is one thing. And parents who have nannies lead their own lives. This gives them more status even in front of their children. They don’t have to appear in the ridiculous role of martyred, harried creatures, forever ill-kempt and ill-humored, waiting on the children like servants.”
The world nationalism made
German nationalism, which eventually took the form of National Socialism, was a collectivistic nationalism, but it belonged to the collectivistic and ethnic type of nationalism. In the framework of ethnic nationalism, membership in the nation is a matter of blood, which can neither be acquired if one is not born into it, nor lost if one is; in other words, nationality is race. This type of nationalism, which is fundamentally racism (sometimes called ethnic chauvinism), is the form in which racism has appeared in the modern era, and it develops when the envisioned national community has a relatively poor record of cultural achievement.
By the time German nationalism began to develop, the German cultural record was—disturbingly for the nationalists—rather undistinguished. Secular literature in German—drama, poetry, philosophy, science—barely appeared before the late eighteenth century. This was the reason why German nationalism pointed to the intangibles of blood and soil as the proof of German virtues and stressed the superficiality of visible achievement in France, Britain, and especially among the Jews. (This was also the reason for the insistence of Nazi ideologists in the twentieth century, despite it being contrary to all evidence, that German culture dated back fifteen hundred years.) This cultural underachievement of the community is recognized by the very members of the elite who import nationalism, leading to the development of a sense of inferiority among them, which becomes a central ingredient of the national consciousness. This sense of inferiority results in the specific psychological dynamics of existential envy (ressentiment), which in turn makes the nation that is formed very aggressive—always feeling threatened in its dignity, and eager to blame outsiders, whose superior achievements its spokesmen envy, for its woes.
While Germany represents the paradigmatic example of collectivistic and ethnic nationalism, perhaps its most salient example nowadays is nationalism in various Muslim countries. From the moment that national consciousness in the Muslim world was born, a sense of cultural inferiority has plagued, in particular, the Arab elites, especially vis-à-vis the achievements of the Jewish settlement that became the state of Israel. Although most of the Arab states were created by Western powers who never colonized their territories (ruled prior to 1918 by the Ottoman Empire, which privileged its Muslim coreligionists above all of its other subjects), the resentment of Arab nationalists toward the equally secular Jews was first expressed as a general sentiment against colonialism or imperialism—that is, against the West. (Since Lenin’s day, at least, colonialism was considered a characteristically Western, first-world crime.)
Liah Greenfeld writes in her 2016 book on nationalism:
* The worth of the nation—the psychological gratification afforded by national identity and therefore its importance—is related to the experience of dignity by wide and ever widening sectors of humanity. The remarkable quality of national identity—and also its essential quality—is that it guarantees status with dignity to every member of whatever is defined as the national community. It is this quality that recommended nationalism to European (and later other) elites whose status was threatened or
who were prevented from achieving the status they aspired to, that ensured the spread of nationalism throughout the world in the last two centuries, and that explains its staying power in the face of material interests that often pull in the other direction.In the early days of nationalism, different elite groups, exposed to nationalist ideas, reacted dissimilarly to them, in accordance with the relative ability of nationalism to aid them in their status-maintaining and status-aggrandizing pursuits. An example is furnished by the nobility in various German lands who as late as the 1800s remained indifferent to the appeal of nationalism, embracing it rather reluctantly during the Wars of Liberation.
