Image by Mohamed Hassan
In This Article:
- The historical origins of the human superiority complex and its impact on global conflicts.
- How the inflated human ego has fueled genocides and divisions throughout history.
- Learn why a shift toward egalitarian respect is essential for ethical societies.
- Understand the role of superiority in shaping religious and cultural conflicts.
- Examine the ongoing struggle for equal opportunity and respect for all humans.
Human Superiority Complex and Ego: How It Shapes Our World
by Carl G. Schowengerdt.
It began when the first human groups formed; the desire of humans to believe that they were, in some way, superior to those other humans around them, and superior to all animals. We apparently need our egos inflated for us to cope with life. Throughout human history, this one weakness has caused us immense suffering and death.
Some 10,000 years ago, humans switched from being hunter-gatherers to an agricultural economy. Our ancestors figured out that it was better to raise crops than to take whatever grew, wherever it grew. Those who cooperated with each other got higher yields, and people started to congregate into villages, where they worked together, built and planned together.
Possessions and land became important factors in survival. Neighbors bonded with other neighbors, and defended themselves against any other human who threatened to take their possessions. The sense of, “It’s us against them,” formed as villages and clans formed and as languages, customs, location and colors differentiated one group of people from another.
Land and resources became valuable possessions, worth fighting for, and worth killing those humans who were “other.” If other people had resources which were desirable, killing them was, at that time in history, believed to be the right thing to do in order to get those same resources and have a better life; and so – the genocides began.
A Savage World of Human Existence
It was a savage world during the first millennia of human existence, as well as now. As larger communities formed, there was often competition for the best resources, the best land and water.
Peaceful, orderly lives were always temporary. If for any reason life became difficult, there was always the urge to move to greener pastures. If those greener pastures were occupied by other people, the brazen invaders believed those occupants should be overcome by force, so that those resources could be used by the invaders, who believed themselves to be a superior people.
That savagery is well documented in the Bible. The military leader, Joshua, for example, believes his anthropomorphic imaginary God has told him that all the Middle East land from the Euphrates River to the Mediterranean Sea belongs to the Israelites. So he gathers his tribe together, arms them, incites them with promises of riches, and strikes off to the land of Jordan, where town after town is destroyed, its valuable possessions looted, and all touchable living beings murdered.
Joshua 6:21. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
Joshua 6:24. And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord.
The concept that every human deserves equal opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness was several millennia in the future, in the human conscience.
Christian children are taught to gleefully sing this song about how Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and “the walls came a-tumblin’ down.” That is a terrible rewrite of history, a whitewash of what was brutal savagery, genocide in its primitive form.
Have Things Gotten Better?
Things have not gotten a whole lot better since. History records invasions by Genghis Kahn, invasions by Alexander the Great, in attempts to rule over the entire known world at those times, each with its full share of massacres. The Middle Ages record the Christian crusades and Inquisitions, each with their fair share of genocide murders.
World War I started because Serbia wanted to have dominance over Bosnia and Herzegovina. The resulting WWI conflict caused 37 million human deaths, including both military personnel and civilian populations. Approximately 1.2 million Christian Armenians were annihilated by Turks, during that conflict.
Genocides have Been Rampant
During my lifetime, genocides have not only continued but have been rampant.
During World War II, six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazi regime, and 15.8 million other “subhumans” killed because they showed genetic or cultural difference from the “master” German race. They were, therefore, in the Nazi mind, inferior beings deserving elimination.
During the Korean conflict, beginning 1950, Western nations fought the invasion of South Korea by North Korean communist forces, believing that communism was an inferior form of government which represented a dire threat to democracy: five million civilian and soldier deaths occurred before that conflict was settled by dividing Korea into two nations.
In the Viet Nam War, soon to follow, from 1955 to 1975, the United States sent American soldiers to fight against communist forces, believing that the fall of Viet Nam would create a domino effect in other Southeast Asian nations, causing them to also fall under communist rule. That conflict caused two million civilian deaths, many of them innocent civilians, because villages were often targeted, suspected of harboring Viet Cong.
In the Cambodian War, from 1975 to 1979, the victorious communist Khmer Rouge forced all those who were of other political beliefs out of their homes and onto the streets. The Phnom Penh hospital was emptied at gunpoint. Those who resisted were immediately killed. Some two million of that Cambodian diaspora died, mostly from starvation.
In 1988, Iran and Iraq entered a brief but bloody war in which no territory changed hands, ending in an armistice agreement. That respite from war with his neighbor allowed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to concentrate on his “Kurdish problem.” Kurds occupied a northern section of Iraq, and were fiercely independent. Saddam turned his military against the Kurds, in an ethnic cleansing campaign. Iraqi planes dropped nerve gas on all sizeable villages, burning and suffocating innocent women and children. Some 200,000 Kurdish men were exterminated. Over one million Kurds fled their homes, hoping to find refuge in Turkey.
In Croatia, 1991-1995, 600,000 Serbs were killed to ethnically “cleanse” the population.
In 1994, Hutu military in Rwanda, using machetes, massacred some 600,000 Tutsi civilians. In their minds, if you had a different culture, you deserved to be killed.
