Tom's Views

Dear [Mentat],

Yes,   recognizing   successful people is one thing society should do. But   glorifying   them? Probably not. Such veneration indeed can do significant harm. For example: few people, if any, deserve to be treated like gods due to their successes. Yet I was reading about how CEOs working for fortune five-hundred companies earn over four hundred times as much money as the folks working in the mail room, compared to the sixties, when they made only twenty times as much. If as a society we spent too many resources celebrating the folks at the top, and too little recognizing the people at the bottom, then we’re doomed to repeat the cycle of revolt, war, and forced redistribution of the available wealth that’s plagued humanity throughout its history. The degree of poverty in a society is a good measure of how happy the overall population is. The more poverty, the less happy and thus, the greater the chance that someone will fight back.

Also, obsessively revering the highest crust of achievers propagates the message that if a person does not achieve greatness to the levels society adores, then he’s not worth knowing.  Then, people exclude him from their friendly circles. While it’s true that this person (if he studied Albert Ellis’   rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT)) might successfully combat his feelings of inadequacy that typically result from repeated rejection, many do not do this effectively. I’d suggest that this whole behavior of flocking to the most successful people while thumbing noses at the underachieving and lonely people leaves much of the rest of society dejected and sad.  This raises crime rates. Indeed violent crime perpetrators do so believing that society has collectively rejected them by thwarting their efforts to achieve acclaim though accepted practices and behaviors. So they try deviance, a clearly harmful strategy to society.

Further, if you don’t think that this chewing up and spitting out of average performers is harmful, you should watch American Idol sometime. There, the Fox network representatives scour the country, looking for the next   American Idol,   which they define as one who sings the best out of thousands and thousands of people they audition. That person then gets to record an album and travel the world to promote it. Yes, every year, they find one winner – people like Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Stoddard, and Carey Underwood to name a few.

While these winners typically advance to rewarding musical careers, the rest fare not so well. Many are devastated, and get humiliated on the show by Simon Cowell, one of the judges. Some leave the stage crying, cursing, and generally angry and hurt. This makes for some rather amusing TV content to be sure. It’s funny to see how many times the contestants tell Cowell to f-ck himself. This built-in conflict is a big reason why the show enjoys [such] high ratings. Yet I do not feel that this sort of thing is good for society. This show underscores how much more we need to develop our techniques of recognizing talent as well as how to reward it when it’s found, and how to dismiss people lacking it in the most dignified and least harmful ways. I could go on about how glorifying success can have far-reaching and harmful effects on society. But I trust you get the idea.

A person’s inability to climb as far as his heroes as you put it, can breed those feelings of inadequacy we’ve been discussing, yet another pit fall of society’s neurotic obsession with the successful; particularly when the inevitable question arises: Why is this hero any better than me? Why should he get all the attention when, to a large degree, he’s able to accomplish what he did under auspices that are beyond his control? For instance: If I was gifted with greater height, dark hair, and a commanding air, I might have made president of a division at [work] by now. But I wasn’t, so I didn’t, and probably wasted too much time trying to get that which the company continued denying me.

The point is this: To assume that a person has nothing worthwhile to offer merely because they’ve not been publicly rewarded for their achievements hurts all of us. In society’s quest to get with the most successful people, we often overlook the useful traits in the less successful and thus,   under-utilize   them. In short, focusing too much on the highest realms of success, blinds us to other useful dispositions. America no longer enjoys its revered position on the world stage these days, and a key reason is our inability to effectively recognize and then utilize the useful traits in   all   our people.

Now to your comments about Maslow: There are   many   good answers to his “rhetorical” question: Why not you? This is actually a   non   rhetorical question because clearly, not everyone is cut out to be a revered psychologist, and even if they were, not all of them would have the motivation to do it. Since we cannot easily direct our deepest motivations, and since favorable motivations appear invariably in society’s highest achievers, it is incorrect to attribute the high achiever’s successes exclusively to his strength of will or other qualities derived from predominantly voluntary effort.

You’re correct. There’s nothing wrong with people aspiring to be great at things they’re interested in. But a problem arises in the attitudes toward others that they typically acquire on their way to that success. They tend to expect the same sorts of achievements in others; jeering at those who don’t get as far. I believe that Albert Ellis in his   Guide to Rational Living   advised his readers that the true nature of success doesn’t involve feeling contempt or disgust for the people beneath them on the mountain. True words of wisdom I’d say.

