TV psychologists and the counseling professions in
general attribute a lot to feelings of inferiority. They lay both timidity and
aggression at the door of an inferiority complex. Whether you punch or cringe
or do anything in-between, it’s because, at heart, you are feeling inferior. Whether
clients have arachnophobia, agoraphobia, or anorexia – or at the other end of
the alphabet, xenophobia - doctors will blame the condition at least in part on
the fact that these individuals were made to feel inferior.
But I wonder about that. In many respects, I think just
the opposite is true. I think most of us, myself included, leapfrog through our
days animated by one little jolt after another of our sense of superiority.
It’s not that we often stop and consider ourselves to be
superior in an overall, global sense. It’s that we feel superior to others in
all our little choices and conditions. We feel assured of our superiority in
all the daily details of the way we lead our lives.
The person who goes to a gym feels superior to the couch
potato, while the couch potato usually feels superior to that eager beaver
who’s up and out there running every morning. Every time one of these runners
would overtake us on the sidewalk, a portlier friend of mine would scoff, “He’s
worshipping the Great God Jog.”
The man in the mansion feels superior to the homeless
bum. The homeless man feels superior to that toff in the mansion. By comparison
to the coddled wealthy man, the homeless man feels his life on the streets to
be gritty and “real.” The man in the Ferrari feels superior to the man in the
old Chevy. But the man in the old Chevy knows how much better he is for the
ecology because he’s not gas-guzzling around the streets in a phallic status
symbol.
Cat owners feel superior to dog owners, and vice versa. The
sixth grader feels superior to the fifth grader; the senior feels superior to
the freshman. The thin feel superior to the fat. The husky feel superior to the
scrawny. The one who reads books on philosophy feels superior to the one who
reads comic books – and vice versa. The one who has no TV or computer feels
superior to those who are connected – and vice versa. Beatles fans feel
superior to Shania Twain fans. Fans of Toby Keith feel superior to fans of The
Pet Shop Boys. The fans of every sports team feel superior to the fans of all
other teams. People who recycle feel superior to everyone.
The one who buys brown eggs feels superior to the one who
buys the boringly standard white eggs. Anyone who has a Picasso print hanging
on his wall feels superior to anyone who has pictures of dogs playing poker.
People who relish their home thermostat set at a bracing 65 degrees feel
superior to those hot house plants who need the thermostat set to 74 degrees.
Those who are awake feel superior to those who are
asleep. Those who are well feel superior those who are sick. The young feel
superior to the old, but the old know they know more. The living feel superior
to the dead.
Most of all, the man who drinks his coffee black knows
he’s superior to the man who’s pouring in the cream and sugar.
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