Since 2011, in Syria, Bashar Assad has not hesitated to use Russian bombs and nerve gas against his own people, causing so far some 600,000 deaths in that civil war. Some 14 million Syrian citizens have been displaced from their homes. In Assad’s psychopathic belief system, if people do not submit to his authority, they deserve to die.
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 because he believes that country belongs to Russia. He states that it has been invaded by fascists and Nazis, and must be cleansed of those forces. If any Ukrainians do not immediately submit to Russian rule, they must be killed, in his psychopathic analysis.
What About Life, Liberty, and Fulfilment?
It has taken Homo sapiens about 200,000 years to realize that every human has the same needs: each of us, as an individual human being, needs an equal opportunity to pursue his or her own life, liberty and fulfilment. The first widely known, but primitive expression of that understanding occurred in the United States Declaration of Independence.
Yet Thomas Jefferson only dimly understood the extension to which that mutual respect should be taken, to be ethical. His concept was that all aristocratic white men were created equal, and were given that divine right by his imagined Deist God. Jefferson, with eloquent language, headed us in the right direction; but was lost in a cloud of ignorance as to what the further implications of that incipient concept were.
Jefferson did not understand that we are absolutely and totally not equal. We are, in fact, each an individual being, each with our own strengths and weaknesses, each with immune systems that attack any foreign cells in our bodies as invaders. Thomas Jefferson, in his primitive understanding of human needs, did not realize that these human needs exist for every man, woman, and child, regardless of social status, race, color, creed, indenture, gender or religion.
Genocide is Officially a Crime, But...
It was not until 1948, through the heroic efforts of Raphael Lemkin, that the United Nations adopted a resolution banning genocide as a crime against humanity, punishable by any nation in which those crimes were committed. Yet the world community has stood by as other genocides continue to go unpunished.
The United States of America has, in particular, been cowardly in responding to the needs of other citizens of other nations, when they are the targets of genocide. Bill Clinton, for example, failed to act while Serbia was carrying out a massive genocide against Muslim Croats and Bosnians. He did so only when, under intense pressure from Bob Dole and Congress, it had become politically damaging to not respond to that crime against humanity.
We are still struggling to realize the extent to which equal opportunity for humans should reach. We have, up to this time, believed that if there was genocide somewhere else in the world, it was someone else’s problem. What we have not understood is that we are now one world, and that crimes against humanity affect all of us. It becomes our obligation to end genocide, wherever it occurs, then back out and let that country become what it wants to be.
Equal Opportunity and Respect for All
There is, in our nation (the USA), still strong gender discrimination, racism, and white supremacy, which attempts to rewrite history, deny the suffering of slavery, re-establish segregation, and deny gender preference. For all humans to show the deepest respect for all other life seems like an impossible goal, so far away.
But at least we now know what our human goal should be: equal opportunity for all humans to obtain their fulfilment in life. Ethical governments will provide those services: universal health care, universal education, equal pay for work done, and equal opportunity for advancement, regardless of social status, race color, creed, gender or religion.
We will never get there unless we get rid of this strongly expressed superiority complex in our cultures and religions, with us since the beginning of human time. That superiority complex must be replaced by respect for all other humans, of any description. That respect must be egalitarian, for it to become ethical, and establish stable, peaceful societies, full of advancements in knowledge and understanding.
Copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission.
Article Source:
BOOK: Human Ethics
Human Ethics
by Carl G. Schowengerdt.
What a mess! Since the beginning of human societies, our sense of optimum human behavior has been thrown into a steaming cauldron of right, wrong, ethics, morals, religions, mythologies and theologies. Further, the guidelines we withdraw from this simmering stew keep changing from generation to generation. We come to fiercely conflicting conclusions about right and wrong human behavior, depending on which of these philosophies is attached to our human values.
It is time to end that confusion. This book examines human ethics and morals throughout human history, from several different perspectives, then provides a definition of ethics which is immutable, unchanging, and unattached to any society, place, politics, economic climate, mythology or religious philosophy. The compelling reasons why this definition should be universally adopted and followed are concisely presented.
For more info and/or to order this book, click here. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Carl G. Schowengerdt is a retired surgeon who grew up in a family of daily religious and ethical discussions. His father was a Methodist minister; his brother a Methodist bishop. Schowengerdt instead studied medicine, became a physician, and practiced surgery for 40 years, specializing in lung and esophageal cancer, as well as family practice. He chaired the Ethics Committee for Genesis Health Systems; was medical director of the Genesis/James cancer unit and Rambo Memorial Respiratory Health Clinic of Muskingam County; and was president of the nonprofit Appalachian Primary Care. His new book is Human Ethics. Learn more at Ycitypublishing.com.
Article Recap:
This article examines the human superiority complex and inflated ego as fundamental drivers of historical conflicts, genocides, and global divisions. By tracing these traits from early human history to the present day, the article reveals how deeply ingrained beliefs in human dominance have shaped societies and fueled violence. The discussion highlights the need to move beyond this mindset, advocating for a more egalitarian approach that respects the rights and dignity of all individuals, regardless of race, creed, or social status.
