The 'Third World' mentality

Ven. Ajahn Brahmawanso told the following story, in one of his talks.

A group of educational phsychologists did the following experiment. At the beginning of the year they divided a class into two based on previous year's results in the following manner. The student who got the best results was put to Class A and the second student into Class B and the third student again in to Class A and so on. The two classes were completely equal, the only difference being one class was called A and the other was called B.When the end of the year results were out, the Class A students had done much better than the Class B students, and the Class B students had performed very poor. The students in class B thought they were 'class B' students and thought like 'class B' students and they finally became 'class B' students.

Likewise, we call ourselves 'third world countries' (of course it is the so called 'first world' countries who started calling us 'third world'). Even our media personnel just repeat this as parrots without ever thinking about it. In the end, we think like the 'third world' and finally we become the 'third world'. It is true that the Western countries have better economies than us, but still we are better than them in some aspects. I think we should make a concious effort to stop using this rubbish, and advice others not to use such terms.