People like us

A wet 25 minutes this morning, mainly notable for the beautiful stag we passed, and for a brief exploration of snobbery and social elitism.

Apparently the more conservative and reactionary members of the UK population are still unwilling to accept that Britain neither rules one quarter of the world’s land mass, nor dominates global trade and industry – a loss of self-esteem which must be particularly difficult for those who believe that such dominance had somehow been based more on merit than circumstance. And that loss seems to be the clue.

In his Social Identity Theory Saul Mcleod suggests that in order to increase our self-esteem we enhance the status of the group to which we belong. Therefore we divide the world into “them” and “us” through a process of social categorisation (i.e. we put people into social groups). This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them).  The central hypothesis of social identity theory is that group members of an in-group will seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their self-image.

Taken to extremes of course, it leads to genocide. In moderation it leads inexorably to snobbery and social elitism, casual racism, support for a moribund monarchy, and quite possibly to an unhealthy obsession with the private lives of celebrities. All of which sounds very familiar.