Religions, cults and the caste system come together in Gap Psychology

Gap Psychology dictates that to achieve superiority, one must claim inferiors and then distance oneself from those claimed inferiors. The greater the distance—i.e., the wider the “Gap,” the greater our superiority.

“Rich” and “poor” are comparatives, not absolutes. For one to be rich, someone else must be poor, or at least poorer.

A person with $100,000 is rich if everyone else has only $100, but he/she is “middle” if everyone else has $100,000. And he is poor if everyone else has $1,000,000.

Getting richer is not simply a matter of increasing one’s ownership of money. If a middle-income person has $100,000 and doubles that to $200,000, he still is “middle” if everyone else rises to $200,000.

Getting richer requires widening the Gap below and narrowing the Gap above. It is the Gap that measures wealth, not the wealth itself.

Gap Psychology describes the desire to widen the Gap below and to narrow the Gap above.

Gap Psychology enters into virtually all aspects of human existence, not only money or wealth. A person with an IQ of 130 is smart unless everyone else has an IQ of 170.

A  21-year-old man who can do 50 chin-ups is strong unless everyone else can do 150. A child who can read at age 4 is considered smart unless every other child can read at age 3. If you can run 100 meters in 9.5 seconds, you are blazingly fast unless you are a cheetah, which means you would be laughingly slow.

Self-improvement does not require improving yourself so long as you can widen the Gap below and narrow the Gap above. 

You can be strong and do just two chin-ups if you hang a 300 lb. weight from everyone else’s ankles.

If you force everyone else to wear blindfolds, you can learn to read at age 8 and be considered smart. And if you tie everyone else’s legs together, you can be fast, running 100 meters in 20 seconds.

Figuratively, that is how the rich treat the rest of us to widen the Gap. They falsely claim that the federal government “can’t afford” to provide benefits to the middle and lower classes while accepting tax benefits for themselves.

Gap Psychology even enters into the abortion controversy. The rich can easily obtain abortions and other medical procedures. It is the poor who must suffer from a lack of care. That is a Gap the rich wish to widen.

Gap Psychology leads to bigotry, classes, and the caste system. Here is an excellent summary:

Caste
by Isabel Wilkerson

“The Eight Pillars of Caste” Summary

The Foundations of Caste: The Origins of our Discontents
For more than half of American history, slavery was the dominant social institution in the South.

Wilkerson argues that even after emancipation, legally sanctioned violence, harassment, and displacement of African Americans remained—and still remains—an existential threat.

According to Wilkerson, these behavioral scripts and socially reinforced biases have become deeply encoded in the American psyche at all levels of society, which unconsciously perpetuates the system.

Her research demonstrates that all caste systems have the eight essential characteristics (Pillars) in common.

Pillar Number One: Divine Will and the Laws of Nature
Hindu cosmology holds that the caste system is an aspect of the birth of Brahma, the supreme god, who created and populated the world out of various parts of his body in a way corresponding to the social functions dictated by the traditional order.

The Judeo-Christian tradition has a contrasting story about the creation of the world’s different races descending from the three sons of the Old Testament patriarch Noah.

The two “good” sons who are rewarded for their honor become the fathers of the Eastern and Western races, while the cursed son, Ham, and his own son Canaan are fated to be people of the South, forsaken by God.

For there to be “good,” there must be “bad.”

All caste systems, religions, and cults (similar to religions but smaller and not as mainstream) identify members as “good” and outsiders as “bad” or lesser in some way.

At the time when Spain and Portugal were beginning their global circumnavigations, the native inhabitants of Africa and India were believed by Europeans to be descendants of the biblical outcasts and thus divinely ordained to suffering and subjugation.

Pillar Number Two: Heritability
In India, caste is inherited through the father’s line, whereas the United States has historically determined caste through the mother.

In Judaism, to be Jewish, one must have a Jewish mother.  The father can be Jewish or gentile.

