Social climbers

Hector Avalos tried to leave some belated commented my old “Conflicted atheism” post. Let’s begin with this comment:

Dr. Hector Avalos6/02/2013 3:05 AM

Thank you for clearing up that confusion between the epistemology of ethics and the ontology of ethics. I must have missed that day in my philosophy courses, which I imagine are much better at RTS.

Avalos has a strange obsession with my RTS degree. What accounts for that obsession?

i) I believe Avalos started out life as poor Mexican. Folks who come from humble backgrounds are sometimes dogged by a persistent inferiority complex. They compensate for their sense of shame by becoming social climbers. Avalos is pitifully status-conscious.

By contrast, impressing others has never been the goal of my life. I grew up middle class. Most of my neighbors and classmates were middle class. We were average. And I never aspired to move higher up the social ladder. That’s not what I live for.

ii) Avalos is very proud of his Ivy League education. Keep in mind, though, that from an evolutionary standpoint, Avalos is just a college-educated monkey. At the end of the day, a monkey who struts around the quadrangle is still a monkey. Even though Avalos suffers from an emotional craving to rise above his humble socioeconomic origins, he can’t rise above his evolutionary origins. He’s just one notch above the Orangutan. An ape with an electric razor.

iii) For the record, I was already past 40 when I entered the RTS degree program, so it’s not as if that’s where I got my ideas. I had a fully-formed worldview long before I started RTS.