Specialness is a lack of trust in anyone except yourself. Faith is invested in yourself alone. Everything else becomes your enemy; feared and attacked, deadly and dangerous, hated and worthy only of destruction.

In the Course in Miracles, Chapter 24 (The Goal of Specialness), Section IV (Specialness versus Sinlessness), Jesus discusses why specialness breeds distrust.

In the small-r reality, we live in our ego-bodies. The type of love we live with is quid-pro-quo and heavily dependent on the other living up to our expectations. We see these people we love as special.

When some people are special, ACIM sees it as a break in our Wholeness. This eventually makes everyone else into an enemy. And it’s all based on our thoughts. These are thoughts we can choose to see differently. We can choose differently than we have in the past to see with our higher selves and change our future in the present.