Because enslaved mothers had no legal right to their own children, Black birth became a production process for slave labor, as Black children were regarded as valuable, durable commodities.

The major distinction between caste and class, Wilkerson writes, is that caste is predetermined, unchanging, and generationally upheld, whereas class implies an attainmentof certain conditions based on merit and effort and is much more inclusive within its respective caste “container.”

Yet we have the expressions “new” and “old” money, with “old money: considered superior by those whose ancestors were wealthy.

In the United States, the exclusion of African Americans regardless of their level of social or professional success—an exclusion based on superficial, inescapable, inherited characteristics—resembles in practice the treatment of India’s “untouchable” populations.

Pillar Number Three: Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating
It is essential for a caste system to separate and manage bloodlines in a way that preserves the impenetrability of the dominant gene pool by subordinate-caste DNA.

This protects the Gap between white and non-white. Most American parents prefer that their children marry within their religion and color.

To achieve this, miscegenation laws are passed that restrict marriage and reproduction along caste lines, a policy known as endogamy—and something Hitler admired about the American model.

The objective of this kind of social engineering is to achieve racial purity among the dominant caste, but it also concentrates resources, value, and empathy among the various levels of the dominant caste that are systematically denied to non-white subordinates.

America’s racial boundaries had been set from its earliest days, and coupled with the nation’s historic exclusion of non-European immigrants, endogamy laws effectively created a process of selective breeding that reinforced caste divisions while reserving for white men the ownership of Black reproduction.

Pillar Number Four: Purity Versus Pollution
The United States has its own unique system of gradations on a scale of racial purity that defines itself in opposition to an obsession with contamination by genetic material from a perceived inferior bloodline.

Not only was there the so-called “one-drop rule” that defined Blackness and which the Nazis found so extreme, but there was also an elaborate status-defining class subsystem within the subordinate caste based on skin tone and proportion of African ancestry.

Systems like the examples Wilkerson uses all share a rabid aversion to the idea of public spaces and utilities, particularly water and swimming pools, being similarly contaminated not by blood but by mere exposure to the skin, breath, sweat, or even shadow of the subordinate caste.

Hitler and Trump have spoken of those who “poison the blood” of the nation. Hitler primarily (though not exclusively) was talking about Jews.

Trump was talking about non-white immigrants.

Pillar Number Five: Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and the Mudsill
Wilkerson returns to the architectural metaphor she introduced in chapter 2 to describe the house’s most important structural element, where the framing meets the foundation, known as a mudsill.

In the segregationist political tradition, the enslaved caste of African American servants and laborers constituted an analogous base to the American social order.

The lowly work they performed for lack of choice was seen as the limit of their capabilities and their purpose for existence, a permanent servile class upon which the American economy was built.

This is part of the belief that the poor are lazy, stupid, and cannot be trusted. It provides an excuse for widening the employment Gap.

It also alludes to benefits given to the poor, i.e., “Who is going to pick up the garbage if we give them money?”

One major difference between the subordinate Americans and Indian Dalit is that while the Indian system has many subdivisions, known as jatis, within each group that determined one’s work, the African American subordinate class has been limited in professional options with few chances to break out except as performers or athletes.

Until recently, even these luminaries were expected to reinforce popular racist stereotypes if they were to be accepted by the dominant culture.

Pillar Number Six: Dehumanization and Stigma
In order to justify the extreme and often violent measures taken to maintain the oppressive status quo, dominant-caste authority invariably engages in a process of dehumanizing subordinate groups.

By denying subordinates equal regard for their virtue, dignity, and suffering, the dominant caste can so diminish subordinates’ humanity as to make them appear mere beasts of burden, pestilent scourges, or puppets on a string, insensitive to pain and humiliation.

The subordinate group thus becomes marked with pariah status, and their punishment is seen as just and moral, commensurate with the perceived bestiality and inhumanity that relegates them to ghettoization and marginalization.

