How The Old and Depraved Concept of Exceptionalism Validates Racism
We must embrace a philosophy that accepts the need for power to constantly shift between all members of society
Growing up, my family was fixated on the idea of competition. The idea of “getting a win” was presented as the only way to achieve any form of life satisfaction.
When you are a child, you accept the reality that is presented to you. Naturally, I lost all of the early contests. This was to be expected because I was still learning the rules. I had been told to respect the adults in my life, and I accepted my defeats as a necessary element of personal growth.
I patiently tolerated this arrangement because it contained an unspoken promise that one day I would develop the skills that would allow me to claim my own rightful victories. While I waited for that day to come, the only value I offered was in showing that I could be a gracious loser. The lessons on this point were very clear. I could never suggest that the contest had been rigged. Skill and skill alone defeated me. The victor was “worthy,” and the loser needed to learn how to admire rather than resent the winner.
As a child, I lacked the insight to recognize how dangerous and exploitable this mechanism actually is. Today, I find myself skeptical of anyone or anything that attempts to justify itself with unsubstantiated claims of exceptionalism.
The true game is your perpetual defeat
The years went by and, try as I might, victories still eluded me. Naturally, there was a temptation to believe something was wrong. However, I had been so well-trained to accept that I must never fault a “winner” that the only thing that remained was to find fault with myself.
This is the true objective.
Faced with enough defeats, many kids give up and resign themselves to a life of losing. After all, we are told that there are winners and there are losers, and that’s okay. Once individuals have been separated into the appropriate groups, the losers learn they must do what they’re told. This is presented as “just the way it is” and anyone living in this form of society is pressured to make peace with this reality.
But what if there aren’t any “losers” in the human race. What if that’s just a lie deployed to justify exploitation?
They create an unattainable standard to make you quit
I came to understand I was being groomed to accept my lot as a loser, but I never quit on my efforts to improve myself. I continued to study. I continued to work out. I continued to make slow progress towards becoming the best version of myself.
The ultimate deceit is tricking a person into giving up on themselves.
During family gatherings, we’d have football games involving my dad, my uncles, and my cousins. At age 9, 10, 11, those games were just beat downs. I gladly endured this abuse because I’d been taught it was disrespectful to infringe upon the celebration of a “winner.” But at age 15, 16, 17, something started to change. First I got fast and could score at will. Then I started to put on some muscle and I could inflict punishment of my own.
I started to realize with delight that finally, after all these years, it was my turn to win!
When you start to win, they change the rules
“Oh, no, no, no!” grumbled my dad and his brothers. “You only think that you’re better than us now because you don’t know anything yet. Besides, it’s important to be gracious in your victories. You weren’t gracious, so you lose… again.”
This was new.
That was the moment that I first began to have serious doubts. Throughout all the years as they’d gleefully celebrated my defeats, they’d never once made any mention of being gracious in victory.
The contests weren’t limited to sports. My family was ruthless when we played board games. They were ruthless during dinner conversation. In fact, every single interaction was a competition that they were determined to “win.” Even more than that, they’d accept that they might get scored against, but I began to perceive that they set arbitrary boundaries to determine when a contest “ended” in order to claim a victory.
It’s only possible to declare a “win” when a contest ends. But life is a perpetual competition. It begins on the day you’re born and lasts until the day you die. If you are to keep score, the only one that means anything is the final tally from after you’re gone.
Nobody wants to wait for judgment day, so they invent false parameters
The artificial boundaries of competition both protect individual pride and create squabbles. Competitions are presented as an accurate “sampling” from the ultimate result, but in truth these are ridiculous fabrications designed to feed the ego.
Quite often in my family, two parties would leave a confrontation both believing they had “won” and that the other was being ungracious. If one brother was to beat another in a 5k race, the loser would create some new and nonsensical competition shortly thereafter. “Well, I was the first to get my gear bag and get home.”
The result is that ego driven people end up accumulating imaginary victories in undeclared competitions. This is how you end up with people who accumulate unremarkable scores at the end of their lives, who go to their graves riding on what they believe to be a tidal wave of wins.
Fabricated victories are meaningless, but even the artificial loses of a false system are too much for people of low character to bear. This is why we have a huge population that falsely insists the Confederacy won the Civil War, or that the Nazis won WWII, or that the traitor candidate won the 2020 election.
“Victory” only exists within a delusion
The more I contemplated my situation, the more I realized that the concept of “victory” is nothing but a lie. The very idea requires competitors to create false and meaningless parameters out of thin air.
