Your Moral Superiority Complex and How It Screws Up Your Relationships
Let’s start with a Brain Snack. Purple butterflies, shuffleboard, and survivors of zero-question dates are a few of the threads pulled at over a 54-minute chat. What happens when you agree 90-100% with another human? Enjoy some wacky thoughts and questions on a stroll:
I want to talk about Moral Narcissism to stick with this theme of Being Human.
I. Welcome to the Church of You
Every morning, a congregation gathers around a single altar. There is no incense. No pews. There is a blurry mirror above your sink, fogged with the hot breath of your exceptionalism. Welcome to the Church of You, where the hymns are humblebrags and the sermons sound suspiciously like, “I would never do that.”
We all believe we’re the exception. The honest one in a corrupt industry. The generous friend in a world of takers. The non-racist white person. The emotionally intelligent man. The thoughtful boss. The good parent. The faithful partner in a hookup culture.
For this last one, a poem in honor of the high school graduating class of 2025 (including my twin daughters), with the hope they escape hookup culture:
There’s a stranger in my bed
There’s a pounding in my head
Glitter all over the room
Pink flamingos in the pool
I smell like a minibar
DJ’s passed out in the yard
Barbies on the barbeque
Is this a hickey or a bruise
—Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.) (from Katy Perry - modern day poet?)
How do you manage entry into hookup culture? Serious self-regulatory work as uncovered in this illuminating qualitative study:
We think it will be easy to be the outlier who can resist temptations. We’ve got moral résumés padded thicker than a politician’s autobiography (and we believe it).
Researchers tested this moral illusion by asking people to rate how often they engaged in virtuous behaviors (source). Six weeks later, they showed those same people their prior forgotten answers, falsely labeled as the “average person.” What happened? People immediately declared themselves superior - to themselves. We will try to outdo our past self to maintain the fantasy!
The problem isn’t that we give ourselves a hallway pass. It’s that we rarely extend the same generosity to others (an unpopular idea I addressed on LinkedIn - here). It matters because, like it or not, you are a villain in someone else’s story…
Below, for paid Provoked subscribers, you also get four exercises or what I refer to as tiny antidotes for your moral narcissism (yes, you!). Use them on yourself. Use them in your classes, workshops, and conversations.