joe1776
Well-Known Member
For some reason, we humans like to pretend to know more than we really do. One way we do that is by creating highfalutin jargon. I'll start with the word 'psychology.' I find it useful to dump that word and think of the study of 'human behavior' because the task usually involves speculating on the causes of our behavior. Young students would understand the meaning of 'human behavior' without help from the dictionary.
'Narcissist' is jargon psychologists would use to describe someone who is highly arrogant. Philosophers would describe the same person as 'egotistical' and psychiatrists would use the term 'superiority complex.' The effect of this creation of jargon is that arrogance is like a career criminal with aliases allowing it to avoid easy detection. Compounding the detection problem is that there are a couple of hundred synonyms for arrogance in common usage.
Following the lead of A. Maslow and others, I asked "What unconscious need would arrogant behavior satisfy?" The need to prove oneself superior to others seems obvious. Can you see that high arrogance provides a credible explanation for the following problems which have been the cause of most wars?
nationalism (Our nation is superior to theirs!)
religious intolerance (Our religion is superior to theirs!)
racism (Our race is superior to theirs!)
Adolf Hitler used all three of the foregoing appeals to arrogance and added his Master Race theory, to incite the German people to start the Second World War in Europe.
It's difficult to think of a kind of misbehavior that can't be credibly explained by a highly arrogant attitude. Moreover, highly arrogant people see others as lesser beings which effectively blocks their ability to empathize with them. Serial killers are extremely arrogant. Arrogant slave masters saw the people they enslaved as subhuman.
Group pride, usually thought of as a virtue, is disguised arrogance. We know intuitively that the man who is extremely proud of being Irish and Catholic would be every bit as proud had he, by some twist of fate, been raised to think of himself as German and Lutheran. He thinks his groups are wonderful because they're HIS groups.
We can simplify the study of human behavior by simplifying the language we use and recognizing that the words we use to describe human behavior can be thought of a symptoms.
Can you think of types of human misbehavior that can't be credibly explained with arrogance as its cause?
'Narcissist' is jargon psychologists would use to describe someone who is highly arrogant. Philosophers would describe the same person as 'egotistical' and psychiatrists would use the term 'superiority complex.' The effect of this creation of jargon is that arrogance is like a career criminal with aliases allowing it to avoid easy detection. Compounding the detection problem is that there are a couple of hundred synonyms for arrogance in common usage.
Following the lead of A. Maslow and others, I asked "What unconscious need would arrogant behavior satisfy?" The need to prove oneself superior to others seems obvious. Can you see that high arrogance provides a credible explanation for the following problems which have been the cause of most wars?
nationalism (Our nation is superior to theirs!)
religious intolerance (Our religion is superior to theirs!)
racism (Our race is superior to theirs!)
Adolf Hitler used all three of the foregoing appeals to arrogance and added his Master Race theory, to incite the German people to start the Second World War in Europe.
It's difficult to think of a kind of misbehavior that can't be credibly explained by a highly arrogant attitude. Moreover, highly arrogant people see others as lesser beings which effectively blocks their ability to empathize with them. Serial killers are extremely arrogant. Arrogant slave masters saw the people they enslaved as subhuman.
Group pride, usually thought of as a virtue, is disguised arrogance. We know intuitively that the man who is extremely proud of being Irish and Catholic would be every bit as proud had he, by some twist of fate, been raised to think of himself as German and Lutheran. He thinks his groups are wonderful because they're HIS groups.
We can simplify the study of human behavior by simplifying the language we use and recognizing that the words we use to describe human behavior can be thought of a symptoms.
Can you think of types of human misbehavior that can't be credibly explained with arrogance as its cause?
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