Eventually, I realized that my family’s philosophy was fundamentally flawed. They’d presented themselves as mentors who were teaching me how to “win” competitions. In truth, the only game they played came in their efforts to dominate anyone who came into their sphere of influence.
Ultimately, they wished to establish themselves as masters, and consign everyone else to the role of perpetual servant. In their minds, that was the natural order of things, and any attempt to change that order represented a violation of the rules.
There’s no honest attempt at true classification. Their arbitrary rules don’t apply to them. They see themselves as “winners.” They see everyone else as “losers.” No amount of evidence will ever change this belief.
Today, I don’t believe anyone is exceptional, and any discussion of “victory” represents an incorrect way of interacting with reality. The fundamental concept of competition is flawed. Cooperation is the only philosophy that has any hope of appeasing human suffering.
American exceptionalism is a lie
It’s intoxicating to succumb to the delusion that you are “superior” to the people around you. I remember times growing up when I received the highest score on a test and reveled in my right to look upon my classmates with contempt.
I’d “won” and they’d “lost.” Therefore I felt entitled to seize the mantle of “master.”
At the time, it confused me that my classmates didn’t respond with the admiration I thought I was due. True to my conditioning, I took it upon myself to lecture them about their “poor sportsmanship.”
Obviously, all of this is humiliating to admit, but I make this self-deprecating confession to underscore the inherent difficulty in throwing off your childhood conditioning. That task is made even harder because our schools, media, and culture unabashedly teach the false lesson of exceptionalism with little discussion as to how destructive that belief system actually is.
For me, I had to first renounce the philosophy of my family. I had to stop from playing the game of interpersonal domination that the people around me didn’t even know I was subjecting them to. In fact, I didn’t know, or at least would never admit to myself, that I played this cruel game.
But I did.
Whether they admit it or not, any person who claims to be “exceptional” is forcing everyone around him into a contest of submission. In this contest, the only rules are the ones invented on the spot in order to aid the aggressor.
There’s nothing exceptional about the United States
The United States of America is in no way exceptional. Our government has stripped women of their right to bodily autonomy. We have crippling debt, social unrest, wealth inequality, and blatant racism. We’re spoiling a world that is quickly becoming uninhabitable.
There are many nations that have some answers to the critical problems that cause immeasurable suffering. But, we’re unwilling to appeal to them for aid because we’ve been conditioned to believe we’re already perfect and nothing needs to change.
In our hubris, we condemn ourselves to enduring misery.
Unless we stop thinking of ourselves as exceptional, we can never fully recognize or make amends for all the crimes against humanity that continue unabated to this day.
Humility is a much more effective worldview
There’s nothing “exceptional” about Americans, there’s nothing “superior” about Americans. Americans weren’t endowed by a creator with some exception to the consequences of unconscionable behavior. You don’t have a “divine authority” to oppress and exploit your fellow human beings. Anyone who says otherwise only wants to exploit you.
You’re the same as any other inhabitant of this Earth. There is no exemption from the rules of decency for those who consider themselves exceptional. Insisting on the delusion that you’re exceptional gives you a skewed, inaccurate, and pathetic perception of the world. It’s time to grow up and be a citizen of the human race rather than a narcissistic, living embodiment of your own delusional ego.
What if instead of fixating on arbitrary points, we viewed our lives from a perspective of totality? Maybe we can start finding peace with the idea that we had good days and bad days. The good days made us proud, and the bad days taught us what we needed to know in order to make progress.
The bad days shouldn’t be blown out of proportion to justify a life sentence of poorly compensated labor. Everybody has bad days. The only difference is that the privileged oppressors have convinced themselves they don’t have to recognize their own.
Exceptional is for them, inferior is for you
The idea of “exceptionalism” is the fabrication of evidence in an attempt to justify condemning some groups and communities to a perpetual state of servitude. This concept permeates our whole society. I’ve been in abusive relationships where people would dredge up a mistake I made a decade ago in order to support their preconception that I was perpetually wrong.
You don’t have to accept the judgment of a society that designates you as a loser. A just society should offer more than the false promise of a chance. If you’ve spent your life waiting for your turn that never comes, it’s time to wake up and demand a change.
There is not now, and there has never been, anything exceptional about the United States of America. National pride doesn’t empower individuals, it empowers a mechanism of systemic oppression that only serves a privileged few.
If you insist on preaching the myth about American exceptionalism, just be willing to recognize that you’re never going to experience the promised reward. That’s not how that game is designed to function. You aren’t going to be the exception to the unfair rules of the cheating masters.