* Among non-noble intellectuals, the second of the two elite groups that were responsible for the initial establishment of nationalism in Europe, the idea of the nation also had to compete with other status-bestowing frameworks. As long as other identities appeared to promise more dignity, the nation failed to captivate them and secure their commitments. French philosophes were above particularistic self-content. Voltaire wrote that “a philosopher has no patrie and belongs to no faction,” and that “every man
is born with a natural right to choose his patrie for himself.”1 Abbe Raynal believed that “the patrie of a great man is the universe.”2 Great men, explained Duclos, “men of merit, whatever the nation of their origin, form one nation among themselves. They are free from the puerile national vanity. They leave it to the vulgar, to those who, having no personal glory, have to content themselves with the glory of their countrymen.” …So long as one could reasonably hope to become world famous (and French philosophes in the mid-eighteenth century still had a reasonable chance of that), it was foolish to limit oneself to a small part of the world. And if one was confident in one’s superiority and felt assured of recognition, one had no need for shared dignity of a nation. In fact, one had no need for nation at all, a republic of letters was enough.…German intellectuals remained faithful to their cosmopolitan ideals long after their French brethren had abandoned theirs. Nicolai considered German nationalism “a political monstrosity”;4 Schiller claimed to have given up his fatherland in exchange “for the great world” and wrote “as a citizen of the world.”5 Fichte was a principled cosmopolitan as late as 1799… Nationalism did not appeal to German intellectuals prior to the Napoleonic campaign because they were the only group interested in the redistribution of prestige in society, and without the support of the nobility and the bureaucracy, they lacked the means to enforce it. To insist on such a redistribution (implied in the idea of the nation) in this situation would have only invited ridicule and damaged the chances of social advancement which some of them had. It was more satisfying to dream that one was an equal member of a community of intellectuals…
* Most of our experiences, however, are not experiences of physical or biological realities, but of the social reality. This reality is also constituted by our experiences, but we don’t experience it through our bodily senses, we experience it through, or in, our minds. Most of our empirical reality, in other words, is neither material nor organic, it is mental.
* While all other animal species, irrespective of the level of development and place on the evolutionary tree, essentially transmit their ways of life genetically, we overwhelmingly transmit our ways of life through symbols.
* No human group of any duration, and no individual, unless severely handicapped or (as an infant) undeveloped mentally, can live without an identity. Having an identity is a psychological imperative and, therefore, a sociological constant… An identity defines the position of its individual or group bearer in a more or less extensive sphere of the social world that is relevant for this bearer, and serves as a map or blueprint for this sphere…
* [P]opulations homogeneous as to any particular such characteristic do not necessarily share the same identity and consciousness: medieval peasants and lords in Europe, though all Christians, did not share an identity—peasants identifying as peasants and lords identifying as lords—and, beyond all doubt, thought differently. To return to language, they did not speak the same language… identities were estate-based… there were no ethnic identities before nationalism…
* Language, above everything else, is the medium of thinking, thinking representing the explicitly symbolic component of our consciousness, the explicitly symbolic mental process… traffic lights well may be the most efficient system of communication among humans… To capture symbolic experiences (experiences produced by the specifically human, cultural environment) language is necessary; only it can incorporate them into reality. A stable sphere of new experiences presupposes the annexation to human existence of a new sphere of meaning which only language can create, the emergence of a new semantic space. Therefore, while one can imagine a social current without the participation of language, institutionalization without language is impossible. Any social order starts with the creation of a new vocabulary, and this is demonstrated by every case of nationalism…
* collectivistic nationalisms are more likely to engage in aggressive warfare than individualistic nationalisms… Collectivistic nationalisms, by contrast, are forms of particularism, whether perceived in geopolitical, cultural (in the sense of acquired culture), or presumably inherent, ethnic terms. The borderline between “us” and “them” is relatively clear… collectivistic nationalisms are articulated by small elite groups… To achieve the solidarity of this larger population, made of diverse strands, they tend (though not invariably) to blame their misfortunes not on agencies within the nation, whom they would as a result alienate, but on those outside it. If they do blame internal elements, they define these as agents acting on behalf of or in collusion with hostile foreigners. Thus, from their perspective, the nation is from the start united in common hatred.
* During war, ethnic nationalism is more conducive to brutality in relation to the enemy population than civic nationalism. This is so because civic nationalism, even when particularistic, still treats humanity as one, fundamentally homogeneous entity.
