Thank you for this well-developed distinction.
To what extent are we engulfed in the superiority-driven greatness? To answer, we have to look at “invisible” things as well as visible--laws, parenting, teaching, customs, church activities, sports, activists of all stripes. Science, engineering. To what extent do our laws enforce superiority? To what extent does our science? To what extent does our parenting? Our churches? Our sports? Each is a study in itself and the story of competing greatnesses can be seen in each, I think.
Where does the inferiority complex come from? Simple: shame. At the way we have treated the First Nations. And for the enslaving of Africans and African-Americans. For the racism that has supported them both. And for the ways we have despoiled the land--a particularly recent effect, thrown into sharp relief by the brutality against First Nations peoples who had identified with the land, during our national “pioneer" story. We cannot heal from our desire to show up everybody else, to dominate them unless we stop lying to ourselves about these crimes against humanity and nature. To what extent are we a beacon of freedom in the world? To what extent are we a nation with a great frontier? How do our laws, customs, parenting, teaching, sports, churches, and activists support but limit our natural and cultural liberties, and the existence and health of our working lands and wildlands?
The only reason I don’t include the ways we mistreat women and children is because these wrongs are so pervasive in the world that, as yet, they play no special role in our national history. For women’s rights, we are making it a key part of our story, but are women free and equal yet? To what extent are some people left out?
And children’s rights--to what extent are laws protecting them not honored due to budgetary constraints? Or due to custom? For example, in family law, cases abound where babies and children are grievously and criminally abused and no one goes to jail.
Or, here’s a big example, who and what has made it possible for officials to say that it’s “unrealistically expensive” to clean up lead paint, lead in water, lead in soils, in short lead that is poisoning children? Where is the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness in that? Where is the right of a child’s body to respond to the natural world? What kind of reality is this? To what extent can we count ourselves protecting children’s rights?
Or the “realities" of effectively limiting climate change? That’s a children’s rights story if there ever was one.