This dehumanizing mindset is inculcated in generations of dominant-caste children who are raised believing in their superiority and entitlement, which desensitizes them to the victimization of others, even in brutal extremes.

Pillar Number Seven: Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means for Control
Wilkerson describes the means necessary for the sustained oppression of an outcast group, which requires only that the members of the dominant class do nothing and remain silent, maintaining a complicity in which the order will thrive.

The image of the dreaded slaver’s whip encapsulates the violence and intimidation deemed necessary to hold the subordinates in their “container,” and the public complicity that allows the brutal enforcement of the order is the result of the racist attitudes bred into the dominant caste since childhood.

The savage business of terror seems like a part of normal life when it is tolerated by the majority of people.

Trump says he will deport a million undocumented immigrants. Imagine the terror these men, women, and children will feel waiting for their lives to be ripped apart when his brown shirts come banging on the door.

1. Ipsos Poll (2013):
30% think most illegal immigrants (with some exceptions) should be deported.
23% believe all illegal immigrants should be deported.
Only 5% believe all illegal immigrants should stay legally, and 31% want most illegal immigrants to stay.

2. Pew Research Center (2021):
25% of adults say undocumented immigrants should not be allowed to stay legally, advocating for national law enforcement efforts to deport them.

3. Harris Poll (2024):
Half of all Americans favor mass deportation of people who are illegally in the U.S.

Pillar Number Eight: Inherent Superiority Versus Inherent Inferiority
Wilkerson uses old Hollywood as an example of a cultural force that helped perpetuate popular stereotypes about African Americans’ inferiority and contributed to the same majority mindset that tolerated Jim Crow cruelty and injustice.

In the South, law and custom dictated at all levels of interaction between white and Black citizens that white people enjoy unquestioned superiority, while Black people were expected to treat the dominant caste with false deference and submission.

The consequence for African Americans is that these constant reminders from almost every aspect of American culture reinforce the generational effect of believing oneself inferior, resulting in defeatism and despair.

The eight pillars can be found not only in castes but in religions and cults.

1. Divine Will and the Laws of Nature
2. Heritability
3. Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating
4. Purity Versus Pollution
5. Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and the Mudsill
6. Dehumanization and Stigma
7. Terror as Enforcement
8. Cruelty as a Means for Control, and Inherent Superiority Versus Inherent Inferiority

Look back at #1 through #8 and visualize religions and cults in America. They all implement some forms of the pollars, and all are related to Gap Psychology.

Gap Psychology is expressed secretly and overtly in various ways: Fear, hatred, disgust, avoidance, fanaticism, and the desire to inflict pain.

We each belong to groups that we view as extensions of ourselves. We find ways to view our groups as superior to others, which helps us feel superior.

These groups range from families to sports teams, cities, states, countries, political parties, tribes, social groups, religions, and cults.

If our group “wins,” however that is defined, we win. And, if other groups “lose,” we win.

Personal note: In my younger days, I was a Chicago Bears football fan. I was nervous watching their games because winning meant so much. Finally, in 1965, they won a Super Bowl.

Crowds of screaming Bear fans clogged downtown Chicago. Logically, I had gained nothing, but I felt I had won. Gap Psychology is not based on logic.

When Donald Trump claims, against all evidence, that he won, MAGAs believe.

They disbelieve the 64 lawsuits he lost, the women who claim he attacked them, the criminality of Trump U. and the Trump Foundation, the many convicted criminals he surrounds himself with, and a trial’s 30+ criminal convictions.

To them, the evidence against Trump proves that someone else has committed crimes. (His attempts to overturn the election constitute the proof the election was stolen.)

That is an outcome of Gap Psychology. When Trump is compared to God, a huge branch of Christianity believes, because when your leader is Godlike, the superiority Gap between you and the non-believers widens.

Gap Psychology is not logical, but it is the single, most important factor ruling our lives. Centuries from now, if we encounter another intelligent species, we will wish to dominate them or fear they will dominate us.

That is Gap Psychology.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell; MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell

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