Blogging is an interesting thing. It’s interesting to throw an idea out into the ether and see if anyone has anything to say about it.

When people have something to say, I use that to gauge how well I did at communicating my point of view. For my previous post, “Outside the In-Crowd”, I can tell from the response that I didn’t do a very good job communicating. For the record, I want to make it clear that I really do appreciate the responses and the care behind them. That means a lot to me. The fact that I didn’t convey my message well is not your fault and it doesn’t make your comments less meaningful.

When I wrote that blog post, I was trying to convey a simple realization that I’d had. It’s a twofold realization.

The first, er, fold, is as follows: One of two things happens when you put a group of people together. Either the group will generally concede to be accepting and interested in everyone, or some subset of the group will work together to elevate themselves by pushing the others down. I don’t think this is necessarily done consciously or vindictively. It just IS.

The second part is: When a subset of the group bands together to elevate itself, the remaining members of the group have an interesting choice. Being a majority, they can ignore the group trying to elevate itself and choose to be accepting and interested in everyone. Taking this path disempowers the smaller group trying to elevate itself. Ironically, most individuals in the majority support the smaller group by trying to get themselves into that group. This is done by, in turn, pushing down other people.

This happens in junior high and high school, but I found it interesting to note that it doesn’t just happen there. That’s simply a common thread I used to try to help make the point.

The general reaction I’ve had to this is basically this (okay, I’m exaggerating slightly): Matt! Why are you saying this? I liked you in high school! I know for a fact that at least some other people did as well! Just because you could never get a date doesn’t mean you are a loser! PLEASE DO NOT KILL YOURSELF!!!!!

To which I express my gratitude. I appreciate your friendship. My point is, I didn’t write the blog post because I’m insecure about whether I was popular in high school. I don’t really care about that. There are, however, a couple of things that I am concerned about:

  • I don’t care about popularity in high school now (sheesh, that was, uh, more than 5 years ago), but I did then. I’m ashamed to admit it but it’s true. And I fear that I was one of those people on the outside trying to get in by pushing other people down. I really do worry about this. I fear and regret what I might have been like and hope I’ve changed.
  • Even though I’m older now, and my friends and acquaintances are older now, I’m still seeing this and have been seeing it ever since. I just now figured out how to make sense of it. So my concern now is, now that I understand it and can quantify it, am I really changing? Am I supporting the in-crowds by pushing down others around me in order to conform to the ideals of the in-crowds? Or am I creating the ideal I would rather have, where people are generally accepting and interested in everyone else? Do I still care about being accepted by the in-crowd?

See, the thing is, regardless of the context (high school, work, church, etc.), the nature of the in-crowd is the same. And the appeal of in-crowd membership is entirely dependent on context. Remove the context, and the appeal is gone.

It’s my hope that we will see this for what it is and disempower the in-crowds around us by simply refusing to give them the support they need from us to survive. It’s my hope that we will instead work to be accepting and interested in others. Hey, in a way it is a form of civil disobedience. Cater to your rebel spirit! Take a look around you and assess yourself. I’ll try to do the same, and I hope we can improve together.