I'm better than you! Lent 2021: Day 31

Watching the traffic on ulica Puławska pulling up at the lights. A parade of vanity. BMW M8, Porsche Cayenne Turbo S, something orange and loud, Volkswagen Arteon R-Line with huge wheels, the tyres a mere lick of rubber around the rims, a brand new Toyota GR Supra. And lesser traffic. 

I look at the drivers of these show-off vehicles. What is their point? Trying to impress other people? Other people they don't know - random passers-by? How vain, how futile, how... infantile. 

I bask in self-righteousness. For a moment or two, it is I - a pedestrian, car-less, car-free - I am superior! No, really - I am! Right? Not wasting money on a statement ride, no need to resort to such primitive showing-off to display my place in the status hierarchy (or rather my insecurity) - not wasting our planet's resources, not turning fossil fuel into greenhouse gases! I... am... BETTER! Qualitatively, morally, ethically, philosophically, inherently BETTER!

* * * * * * * * * * *

We get caught up in this kind of thinking, don't we. Our mammalian biology - our desire to express ourselves in terms of place in our hierarchy - is matched by our human intellect. Now, this intelligence can either be harnessed to make money, which can then be spent on baubles of vanity, or else it can be used to attain a higher understanding of our human condition. Now, I happen to consider the latter to be a more worthwhile use of the human intellect.

Does that make me intrinsically better than those who roar up and down ul. Puławska in their status symbols? Of course they will have their justifications. Except I don't want to hear them!

Or is my self-righteousness merely my own attempt to stratify society into a hierarchy in which I'm near the top - a Philosopher-Sage looking down on the shallow attempts of the show-offs and loud-piped boy-racers trying to make an expensive point? 

Of course it does!

Does that put me on par with the very people that I look down on?

What's the difference between me looking down at them, and them looking down at the drivers of six-year-old Honda Civics or ten-year-old Opel Merivas?

Don't we all tend to do this? Looking down on people with a different worldview to our own - an important element of contemporary culture wars, with the virtue-signalling woke looking down on the racists and sexist and homophobic conservatives, and flag-waving nationalists looking down on lefty degenerates?

We all (including me!) need to rise above our innate mammalian instinct to rank and segregate and categorise into 'better' and 'worse', into 'one of us' and 'one of them', to see our worth in terms of the diminished worth of others. We subconsciously apply rank: inferiors and superiors, and self-hierarchise ourselves. And from this stem our complexes of inferiority and superiority.

At times like this I ponder with a degree of sadness just how much evolution - spiritual evolution we still need to undergo before we can drop our instinctive behavioural ties to lesser life forms.

It's hard for us all - including the self-righteous! Our subjective conscious experience is central to how we see the world - the Universe - around us, so it is natural that we weave a self-serving narrative about our lives in which we justify our existence in terms we can understand - hierarchical terms. However we wish to frame them.

This time last year:
Refutation (I)

This time five years ago:
Before Spin by Keith McDowall

This time six years ago:
Mill town Łódź 

This time seven years ago:
Today, a tipping point in European history

This time eight years ago:
Church and state

This time nine years ago:
Scrub fire in Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
Airbus A380 visits Warsaw
[yesterday the last one left the Airbus factory]

This time 11 years ago:
Lenten recipe no. 7

This time 12 years ago:
Poland's economy - upturn in sight?