Tension between the ideal self and perceived self results in unusual form of snubbing

Date published: 8/28/2008

WHEN A PERSON thinks he or she is too good for someone else, it opens up a whole range of troublesome conceptualizations (of both the person himself and the people he's around).

For instance, when two people who respect each other are talking, they both allow their identities to be shaped, in part, by the person they're talking to. They define themselves with some amount of ambiguity, and allow suggestions and new descriptions of themselves from other people.

But folks who think they're too good have a very solidified self-definition. While, in an ideal conversation, there's a give-and-take of each person telling the other what he is, the snooty person comes in with a definition of himself that precedes the conversational, self-defining activity, and this self-definition has already prescribed the ways the person needs to act to the people he looks down on.

The interesting question here is, is it possible to think you're too good for your own self? To condescend to yourself? I think so.

This same mechanism--starting out with preconceived ideas instead of allowing some looseness when it comes to the way you see yourself--can happen within one person. You scoff at your own ideas, treating yourself as if you're inferior to your own observation. You look at yourself pompously, because you're looking ahead to all the things you should be doing and need to accomplish, not where you are at this moment.

To be able to condescend to yourself, you need to create some distance and discord inside yourself. We can think of "the self" in two ways: On the one hand, there is the narrative story of our lives, what people think of us, etc., etc.; and on the other hand, there is the raw sense of observing the very basic, phenomenal feeling of being an isolated ego. When these two things split up, you're left with some distance inside yourself. The self-as-isolated-observer analyzes critically the self-as-narrative-story, and they gobble each other up.

Date published: 8/28/2008