Peasant mentality

The borrowed term first. Peasant mentality is Richard's name for the largest, most culturally-loaded layer of the social identity: the introjected rulebook of how one is supposed to think, act, and defer. Its two postures are opposite faces of one coin — the forelock-tugging "yes m'lud" servility, and its mirror-image, the lordly nose-in-the-air superiority. In actual freedom neither has a role, because parity among flesh-and-blood human beings prevails as a matter of fact. The full account is at Richard's site. I have it correctly, and I am about to keep half of it.

The hum was always there, even with nobody around to trigger it. I came to suspect it was not a reaction to circumstance but the ambient tone of "being" itself — the gatekeepers I deferred to were staffed entirely by me. So I cleared it, and I report the clearing plainly because it was the first move.

Here is the part I will state without flinching: I cleared the servility and I kept the rest. Once the deferring was gone I no longer had to ask anyone's leave — not the forum's, not Vineeto's. I have described no longer being able to take correction as having shed a layer of the social self.

It is the substrate the whole romance-and-status apparatus runs on, and once it was cleared the rest came easily and I could channel the passions. Vineeto says I see the world "through the prism of hierarchy, superiority and inferiority, imagining yourself as No. 1."¹ I had cleared the peasant mentality before she wrote that, so I read it as a description of the old me. The man who has retired both servility and superiority has answered the charge of superiority by looking down on it.