Member-only story
The Psychology Behind Why We Put Others Down…
I’m sure you learned this in elementary school, but it’s still true and still applicable…
I’m sure that when each of us was in elementary school, an adult — probably a parent or a teacher — explained to us that people tease, bully, or put other people down because they are really insecure, or don’t feel highly, about themselves.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life all these years later — is that this is still unequivocally true.
In society, in the adult world, people deal with their insecurities and inadequacies by taking them out on groups of people who they do not belong to — and who they also feel better than or superior to.
Don’t get me wrong. Isms like racism, sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, etc. are not rooted in human insecurity. They are founded in systems deeper than that, and they express themselves in ways deeper than putting another group of people down.
Yet, however insecure someone is, or how worthless they feel about themselves, will be evidenced by how they treat “outsiders” or “people who are not like them.”
We see this often in societal hierarchies. In fact, there are entire political parties, movements, and TV networks that are built, for example, to make insecure and inadequate white people feel better about…
