Thoughts on feelings on superiority and unchecked concentration of power

I visited the Resistance Museum and Anne Frank’s House in Amsterdam this week. The Resistance Museum is a peek into life in the Netherlands under Nazi Germany.

During the war all the European powers heavily exploited their colonies for mineral resources, natural gas and food supplies. One such colony was Indonesia which was ruled by the Netherlands. This colony had a tiered racist structure with the native Indonesian at the bottom, then the Dutch-Indonesian mixed race and the Dutch people at the top. The native Indonesian people were used for all kinds of slave labour.

Then many of these European powers including the Netherlands themselves were ruled by Nazi Germany and got a taste of what is like to be ruled by an unjust foreign power. Nazi Germany carried out a forced extradition and murder of millions of jewish citizens to concentration camps. The Indonesian colony of the Netherlands was attacked and taken over by Japan. Although initially Japan promised to free the Indonesians from the Dutch rule, they turned to be just as bad as the Dutch and continued their oppression and also oppressed their Dutch rulers into forced labour.

To me the recurring theme is that unchecked power in the hands of anyone has always been abused time and time again. Humans are selfish and they have used that power to serve selfish interests even at the cost of some others. Concentration of power if very harmful and we should always aspire towards a world where the power is kept checked by its own people and has counter balances in case the check fails.

Nazi Germany was also famous for having feelings of superiority over other races. These were also similar to the feelings of supriority that the white-skinned European colonisers had over their colored skin colonies. Japan during the WW2 also had similar feelings about their own race.

Humans have often mistakenly attributed success and progress as a sole result of their own genes. When the reality is much more nuanced than that. Success/ progress is almost always a combination of hardwork, some random privilege, lucky opportunity and other complex factors which worked out in your favour. But human psychology is known to make simplifying assumptions especially when making conclusions about third party experiences (trying to explain your neighbours success). The simplifying assumption about the “feelings of superiority” in this case is a very costly one because it led to multiple generations of oppression of some people by others and the famous world wars.

All the above is also valid for “feelings of inferiority”. More often than not a feeling of inferiority is the result of failures, self or peer brain washing and a lack of growth mindset. The failures themselves have root causes which are also extremely nuanced and are often a lot of environmental factors which are beyond anyone’s control.

Feelings of superiority and inferiority do much more harm than any good. It leads to an unfair society with differential treatment which has no basis in reality. A rule, society or any institution rooted in such feelings is never sustainable and as history has indicated it usually implodes sooner or later. A world we should aspire to build is the opposite of this, which celebrates everyones individuality, distributes opportunities based on merit and correctly attribute cause of success backed by rational reasoning.

A good follow up exercise to this reading is: what feelings of superiority or inferiority do you harbor? Are they rooted in reality or just simplying assumptions? Are you comfortable challenging these feelings if they are no longer serving you or those around you?