How we learn to pull each other down, and how we can learn to climb out together
The Disease – The hell-pit joke and what it really says
Picture the old joke about the pits in hell. Every country has guards. The Sri Lankan pit has none, because if one of us climbs up, the rest pull that person down. We laugh, but there is a sting in this tale. Why does the joke feel so familiar?
Psychologists have many names for this pattern: social comparison, relative deprivation, and zero-sum thinking. Different cultures have their own metaphors for it too, from “tall poppy syndrome” in Australia to “crabs in a bucket” in the Caribbean, to “the nail that sticks out being hammered down” in parts of East Asia.
It is not a Sri Lankan defect, but our version has a particular flavour, shaped by culture, scarcity, and history. The question is not, “What is wrong with us?” but “What trained us to treat another person’s rise as a threat?”
When one seat feels like the only seat
Think about Grade Five, O/Ls, A/Ls. From early on, many of us learn that there is one place in medicine, one cushy government job, one chance to go abroad. One seat on the bus out of struggle.
When life is framed like this, a friend’s success can feel like a door slamming on our own face. If the story in our heads is “only a few of us can make it”, then every win for someone else feels like a loss for us. Crab mentality grows naturally in that soil. Not because we are cruel by nature, but because we have been taught, over and over, to see life as a fixed-size pie.
History, hurt, and mistrust
How many of our national memories are built on safety, fairness, and abundance? More often, we inherit stories of colonisation, riots, war, queues, corruption, and broken promises.
When trust in institutions is low, we cling to smaller circles: family, party, ethnicity, school, batch. Protecting “our side” can quietly turn into blocking “their side”, or even blocking anyone from our own side who rises too far and stops being “one of us”.
In that atmosphere, it is easy to tell ourselves a dangerous story: “People who climb high will hurt us.” If we believe that, then dragging down the climber can feel like a form of moral duty.
Social media, gossip, and the quick hit
In the past, gossip travelled slowly, through tea and temple and office corridors. Now it travels at the speed of light. A distant cousin posts a photo from New York, a schoolmate announces a startup, a colleague shares a promotion. We scroll, and the comparisons quietly but surely bite.
There is a quick high in sarcasm. One snide comment, one “must be contacts” remark, and for a moment our own disappointment feels smaller.
The effort of building something is huge. The effort of tearing something down is tiny. Crab mentality simply chooses the cheaper energy path, again and again, until it becomes habit.
The Cure – Seeing the game without becoming it
For those on the receiving end of crab mentality, the first act of survival is clarity. When praise turns to sarcasm, when quiet help turns to subtle sabotage, it helps to name what is happening: this is fear, scarcity, and hurt speaking through others, not proof that anyone is unworthy.
Seeing this clearly keeps us from swallowing the poison. The goal is not to become hard and bitter, but to stay clear and kind. Those who pull others down are often repeating what was done to them. The damage can be recognised without copying it.
Refusing to let closed doors define us
Jealous people do close doors. Promotions are blocked, credit is stolen, recommendations quietly vanish. That reality hurts. Yet a closed door in one place does not mean the world is a closed place.
There are other people, other networks, other institutions. There are communities and collaborators who care more about competence than politics. Each slammed door becomes data: this is not a room where growth is possible — not right now, anyway.
This information, though painful, is valuable. It pushes us towards spaces that are a match for our work instead of begging for space where we are only ever half accepted.
Building circles that hold us up
If some circles drag us down, others can hold us up. One of the most powerful responses to crab mentality is to gather even a small group that refuses to play that game: a lab, a writers’ circle, a startup team, a study group, a community project.
In such circles, the rule is simple: progress is celebrated as if it increases, not reduces, everyone’s chances. Information, contacts, and hard-won lessons are shared. People speak well of one another in rooms where decisions are made.
These small alliances can do what large systems often fail to do: protect, encourage, and amplify those who are trying to climb.
Staying generous without being naïve
Compassion for oppressors does not mean letting them run anyone’s life. It is possible to understand that their behaviour comes from fear and pain, and still refuse to let that fear decide the future. The inner stance becomes, in effect, “We see why this happens, but we will not shrink to make anyone comfortable.” This balance matters.
If we harden into hatred, we become new crabs in the same pit. If we stay endlessly accommodating, we let others keep their claws on our backs. True compassion holds a firm line: wishing others healing, while stepping out of their reach when necessary.
Owning our story
In the end, the deepest cure is to root our worth in something stronger than other people’s reactions. That may be the quality of our work, the integrity of our choices, the care brought to those around us, the long arc of what we are trying to build.
Crab mentality thrives when our sense of self is fragile and outsourced. It weakens when we quietly do the work, keep improving, and let the results accumulate over years.
Some will always resent that. Others will eventually be drawn to it. Either way, the task is the same: to keep climbing.
A Concluding Twist
Imagine the old joke told differently. The crab pit, once famous for crabs pulling each other down, becomes known for something else.
Each time one of us reaches a ledge, that person leans back in and pulls another up. Some crabs still pinch and drag, but they grow fewer each year, drowned out by the ones who choose to lift.
Prospering in the face of crab mentality is not just about getting ourselves out of the pit. It is about changing the story of what people from this pit do to one another. Surviving is innate. Thriving together is the real rebellion.
