How to Overcome Inferiority About Your Educational Credentials

A reader left a comment: they were a small-town exam grinder, went through a Hengshui-style high school, and only managed to get into a private undergraduate college. They feel inferior about their educational credentials.

This is a typical example of a seemingly minor issue that actually involves rebuilding an entire worldview, outlook on life, and set of values, as well as healing one’s inner core (through Marx + Zhuangzi + psychology).

It is a typical case of “Most Personal Problems Are Problems of Humanity and Society.”

A common response and defense is to look at bookworms whose education has done them no good, or people with little formal education who have become fabulously wealthy. This approach is misguided. It will only worsen various psychological issues, making one increasingly vulgar, obnoxious, and smarmy.

I. Psychological Healing

1. Understanding the trinity of inferiority, superiority, and self-hatred

Many people who study psychology come to realize that everyone has feelings of inferiority, that a sense of superiority is a defensive compensation for inferiority, and that self-attack is also an outgrowth of superiority. Two books by Karen Horney explain this very well. The Adlerian psychology book *The Courage to Be Disliked* offers an excellent discussion of the present, courage, and overcoming inferiority.

1. Self-attack, self-doubt, and a harsh superego

“How to Address a Harsh Superego and Self-Attack” involves an entire framework and the healing of issues from the bottom up, from beginning to end. At the most basic level are dissociative trauma of the self and issues of object relations.

Loving yourself is actually very difficult. To judge whether someone is compassionate, first look at how much compassion they have for themselves.

1. Embracing the shadow

“How to Embrace the Shadow”: a. Embrace avoidance (embrace emotions, karmic obstructions, and stray thoughts); b. Embrace anxiety (escaping is a good thing; procrastination is not an illness, but an exhaustion of mental energy); c. Embrace shame and guilt (shame = trauma); d. Embrace ordinariness and existential crises (“Accepting Ordinariness”).

1. Unconditional confidence, freedom, and ease

“How Can People Become Better, More Confident, and Like Themselves? It Does Not Depend on External Conditions”

“How Ordinary People Can Experience Innate Wholeness”

II. The Small-Town Exam Grinder’s Malaise

1. Issues involving parents

East Asian, Hengshui-style education places far too much emphasis on how much children owe their parents and amplifies guilt. This runs counter to both human well-being and healing.

Separate responsibilities: people cannot save or heal others.

The greatest thing I have gained from studying psychology is this understanding: children’s love for their parents is 100%, greater than parents’ love for their children. Caring for and saving their parents is written into their genes. Every child makes funny faces or competes for good grades to ease the tension at home.

The view that children owe their parents nothing may be extreme (though some highly insightful friends of mine who are parents think this way). But at the very least, we can say that parents and children give each other reasons for gratitude. I am 36, have nephews through both my siblings and my sisters, and have quite a few friends who are parents. We all know that children are angels. They bring their parents so much energy, wisdom, and experience of life. We have particular reason to be grateful to our children.

Letting go of the fantasy of saving others, ending your guilt toward your parents, being yourself, loving yourself, and fulfilling yourself—these are what your parents, in their heart of hearts, most hope for.

1. Compulsive striving

Responding to everything with effort, with the spirit of tying one’s hair to a roof beam or stabbing one’s thigh with an awl to stay awake and study. But academic performance and progress do not come from that. Once you enter society, things work even less that way. Behind it is nothing more than a harsh superego.

Often, what helps is lying flat, non-action, tranquility, the natural healing of the deeper mind, and a virtuous cycle.

1. Linear values and the social clock

Move toward pluralistic values and an outlook that sees life as an open wilderness.

III. Zhuangzi’s Psychology

1. Breaking the fixation on effort

There is no “striving” in Daoism. “A Systematic Discussion of Effort,” “Spiritual Practice Is a Pseudo-Concept,” “Zhuangzi: Follow What Is Natural; Forcing It Leads You Astray.”

Embrace your past. Respect your past self.

How can ordinary people experience “innate wholeness”? Be grateful to your deeper mind. Be grateful to your former self: that immature child, that frail body, that struggled to survive and fought its way through such difficulties. A rural child facing loneliness, bullying, exploitation, and pressure from every direction has come all this way, even if they only managed to enter a secondary vocational school or a junior college.

Do not stab your past self in the back: your past self was much weaker than you are now and lacked so much knowledge and so many resources. Yet they faced painful, terrifying experiences that even your present self would struggle to handle—experiences your past self managed to steer you away from. And yet you give your past self’s performance a poor, negative assessment. You are the only eyewitness to what your past self went through. Your present self, of all people, should never stab your past self in the back or betray them.

