PSEUDO ELITISM.
Nietzsche once said, “ If you stare into the abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you”. A similar phenomenon has been haunting the spirit of our generation, but it’s not darkness this time, it’s the identity.
It is believed that if you lie to yourself long enough, it becomes your truth, but does it? More often than not, your lies become a blanket around you that helps you create a version of yourself that others would like, but here’s the catch, the blanket that you so gladly wrap around yourself is nothing but your shroud.
You’re afraid of your truth or perhaps aren’t proud of it, so you try creating a version of yourself that’s better and more likable. To do that, you consider certain parameters that are based on the people that constitute your environment, or rather the environment that you wish to be a part of. The price for this is your identity, and often, your happiness.
Imagine yourself joining a new college. You are excited to meet new people. The people that you meet on the first day are fluent in English and talk about the latest Netflix drops, but then again, you’ve only ever watched shows on Disney in your native language and have laughed with your friends in your desi slang. You want to be a part of the crowd, so you go back home, search for the most popular shows, get yourself a new Jansport bag, and Nike sneakers and a week later join the crowd with a new accent.
You’ve got the gang but have lost the money that you had been saving for months for a replacement for the age-old earphones. You’re now updated with the current hits on Netflix, because that’s what you’ve been watching after college every day, leaving no time for your favorite Shane Dawson conspiracy theories. You’re so happy and jovial in college, but why does the smile fade off when you come back home? Why does it become a task that you check every morning and a mask that you take off in the evening?
In today’s world, authenticity is rare. Wherever one turns, one finds the claim to be the best. From institutions to restaurants, from people to shows, elitism is the talk of the town. The enigma of “ The elites” is rapidly spreading like a forest fire, drawing not just the youth but also adults. If you’re not a part of the elitists club, then you sure are curious about them.
Before moving further, it’s crucial to understand the essence of elitism and what it is that we are questioning — Is Elitism the truth or is it just desire?
Elitism is the belief that certain people should be treated, better than others based on their skills, power, or influence. Whereas, being an elite is a status. For example, it is unfair for top-tier private schools to dominate entry to top-tier universities based on the social strata of their parents or professors. This makes the level of the playground uneven for people who aren’t elites, which gives rise to the desire of being an elitist, thereby starting the continuous circle
We find elitists all around us, from the person sitting across the room to popular characters on the screen.
Rose, Titanic ( Image source : Netflix)
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Let’s talk about one of the most popular female protagonists of all time, Rose DeWitt Bukater from Titanic. Born into a wealthy family, which had lost its wealth, Rose was forced to succumb to the path chosen for her by her mother who could not have her elite status stripped from her. Rose was expected to marry a rich businessman and attend social gatherings, dress in high-class fashion and speak in a proper dignified tone. When all she wanted was to live a meaningful life that was devoid of all the pretense. Irrespective of whether she was able to achieve that, it forces us to question the worth of trying to join the club of elitism.
Alexis, Schitts Creek. (Image source : Netflix)
In Schitt’s creek, we find Alexis who had once been an heiress to an enormous fortune has a very shallow and materialistic personality. Only when her family is stripped of its wealth and forced to move into a small town, her blanket of luxury falls off and she is forced to reflect and develop who she is as a person, without all the cards.
It is interesting how both of them have very different personalities with and without their elite status.
Rebecca, COS (Image source : Netflix)
Then we have Rebecca Bloomwood from “Confessions of a shopaholic”, who is shown to enjoy the comfort of expensive items, even if she’s drowning in financial debt because a scarf that costs more than her monthly income “makes her haircut more expensive”.She makes us wonder, why do people do it? Why do they choose to be elitists rather than embracing their authentic selves? ( add the idea of how aspiration is a big aspect and how that changes people to maintain a specific lifestyle)
The answer ranges from psychological to social spectrum. On the psychological front, people pretend to be elitists initially and eventually start believing it until they no longer remain the same. Becoming elitist stems from an aspiration to achieve as much as one can, which often requires one to play the part of the club they want to fit in. This is done often to make way into a higher social structure, which brings us to the social spectrum. As an elitist, you’re someone who spends a fortune on how you dress, the clubs you hang out in, kind of drink you order, which gives you access to people belonging to a higher social club. Being a part of that club opens doors to opportunities for you to create a lifestyle that would otherwise be impossible. The accessibility that the club offers, in turn gives them power. Power and status of hierarchies are not unknown in human society. Although a significant amount of evidence suggests that people seek power and status, there is a general emphasis in the existing literature on the hierarchy of acceptance and reinforcement. Access to crucial means such as power, status, and a higher social quotient legitimizes your chances of success. The accessibility further increases individuals’ motivation to attain high status, particularly in hierarchies perceived to be illegitimate, and lowly, leading to status challenges, which are detrimental to growth.
The process and price climbing through the hierarchies and adding superficial layers to fit in is to be someone entirely new,
Someone pretending to be better than the rest, without any weightage to their claim. Someone wrapping their minuscule achievements around them like the moon wraps clouds around itself. Someone so deeply convinced that social acceptance is what they want at any cost that they’d sacrifice their own identity behind it. Someone like Nicolette Gray, a social media star who pretended to be a social brat for fame and created a fake socialist persona online with top in line cars, and apartments in Los Angeles’ most posh areas, only to have lost the YouTube fame once she couldn’t support her “Beverly Hills Brat” lifestyle. She’s now built on that fame and channeled all the public attention to her Instagram account, which now delivers most of her paychecks.
Pseudo — Elitism is about going beyond one’s means to build a lifestyle that cannot be sustained forever with the aspiration of developing something remotely similar, that one can maintain once the fire of pseudo-elitism extinguishes as it did for Nicolette, the “Beverly hills brat.”
The concept of pseudo-elitism is nothing but madness, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra in Don Quixote rightly said “ When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?”
