Common human experience suggests that there is no better way to get someone to fight than to attack his dignity.  The insult or demeaning gesture has been a standard inducement to fight from the days when aristocrats whacked one another in the face with a glove to today’s gangbanger taunts about “yo mama” and so forth.

Unfortunately, we have been telling people they are insignificant for quite some time now.  Although the message has been implicit and subtle, its cumulative effects have been powerful.

The regrettable fact is, contemporary life occurs on a scale that is almost inherently dwarfing and demeaning to the great majority of us.  Today the overwhelming majority of us find ourselves, in the larger order of things, occupying the roles mainly of spectator and consumer--when we are innately “hard wired” to derive our sense of significance from being participants and producers.

To appreciate how significantly our lives have changed, a few simple comparisons can be useful:

Most of human history has been lived out in the context of tribes and villages--environments in which virtually everyone knew everyone else, and where just about everyone had some sort of ability or character trait that was recognized and valued by the others.  

When it came to skills, the largest frame of reference most people ever had to deal with was 100 people.   If among a group of people that size, you were the best athlete or cook, storyteller or musician, warrior or weaver, you were not just recognized and valued, you were considered a thoroughly remarkable human  being.

Today, our frame of reference is so vast as to preclude even people who have traditionally been considered extraordinary from feeling like much of anybody.

As an athlete, being the best among 100 people may get you on your high school team, but not necessarily anything more--and even being that team’s captain isn’t considered much of an accomplishment, since in everybody’s minds, the “real” athletes are the infinitesimally small subset of the population whose exploits we follow on television. 

If you’re the best musician or storyteller among 100 people, your prospects for feeling like a “somebody” are even dimmer.   As for cooks, even if you’re so talented that you earn your living as a professional chef, who cares?  The only culinary artists most people have heard of or accord much significance to are celebrity chefs--the ones with their own television shows and best-selling cookbooks.

Our prospects in the general business world have undergone a comparable transformation.

It wasn’t all that long ago that if you were, say, the proprietor of a hardware store, you had a definite position in the community:  everybody knew you, and the need you fulfilled.  Today, if you’re known at all, you’ll be considered just a small-time local alternative to Home Depot, and rather lucky to be able to eke out an independent living at all.  The vast majority of us are only hired help--employees--whose activities or contributions to the community are virtually unknown to our fellows.

When we no longer have a place or standing in a community based on substantive factors like our actual economic contributions or our talents and abilities, we tend to establish our identities more through the things we can buy and display.  Consumer goods come to take on roles beyond their original functional purposes, serving more and more as identity props.

This may not be the most desirable of arrangements, but most of us do our best to adapt. (Also, since we tend not to consider other frames of reference, for many of us, feeling small has come to seem to almost part of the natural order of things, if we want to enjoy the material comforts and conveniences of an advanced civilization.)

The situation is qualitatively different, however, for those who can’t afford decent identity props, and have to establish some acceptable sense of who they are without them.