It is often thought that oppression is something that elites do to the rest of the population.

There is a problem with that claim. The worst people I’ve known were not in the elites. They were people in the “hoi polloi” who thought that they were the only sane and rational people out there, and that everyone else was stupid or insane.

I attended an elite school called St. Stephen’s School on a full scholarship. As an immigrant, I was poorer than most others students, and any number of people there treated me badly. However there were things that the St. Stephen’s people were right
about. They believed in excellence. They believed in being one’s best. And any number of them also believed in compassion.

We see no such values in the bullies on the Internet.

I have not found the people in the elites to be worse than an average person. Any number of them had their heart in the right place. The worst behaviour I have seen was in people coming from humble upbringings who thought that they were better than the
elites. These men would get together with a woman from the elites and treat her like shit. That way they got to feel that they were a part of the elites while considering themselves better than the elites and while wiping their ass with the elites’
finest product.

When I was talking to a co-worker about my negative experiences at St. Stephen’s, he said that the problem was elitism. No, it was not. I had a girlfriend from the other side of town who had also had a terrible experience with her upbringing. Her
classmates were not a part of any elite. Whatever their problem was, elitism was not it.

That people in elites can be jerks, everyone knows. However people outside the elites can be jerks as well. While I had negative experiences in an elite setting, I had greater negative experiences outside an elite setting. Anything human is capable of
being a jerk. And it is complete foolishness to look for potentials of evil in the elites while failing to see the same outside of them.

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