“Self-supremacy” is a term that aptly describes an out-of-control craving for personal power. It’s the main source of pollution in today’s political landscape. One example is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who recently lit the World Trade Center in pink to celebrate the signing of his infanticide bill. After all, how better to show off your personal supremacy than to play God by exercising your power to snuff out the innocent lives of full-term babies?
Another stubborn case of self supremacy is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who literally orchestrated cues to her Mean Girl Caucus of Democrat women clad in white at the 2019 State of the Union address. As Pelosi reminded us during the 2018 midterm elections, her whole raison d’etre is personal power, best served raw and directly to her. Here’s how she explained to Rolling Stone why she was excited at regaining the speaker’s gavel: “Awesome power. The speaker has awesome power.”
There’s also the example of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his FBI clan. He appears to be living the self-supremacist’s dream of being accountable to no one. He can even use Stalinist tactics with impunity, such as that pre-dawn raid with guns drawn at Roger Stone’s house with CNN in tow.
Also, how about those scandals recently exposed among Virginia’s top leaders? They show how easily we can become subjects of people who think of themselves as superior to us mere mortals. They see themselves as both above the law and the rules of simple decency.
But whatever the level of power-mongering, whether power-drunk globalists on the world stage or on a more local stage, politics isn’t the only area where you’ll find self-supremacists on display. I’m sure you can think of a million other examples—in academia, in Hollywood, in the media, definitely in Silicon Valley. But they’re in daily life, too: the toxic boss, the high school mean girl, the playground bully, the meddling neighbor.
Profile of a Self-Supremacist
The terms self-supremacy and self-supremacist capture the intent and the ultimate agenda of power elites. Self supremacists are, quite simply, control freaks. They have an insatiable appetite for power, and act on it. If they could, they’d gobble up the entire public square for themselves, and make sure nobody else is heard without their permission.
They view independent thought as problematic and the First Amendment as nothing but an impediment to their power. They are in the business of silencing others, usually through smears. And here’s the kicker: they’ll accuse you of doing exactly what they intend to do to you. As a mental condition, self-supremacy is like a classic case of psychological projection.
Everything the self-supremacist pursues, including political power, social status, excessive wealth, a dominant voice in the media, and “progressive” social policy agendas, is dedicated to advancing one goal: personal control over others’ lives. That’s why they invariably support the growth of big government and the Mass State. How else to control others? While their agendas grow their personal power, they diminish others’ happiness and self-reliance. It’s a sick game, but it’s been going on from time immemorial.
Just as socialists fear that a happy person might exist somewhere, self-supremacists also fear the existence of a person who doesn’t validate their vision of the world in which the self-supremacist reigns supreme.
Political Correctness Is the Self-Supremacist’s Vehicle
Self-supremacists employ two pet operations to try to divide and conquer people: political correctness and identity politics. Political correctness is the machine, and identity politics is the fuel that runs it.
Political correctness gets people to self-censor so they stop having spontaneous conversations with one another. This is fueled by identity politics, which forces people to stop seeing one another as individuals to engage or befriend, and only as parts of identity groups that either have grievances or undue privileges.
Political correctness heightens our fear of the smear in order to induce us into self-censorship. After witnessing the tarring-and-feathering of those with views deemed politically incorrect, people hesitate to express their thoughts to others. It’s especially harsh on college campuses, but it affects all other spheres of life as well: the workplace, the neighborhood, even some churches.
As a spiral of silence sets in, more and more views fall out of circulation. Before you know it, people stop sharing their ideas with one another, just to be safe. This affects perceptions of public opinion, and leads to public policy changes. So, when we succumb to political correctness out of the fear of being socially isolated, it’s actually a trap. By succumbing, we put ourselves and others into a state of mental isolation.
Self-Supremacists Control Language to Control Thought
Self-supremacists know that in order to control what you think and how you think and even if you have the capacity to think, they must first control what you can say. That’s best done by loading the language with emotionally charged terminology. George Orwell examined the phenomenon in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” and his description of Newspeak in the novel “1984.”
Let’s take a look at just a very few of the more general terms that today’s self-supremacists have incessantly injected into our language. We should explore what those terms really mean and how they lure you into using them when a safer strategy would be to question and even replace them.
“Progressive.” Personally, I don’t think pro-thought people should ever succumb to using the political term “progressive.” It’s mostly an invention of self-supremacists who see the Mass State as their path to personal power. The term is also used to inject a feeling of purpose into their followers. Once they’re baited with “progressive” promises, self-supremacists can use their followers to help build their personal infrastructure, the Mass State.
But the Mass State is simply the default position in human history. Progressivism is a fully deceptive term that means its opposite: turning back the clock on human progress. The term is actually a temporary stand-in for socialism.
“Socialism.” Here’s where self-supremacists are getting closer to achieving their personal purpose. Socialism is another deceptive term that’s gaining currency in an increasingly ignorant population. I’ve heard that a lot of millennials connect the term with the idea of being sociable, kind of like in the spirit of partying. And I suppose the lure of free stuff feels like a party.
But, as Vladimir Lenin made clear: socialism is simply the prelude to communism. And what else is communism but the ultimate dream of self-supremacists? It’s about a mass state ruled from the top down by a little power clique. One strongman eventually emerges to dictate everybody else’s lives.
One can see that dream in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unveiling of her “Green New Deal.” It’s about controlling everybody—what they can do, what they can eat, where they can go, where they can live, how they should or shouldn’t move, what they can say. The deal unabashedly calls for basically tearing down everybody’s houses and remaking them in her personal image.
