The default reaction to the notion of elitism seems to be negative because it implies an arrogant and self-centered position that doesn’t bode well in a society of people all hungry for attention, love and appreciation. Say to someone that you are better than him and he will probably frown at you and leave with quite a bad impression of you. It has also often been said that elitism is an impediment to the mass adoption of GNU/Linux.

But my friend Kevin let me in on a different way of looking at it, which is quite interesting. It goes below the surface, beyond the initial conceptions of “elitist behavior”. If you say to someone that you are better then him you are likely expressing what you really feel about yourself. You believe in something and live accordingly therefore believing that you are in the right. Upon seeing someone who breaks the norms you established for yourself the instinct is to frown upon it and consider it “worse”, unless you are incidentally impressed by it enough to actually modify your views and ways. Therefore saying to someone that you are better than him would likely imply a true feeling.

So what does absolve this from being a sin? It’s the fact that this feeling is subjective, and therefore an expression of it has nothing to do with others, except that others may be on a receiving end of it. It comes down to whether others would get offended by this and the reasons for which they should be offended.

Well, apparently, most people are offended by such a statement. Whether this is justified really depends on a few variables. Are they oppressed by it in any way? Should they feel oppressed? Someone believing to be better does not necessarily deprive other’s freedom to believe the same about themselves. So the answer would probably be no. Does it hurt their self esteem? Well, if it does then maybe they didn’t have enough self esteem to begin with. It can be argued that those who don’t have enough self esteem shouldn’t be further discouraged from it, but that may merely be put under the category of “being nice”, not “being right”.

Interestingly, that is exactly what the whole argument would probably lead to, despite the logic that may suggest that “elitism” is not necessarily wrong and unethical, the current social norms simply reject it as an undesirable social phenomenon favoring the logic of “being nice” instead. Perhaps we live in a society of people who are all to a point insecure about themselves. Perhaps humans need constant reassurance from others to keep going and building their self esteem. It would make sense to assume that every human needs to receive just above as much reassurance as discouragement in order to build a healthy self appreciation.

So if the current social norms are so adverse towards even an expression of higher self appreciation maybe it is a symptom of major self-esteem deprivation. It could explain a few things in addition to the adverseness towards elitism, such as the tendency to worship someone or something, to follow the crowd even when the direction you are going is deprivation of basic rights and freedoms.

Thought of it this way, maybe the real enemy aren’t the small honest elitists we often frown upon, but the big ones we chose to follow - the ones who may have abused their leadership skills and their knowledge of how to manipulate society’s weaknesses to their best ends.

And here is an interesting question. If everyone was an elitist, would everyone be more or less happy, more or less free and more or less empowered and successful?

That said, we have to get back to the reality we are living in. We can believe all we want about ourselves, but as long as open expression of our self appreciation breeds animosity we’ll unlikely achieve the goals we are striving for. Who would help us? Who would join us? We have to be user-friendly to succeed in a world so deprived of friendliness that its lack becomes a highly sought for commodity.

This does smell of manipulation of human weaknesses for the cause of your own goals though, so that much should at least give us pause for appreciation of those who just dare to be who they are and who they believe they are regardless of who they offend by it and what others think of them.

So the conclusion would be that neither being right “in your face” nor being nice are wrong and unethical, but in a world we are in we have to employ both depending on what we wish to achieve. If you have no friends, and think you’re better than all friends you would ever have, perhaps continuing the current strategy isn’t the best course of action. If you are elitist and yet have friends who are attracted exactly to this bluntness and utter honesty, then keep going, I suppose. :)

I for one, personally, feel (and especially after pondering this topic) that my self esteem isn’t quite big, definitely not big enough to provide much fuel for any elitism. I rely a lot to opinions of others, especially friends and people I admire and appreciate the most. Even a signal that would imply that something is wrong has me a bit worried.

Yet I think I have grown more blunt in recent times, but I’m not sure if it’s for right reasons. I guess.. life is a constant process of rediscovering who you are and evolving or devolving on that basis.