I have written elsewhere about the people paradox--we all want to be equal, yet we all want to be special. Equality is necessary for human affairs maintenance--like the socks we get at Christmas. Yet we all want that special gift--something just for us.
I would like to focus on a particular danger of the drive to be special. That danger is that we become addicted to feeling special and seek shameful shortcuts and machinations to secure our special fix. I call this in its most typical manifestation the "country club syndrome." We like to think of ourselves as among a select group of the chosen and hence more worthy than all others--a very heady feeling that can lead straight to addiction and some very ugly assumptions and consequent behavior. We come to idolize ourselves. One of the central benefits of the informality and how-you-doing equality of American society is that we detest the holier-than-thou mentality however cloaked in wrappings of respectability. Christ is our example--a man open to all.
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