Self-righteousness or self-interest?
When I was in fifth grade I had a huge conflict with my biology teacher (Lets call him S). S constantly made his students go outside to clean our schoolyard during classes and I just thought that it was wrong. One autumn day we came to class and our teacher said that we won’t be studying today and will be cleaning instead. The day was particularly cold and I was wearing a very light coat. Needless to say, I didn’t want to go outside. I raised my hand and addressed my teacher: “Do you really believe that collecting garbage is an appropriate substitution for learning biology?”
He got red in the face and angrily replied: “It’s not about garbage. It’s about keeping our environment clean and since biology is all about nature, there couldn’t be biology without clean environment. Don’t you believe that we should take care of Mother Earth, Sazonova?” I said that I did, but I didn’t believe that we should be ‘cleaning the environment’ during classes. He tried to shame me in front of the whole class implying that I was a bad person for not caring about my surroundings.
I knew that I would freeze to death if I were to go outside, so I argued that I’m a good person who never litters (which was true) and if he wants to keep the schoolyard clean he should go after people who actually do litter. The situation escalated to the point that somebody called our school principal to resolve it. As soon as she came into the classroom S got quiet and told her that there was no need for her involvement. He asked us to open our books as if nothing happened. I felt like I won, but I found his behavior a little odd.
A few weeks passed. One day I happened to be in a teacher’s lounge waiting for one of my teachers. Meanwhile two other teachers were talking nearby about S. One of them was complaining to the other that while all of them were terribly underpaid S collected extra money for keeping the schoolyard clean and didn’t even do any work himself. All of a sudden my argument with S made sense and I lost any remaining respect for him. I knew my reasons for not wanting to go outside that day. Granted I presented them in a different light, but I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t have a coat warm enough to stay outside for almost an hour. Meanwhile, S (who after all was an adult) tried to make me feel like a bad person and presented me to my peers as somebody who doesn’t care about Mother Earth because he needed my cooperation to make a few extra rubles.
It taught me a valuable lesson. From then on I acquired a habit of looking for hidden motives when people are too vocal about their good intentions. In other words I became suspicious of intense self-righteousness. Needless to say, when all the Global Warming hoopla started I was waiting to see just how much money the high priest of the Global Warming movement would make. However, I was still surprised to find out that his net worth went up a whopping 10,000% (from about 1,000,000 in 2000 to 100,000,000 in 2008).
