August 24, 2025

Dear you,

As a participant and observer of life and relationships, I have long witnessed subtle dynamics in interactions that corrode the possibility of truly symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationships—whether at the interpersonal or group level.

Then yesterday, on August 23, 2025, as I watched a video which randomly appeared on my timeline—a social experiment designed to demonstrate how learned helplessness develops (https://youtu.be/gFmFOmprTt0?si=zsuZ7l5rqVDBD3uh) —I finally identified the alternate state to which I have been acutely sensitive for years: learned arrogance.

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What is Learned Arrogance?

Learned Arrogance

A psychological and social state in which an individual or group, consistently supported in their ability to control outcomes, unconsciously develops a belief in their superior competence.

This belief arises as one observes others experiencing learned helplessness—where agency has been eroded through systemic barriers, trauma, or artificially limited control. Over time, the supported party internalizes a sense of comparative superiority and continues to act from this belief even when evidence of equal or greater competence is present.

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Key Features

• Mirror dynamic: Emerges as the opposite pole of learned helplessness.

• Reinforcement: Social structures and privileges reinforce the illusion of greater ability.

• Persistence: The mindset endures despite contradictory evidence.

• Impact: Maintains hierarchies, justifies inequity, and normalizes supremacy (e.g., classism, racism, ableism).

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The Duality

• Learned helplessness: “My actions don’t matter, so I stop trying.”

• Learned arrogance: “My actions always matter, therefore I must be more capable than those who struggle.”

Both are distortions of reality, shaped and reinforced by systemic conditions.

Whole belief systems are built upon the interplay of these two premises. Their impact extends across every type of relationship in which artificially manipulated social constructs assign superiority to some and inferiority to others—whether among humans or animals.

This is the bedrock of supremacy.

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Illustrative Outcomes

As Carter G. Woodson observed: “If you teach a being that they must enter only through the back door, they will build back doors so that they may enter where no back doors exist.”

The reverse also holds true: If you teach a being that only they may enter through the front door, they will regard all others who attempt entry as interlopers and will feel unconsciously compelled to correct this so-called existential error.

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The Antidote: Informed Compassion

The antidote to both learned helplessness and learned arrogance is informed compassion.

Informed compassion is the psychological state in which one becomes conscious that agency itself can be either inflated or eroded by manipulated social norms—and also recognizes that these states typically co-exist within us all. It is the willingness to face both learned helplessness and learned arrogance in oneself.

From this awareness comes recognition that individuals and groups have unconsciously built multiple hierarchical structures which prevent authentic mutuality. Out of this recognition emerges the possibility of dismantling false hierarchies and building nurturing relationships that honour the dignity and agency of all.

This has been my lived experience.

The realization began when I was unintentionally neglected as I cried by parents who loved me deeply, and actively cared for me with conscious and unconscious competence in every way but one. They, doing as they had been instructed, silenced the gut instinct to pick up and stay with their crying baby. But God came to me in the darkness of aloneness, and stayed with me.

I did not become consciously aware until about five years ago, during meditation, that the presence of God was so dearly close to me as I was terrified in the darkness which seemed to separate me from all others, though they were only resting.

The consciousness of the divine with-ness of God was deepened as I accepted Their invitation to get to know Who They really are through observation and interaction with Yeshua M’shikha.

Leaning more deeply into that invitation came one evening in 2005, after I watched Blood Diamond with friends who were a part of my broadened definition of family.

We had finished the film at almost two o’clock in the morning. They went to bed, unaware that I had been hiding an increasing seething searing rage —at how cruel humans could be to each other; at how wealth, luxury, and power were built on the backs of the youngest of us, whom we should be cherishing and guiding to maturity; and on the backs of those deliberately dehumanized and diminished in the hierarchy of socio-political caste.

I was so angry that I had aged this far in life and was still not in a position to be able to do anything to significantly shift that unjust dynamic. I was headed toward the stairs, speaking outrage and contempt and disgust and disappointment to God, when as clearly as day I heard:

“But those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their wings. They shall mount up on wings like eagles. They shall run and not grow weary. They shall walk and shall not faint.”

My birthday was approaching. I was almost thirty years old, and by traditional markers of success I had not “arrived.”

And yet, I felt powerful and competent and capable and successful—not arrogant but content. I was living with friends who felt like family. I was nurturing and loving people every day—cooking and feeding hearts, minds, and bodies. I was engaging in dialogue that challenged systemic norms. I was observing multiple attempts to build wealth and influence in community.

And I was also arrogant. Disgusted by hierarchy and harm, I pointed it out with sarcastic eloquence meant to burn arrogance to ashes—without concern for the person who might, at worst, be consumed or, at least, scarred by my words.

Within minutes of hearing God’s voice, I bumped into the little sister, Cece, who had also been up worrying about relationships. God’s message comforted her then too. 

Although that message and the eagles featured in it has consistently been a comfort and source of encouragement throughout my life, it was only about six weeks ago that I finally understood that God was calling me to be patient, and with that patience, to also be gentle, and kind, joyful, peaceful, good, with integrity also called self-control. 

And now, as I approach my fiftieth birthday a few days short of two decades later, I cannot deeply enough express gratitude for all of you, the cloud of innumerable witnesses who have been with me through the darkness which felt as if it separated me from all others when it truly did not.

So today, exactly one week before my fiftieth birthday, when by the same contrived sociological standards I might have thought myself unsuccessful, I rest in the certainty of the power of informed compassion within me—grateful that God continues to heal the wounds of both arrogance and helplessness, which are the root of anxiety within us all.

 And I am immensely, infinitely grateful that as those wounds heal, incomprehensible, indescribable peace emerges, and everything that I do and say flows from this new kintsugi mended heart.

Therefore every day, I choose life.

So that we can finally build a world guided by informed compassion which we consciously enjoy together—will you choose to be more open to divine healing through the expert surgical excision of both learned arrogance and learned helplessness too?

With love, hope, faith, and solidarity,

Saran Lewis