Like any utopian bait-and-switch scheme, if left to its own devices socialism devolves into scarcity, misery, and terror. It’s a one-party system enforced by a massive network of bureaucratic busybodies. In short, socialism is synonymous with slavery.
“Hate Speech.” This concept was devised basically to get people to shut up, and to abolish the First Amendment. How else to explain the insanity of college students who think they’re “woke” when parroting the line that “free speech is hate speech”? Political correctness has a tight grip on them because they know that to say otherwise is to risk social rejection. The whole playbook of political correctness is to make such cowards of us all.
“White supremacy” takes the prize in the context of self supremacy. How many “white supremacists” does anybody today really know? Likely, it’s an average very close to zero (Democrat politicians in Virginia notwithstanding.) Yet the Southern Poverty Law Center, a massively powerful and wealthy pressure group, seems to have a heavy investment in perpetuating or even inventing the threat of such groups of influence. The blatant staging of the Charlottesville riots two years ago demonstrated just how exaggerated the influence of such groups is.
The SPLC “hate map” provides a sprinkling of white supremacy “groups,” about 100 across the whole USA. They’re not organized, and can include cases as pathetic as a single dysfunctional kid at a computer somewhere who starts up a “group” on the internet. The SPLC brandishes terms with big emotional payloads like “white supremacy” because they produce a lot of bang for the fundraising buck. Associated terms like “white privilege” and “whiteness” are meant to get you to focus on people as potential enemies rather than as potential friends.
Isn’t white supremacy really just a subset of self-supremacy? One can only wonder if today’s self-supremacists use the term “white supremacy” primarily to deflect attention from their own attitude of supremacy, and from their own agenda of power-mongering? After all, Jim Crow laws were enforced by self-supremacists—i.e., individuals who want to erase the individuality of others by pigeonholing them into sub-groups, de-humanizing, and humiliating them.
Identity Politics Is the Fuel
Identity politics is basically a form of psychological projection because self-supremacists have to deflect and project their own intentions onto others. Today’s self-supremacists have devised a system called “intersectionality,” which basically means that your status of personhood is based on how many victim points you can claim. For example, if you’re white and male you lose points. But if you’re transgender or a non-English speaker, you gain points. It’s just another divide-and-conquer scheme.
But the effect of this identity rating system is to de-humanize people by erasing their uniqueness as individuals, along with the development of personalities. This prevents people from getting to know one another through real conversation and friendship. Instead, we are expected to pre-judge people based on their race, ethnicity, sex, or other politically correct and politically incorrect characteristics. (Gee, that sounds an awful lot like bigotry.)
So when fed into the engine of political correctness, identity politics is the fuel of self supremacy. It inevitably brings about social distrust. This distrust creates misery and alienation in a society, while empowering self supremacists to direct our lives.
Self-Supremacy Aims to Break Up Relationships
There are a host of other words related to self-supremacy: conceit, narcissism, egotism, self-centeredness, vanity, arrogance, smugness, and snobbery, just for starters.
But its most distinct feature of is its disdain for others’ strong personal relationships. It’s an attitude that’s very anti-friendship, anti-thought, and anti-conversation. Self-supremacists constantly engage in relational aggression and meddling. This involves a lot of rumor-mongering, smearing, and back-stabbing for the express purpose of destroying relationships. Ostracism is always the prime goal, and such bullying dynamics happen to be a common thread in socialist systems.
The urge to separate people as a means of gaining power over others’ lives is also why self-supremacists are intent on destroying a culture that nourishes relationships. If they succeed in their war on the family, they will be able to control all other personal relationships. They push for policies that erode the most intimate of human bonds.
For example, self-supremacists are big fans of no-limits abortion. This erodes the mother-child bond both for the individual and society as a whole. The next step in this erosion is infanticide, which is gaining wider acceptance today. Another policy they push is no-fault divorce, which erodes the husband-wife bond.
Another big feature of self supremacy’s social policies is promoting the hook-up culture. It not only erodes real intimacy between men and women, but also bonds of trust and friendship. Such people also support education policies that undermine parental authority and erode family bonds. Self-supremacists’ constant attacks on church doctrine corrode the awareness of the first and last refuge of a human being: a personal relationship with God.
In the end, obedience to the dictates of political correctness and identity politics is the path to virtual solitary confinement for each and every one of us. As we cut off our speech, we cut off our capacity for full conversations with others. We diminish our capacity for strong personal relationships. Hence, today’s epidemic of loneliness.
At the same time, we should realize that each one of us has the potential to be a self-supremacist. No one is immune. As soon as we think we’re immune, we’re on the path to losing our freedom.
If we succumb to that mindset, we cut ourselves off from strong relationships. If you look at the end products of self-supremacy through the lens of human history, where do people end up? Tyrants such as Nero, Napoleon, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Che Guevara could never satisfy their insatiable appetite for power. If left to its own devices, this appetite leads to just one man standing, alone and isolated, just like all of his victims.
That’s the trap of self-supremacy. That’s the insanity of it. It’s like a disease that has infected the body politic. Americans desperately need to understand these dynamics of tyranny. In a very real sense, the First Amendment was devised as a check against that destructive impulse.
The only cure is a diet of free speech and plenty of exercise of it. We need lots of real conversations about these dynamics. We need to expose them until we regain our senses. We need to understand how and why anyone would try to undermine the human right to think one’s own thoughts and express those thoughts freely to others. Otherwise we may well end up on the side of history where self-supremacists are taking us: the ash heap side of history.