We realize that even our present selves would struggle to bear this pain, let alone who we were then. We discover that our former selves were brave, wise warriors, not lowly or vulgar. It is precisely because they were so brave and wise, embodying truth, goodness, and beauty, that we have made it to today.

Respecting your past self also means respecting your present self. Your past self was simply a succession of present selves: your essential self whole and at peace, with innate wholeness. Your present self is moving forward with difficulty but with strength, just as your past self did.

Look at junior college students, secondary vocational students, and assembly-line workers struggling through life. Everyone is already doing their best. “Effort” is a pseudo-concept. To say they—or you yourself—are not trying hard enough shows a lack of empathy and a failure to understand the predicament of people at the bottom of society.

Historical materialism, fate, and the circumstances and opportunities we encounter carry more weight than so-called individual effort. All an individual can do is respond to circumstances and do their best. Everyone is already doing their best. For those who still insist on whipping themselves onward, forcing it leads you astray.

1. The usefulness of the useless

1. Presence, ease, and innate wholeness

Stop seeking outside yourself; look within.

1. Let the tranquility of the essential self absorb and work through the many forms of the ego, fixations, greed, anger, and delusion

“A Special Series on Karmic Obstructions,” “The True Self Accompanying Libido,” “Mental Energy/Libido Determines Your Fate”

IV. Marxist Psychology

1. “Most Personal Problems Are Problems of Society and Humanity: Avoid Excessive Self-Blame and Self-Attack, and Embrace the Shadow”:

For an ordinary Afghan girl, a Black person in an American slum, or a Vietnamese worker, the problems highest on their list—poverty, insecurity, survival, violence, pornography, gambling, drugs, hunger, inferiority, repression, despair, a lack of positive social interaction, and so on—are all social problems, not her or his “personal problems.” For an ordinary white person in Europe or America, the problems highest on their list—family, social relationships, career planning, challenges at work, psychological problems, existential crises, and so on—are all human problems, not her or his “personal problems.”

Many of our psychological problems and self-critical tendencies are “deliberately” shaped, conditioned, and instilled by society, making psychological manipulation and exploitation easier.

Ordinary people need Marxism to reshape their worldview, outlook on life, and values. This includes examining the “just-world hypothesis,” the “theory that effort brings rewards,” the “theory of total individual responsibility,” and so on.

1. “How Ordinary People Can Experience Innate Wholeness”

See how more than a billion people live in pain and struggle at the bottom of society, yet still retain their simplicity, truth, goodness, and beauty. This is ironclad evidence of innate wholeness, and it also deepens our empathy and compassion, bringing us comfort and confidence. See heaven and earth, see all living beings, see yourself. All beings suffer.

“The Syndrome of Feeling Surrounded by the Petty and Micro-Bourgeoisie”

1. Petty-bourgeois malaise and elitism

Inferiority about educational credentials involves elitist issues such as tournaments of ever-intensifying competition, competition among peers, and social Darwinism.

“Petty-Bourgeois Malaise” systematically analyzes the materialist roots and various manifestations of petty-bourgeois malaise.

In a Zhihu discussion about how to break free of reverence for Tsinghua and Peking University, one response was very good: fundamentally, it is still an issue involving one’s own sense of superiority. As a student at a Project 985 or Project 211 university, do you feel superior to and look down on students at lower-ranked institutions or those who struggle academically? A sense of superiority is often merely a defense mechanism against emptiness and a lack of a sense of existence. Where there is a sense of superiority, there can be no compassion or empathy.

“You Cannot Be a Social Darwinist or Elitist Only When Luck and Power Are on Your Side: A Common Tendency Among Programmers at Major Tech Companies and Finance Professionals”

“A Small-Town Exam Grinder Goes from an Impoverished Village to Beijing’s Elite: Is This Defying Fate and Changing One’s Destiny?”: Then why was it that, throughout the thousands of years before the founding of the People’s Republic, very few small-town exam grinders could do this, while after 1990, large numbers could? This is the course of history, not individual effort. Did those who failed to do so really just fail to work hard enough to defy fate and change their destiny? Are they cowards and fools in the face of fate? Then why can’t the billions of children in Asia, Africa, and Latin America do it?

“How University and Secondary School Students Can Respond to Meritocracy”

V. Living in the Present

Living in the present and being grateful for the present make it easier to feel no regret about the past and no fear of the future.

Ultimately, inferiority about educational credentials belongs to the ego. It is not the main issue of the present.

Your current work, studies, relationships, daily life, inner life, and so on have nothing to do with educational credentials. People imagine, “If I had earned such-and-such a qualification back then, things would be different when applying for jobs or going on arranged dates.” This is an issue of the past and regret, rather than living in the present.

When libido is invested outward in a healthy way, and there is a sense of self-efficacy rather than learned helplessness, libido will not withdraw and turn into self-attack.