By Rachel Puryear

We all know that sometimes, when it comes to politics and collective beliefs, people can be manipulated into believing some pretty strange things – and for that matter, some really destructive things, too.

People can be led to believe that some folks are better than or inferior to others – because of their skin color, gender, or other superficial reasons. They might believe that it’s okay to destroy the environment for everyone, just to benefit a few people. They might believe that people who are poor and struggling just don’t work hard enough, or otherwise brought their misfortunes entirely upon themselves. They might believe that violence is a good first resort to solving problems. They might believe that economic, social, and technological progress is inherently evil, or against their religion. And so on.

What are some of the fundamental, underlying attitudes and outlooks that underlie the above things? Certainly, there are many answers.

I will focus, however, on one particular destructive attitude that tends to get largely overlooked. It’s a human tendency, but is still far from universal.

I’m talking about the belief many people have that, “no one else should ever have it better than ME!”

This belief makes us all poorer, and worse off – because it discourages progress, and gives people a psychological disincentive to improve things.

So let’s explore that further.

As human beings, we all experience unfairness and injustice in life – some more than others, true; but at the end of the day, it’s an inevitable part of living.

But people respond to unfairness they experience differently.

Some people feel that because they experienced unfairness, then why should anyone else not go through what they went through? Why should they make any effort so that someone else can have a better time than they did? Some people even make their own suffering an important part of their own identity – i.e., “back in MY day…”, “kids are so spoiled these days…”, wanting everyone to know how unfair life was to them. For the sake of this post, let’s call this the “selfish attitude”.

Others might experience at least as much injustice, unfairness, and suffering as the former; but look at things the opposite way – because they know what it’s like to go through what they did, they don’t want anyone else to go through the same. Maybe they’re even willing to make efforts to change things and prevent others from also suffering in the way they did. They make it a key part of their identities to do better than what they had, and break the cycle. For the sake of this post, let’s call this the “enlightened attitude”.

These two very different attitudes reflect deep differences in values, levels of empathy, and worldviews between different people.

Last week, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down a lawfully crafted executive order of the Biden Administration, granting (in most cases) $10,000.00 of loan forgiveness for low to middle income student debtors.

Not only was this much-needed, and lawful relief struck down, but many people cheered. This included people who were not particularly well off, who might have even benefitted from student loan relief themselves – if not now, then maybe in a previous time.

Why did they cheer the denial of such important relief? Because it was unlawful? No, it wasn’t. Because it would have hurt the economy? No, and in fact, there was good reason to believe it would actually help the economy. Because they would have otherwise had to pay the canceled debt out of their own pockets? No, they would not have, student debt is backed and guaranteed by the federal government.

And before anyone screams about “the taxpayers,” let’s remember that student debtors are also taxpayers whose taxes sometimes pay for things that don’t benefit them directly – and they deserve their fair share of tax-funded relief, too.

No, people who cheered the baseless stripping away of much-needed student debt relief largely shared a particular sentiment – they believed that because some people paid their loans, often struggling to do so, that no one else should ever get relief. The selfish attitude. Apparently it doesn’t occur to them that they should have had relief that maybe they didn’t have, and so should others.

Nowadays, we’re lucky to have much better painkillers than people who lived centuries ago had (so long as you have healthcare, that is). Does that mean that people today should suffer terribly with pain and disease without relief, because their forebears had to? I don’t think the people opposed to student debt relief would think they themselves should suffer needlessly, just because people had to before. What if they had to live with other people’s selfish attitude forced on them, all the time?

But what if a lot more people made a conscious choice to ask themselves why they embrace an attitude that others doing better than they did is somehow harmful, or offensive to them? What if they examined the likely falsehoods underlying that? What if they took pride in desiring – and maybe even making some effort for – better opportunity and prosperity than what they had? What if they embraced the enlightened attitude? Is that too much to ask?

One of my all-time favorite novels is Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. If you haven’t yet read it, it’s an amusingly absurd dystopian tale about a society where painstaking steps are taken to ensure that no person has any natural or unnatural advantage over another – and the unanticipated consequences of such.

So, knowing that the widespread selfish attitude is a problem, and perhaps even seeing how it negatively shapes our own lives as well as the greater scheme of things; what do we do about it?

Well, unfortunately, you cannot change other people, much as we might all wish we could sometimes. However, you can work on yourself.

We’re all capable of having the selfish attitude from time to time. It’s a matter of whether we let it become our default, and a major part of our way of thinking about the world and others, or not. Each of us does have a choice about whether or not we address and challenge our own attitudes, and try to change them when they’re not working well for us.

So that’s what you can do. You can examine yourself, and work on your own values and beliefs first. And if you do that, not only might it help you become the best version of yourself that you can be, but you just might even inspire change in others – and model change for the better. It won’t change the world overnight, but few things worth working towards do – and it just might improve your own life, as well as those of the ones you love and care about the most.

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Thank you, dear readers, for reading, following, and sharing. Here’s to embracing the enlightened attitude.

Check out my other blog, too – World Class Hugs, at https://worldclasshugs.com. It’s about celebrating empathic/HSP people, balanced versus toxic relationships, spirituality through love and curiosity rather than rigid dogma, and visiting gorgeous natural places.

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