Better than what?
On social judgment, innuendo, and the problem with rewarding people for things they cannot control
Most people like to be told that they are good at doing things or that they have good souls. This is perfectly normal and reasonable behavior: We are social creatures, so we tend to be responsive to social judgment.
■ Some people like to be told not that they are good, but that they are better than others. It seems like a small distinction, but it is not; everyone can be objectively good at the same time, but being “better than” is a positional good. It is something that has value expressly because other people can’t have it.
■ A particular subset of these people wants to be told that they are better than others through no particular merit of their own, but merely through some accident of birth. These people are obnoxious. They choose race or nationality or skin color or parental lineage or sex or any among a whole batch of immutable characteristics as a basis to insist that they deserve privileges of attention or respect or deference.
■ Sometimes, they are explicit about it. Other times, they use images, innuendo, and dog whistles. It is all the same.
■ One of the main points of even having a civilization is to uncover base, crude, and indefensible bad instincts and train them out of people. All animals have instincts, but we have the ability to explain to our young which of those instincts are worth keeping and which (like the appetite for unearned privilege) ought to be stopped. Anyone who really believes in “defending civilization” has to be serious about training away those bad instincts, starting with themselves. If they claim that mantle of civilization but don’t do the work, then they are frauds, hypocrites, and posers.