At least we agree that worshiping anyone, for   anything   they do, is probably not good. Yes, determining how much recognition to give a person challenges employers and anyone in a position to evaluate others, and I expect that we’ll be wrestling with how to fairly distribute wealth for centuries to come. Clearly, the hard workers deserve to receive more than   no   success for their efforts. However some at the top deserve   less   than they get as well.

Further, people undoubtedly have   some   control over how their lives turn out. One may choose for instance, to cultivate an inborn talent by way of some inborn tenacity. For others however, tenacity is an act of pure will which taxes their physical and psychological energies much more than the person who has developed it from their natural potential, or learned it from their parents. For all the rest, some quantity of their tenacity comes with them out of the womb, or at least, appears at very early stages of development, while the rest results from willful dedication to their pursuits. These folks must fight agonizingly for every advancement they make. Obviously, the balance between natural and willful tenacity varies widely from person to person, and since it’s easier for those who received these gifts at birth, as well as harder for those who didn’t, it follows that various people must exert varying levels of effort to achieve the same level of success. Success occurs with little effort for some, more effort for others, maximal effort for still others, and for the rest, it does not occur, no matter the effort. We can’t assume that everyone receives the same gifts at birth, and can easily demonstrate that they don’t.

So given that, a certain level of success occurring in one person doesn’t demonstrate the same character traits as it might in another. More specifically, five units of success in one person might demonstrate the highly esteemed virtues of success like reliability and honesty. But in another, those same five units of success could reflect less desirable qualities. Success is not always good, nor is its level of reverence the same across all people.

Unfortunately, people gloss over this difficulty when they make statements like, “You can be or do anything you want if you just put forth the effort.” Teachers used to tell us this in school all the time. But what they neglected to say, was that all the effort in the world can’t make up for lacking desire to accomplish, and that all their compulsory learning tactics probably do not forge true desire. Many of them actually blamed kids for not wanting to work a particular task. [Our music teachers] come to mind here. Even [the electronics teacher] tended to be overly hard on students at Connelley who were struggling to learn the material, poking fun at them right in front of the class, yet offering few if any alternative tasks for them to do, that would accomplish the same learning.

Since I’ve been old enough to understand it, I’ve always struggled with teachers and bosses who humiliate their students and subordinates for lacking qualities that derive from largely inborn or hereditary ingredients. Talk about punishing the son for the sins of his father! But this happens all the time. Perhaps it does no good therefore to complain about it, other than to make people aware of it, and inspire hope that someday society will treat its citizens more justly, and better utilize its members in ways that best capitalize on their inborn traits, as opposed to the traits it can force out of them.

I agree that people with longer odds against success, should get more credit for whatever success they achieve, than those for whom success came easy. Likewise, people with those same long odds who   don’t   manage to achieve much external success, should not be outcast and regarded with so much distain. There’s just so much more to a person besides how much he earns or how many trophies he sports on his walls.

Many folks fail to recognize this, with their mate-seeking strategies that involve ruling a man out if he’s not a millionaire. Here’s where my lacking compassion for such individuals shows through. After reading countless thousands of ads on the web-based dating services, and after listening to countless tens of thousands of profiles on the telephone dating lines, I’ve concluded that most of these gold-digging women will in fact, never get what they want because there just aren’t enough millionaires to go around. And to that I chuckle and say, “Good for you. You deserve to live alone if you judge men so single-dimensionally.” Obviously, I’m somewhat bitter about how society rewards successful men – with the beautiful women. Against this system that has kept my longest-running dreams from coming true, I certainly rebel.

Finally, I truly doubt we’d still be in caves [even if people were less obsessed with becoming highly successful, and being glorified for it]. Success can be attained and thus advance society in ways less harmful to the less successful. We might not have advanced as   quickly   as we have, if things weren’t so cut-throat. But in my opinion, we’d be in the main, far better off if we treated the poor a bit better, and the rich a bit more like the rest of us flawed humans.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Disputing REBT
• Limits of Success
• Money Not Only Measure of Success
• Self Esteem Vs. Others’ Esteem
• Tom’s Love Quest –> The Falacy of Hero Worship