Post #111: Cheer Up, You Are Not Special

15 May 2024

“These are strivers with blinders on. They’re trained, harnessed, and directed to perform; to have answers and to have them first; to earn As, score goals, play Bach; to prove themselves always and forever special. Any sign of wobble, and in step their parents. From birth plus a day or two, they’re strapped into the car seat and in a sense never let out—they’re protected, driven, and aimed in one direction. The expectation—or ardent hope—is that every dividend will soon follow.”

—David McCullough, You Are Not Special (2014)*

     A pitiful picture, if you ask me. Don’t get me wrong: I am not beholden to the myth that we are all created equal, nor much taken with the widespread inclination, among academics especially, to take from Peter and give to Paul so that we might delight in the pleasing fiction that we have corrected for the disadvantages of our respective conditions, which in fact run far deeper than such shallow and often unavailing exercises in redistributing can by force of law. I see only irresponsibility, not utility or justice, in pretending that we are living in any other than a fiercely competitive and inherently unfair world at practically every level, and irremediably so. To think otherwise is not wisdom but conceit, typically owed to being protected from the fray by good fortune, not being above it or immune by virtue of superior wisdom.

     In his commencement address, which “went viral” in 2012 (an expression that would be more properly reserved for disease, though fitting enough in many cases of short-lived trends), Mr. McCullough attributed the impulse behind our vying for distinction with one another to “our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality.” If that is just fancy footwork on the Darwinian dance floor (insignificance as a potential mate, mortality as the end of organisms evolved for survival above all else), it might pass; but I fear that there is more to it than that, an admixture, despite McCollough’s best intentions, of the kind of obfuscation that he cannot fully escape even if his speech was itself a warning against precisely this tendency.

     The dreaminess the makes of human competition a primitive evil that we may discard at will is no more than an affectation of the most polite and polished, educated and credentialed upper strata of a bourgeoisie that dares not even utter its own name in America, but goes by the pretense of “middle class” instead. That even the most rarefied of these specimen do not often live consistently by their own professions of egalitarian faith is evident at college admissions season, and the same well-meaning hypocrisy that besets them also bedevils McCullough’s earnest if equally conflicted and confused speech and book.

     It is ludicrous, he rightly points out, to preach that grades don’t matter, then hire a therapist and a $150-an-hour tutor to wipe away the stain of an inexcusable C+. It is equally disingenuous to substitute “special” for “superior” and fudge the issue by the tacit pretense that everyone can be the one any more than the other. McCollough hammers away mercilessly at his theme (a good half-dozen you’re-not-specials with minor variations) and the squirmy silence deepens a little more with every repetition, as one can fairly hear the frightful question arising in the pews whether the speaker might possibly be serious, not just teasing the proud parents and their hothouse products by playing around with the well-known red lines in the manner of a court jester given special license for the glorious occasion. But no, in the end they need not have worried: what he takes away with one hand, the kindly English teacher gives back with the other, exhorting everyone to dream big and keep working their asses off, until in the final line all tension is dispelled by the reassuring call to them all to lead extraordinary lives. General relief, applause, applause!

     And perhaps it had to be so, not only on the general principle that James Q. Wilson once pointed out to me when I asked him why an advocate of law-and-order would have a radar detector in his car (“Didn’t you know that Americans always like to be on both sides of an issue?”), but also on the more salient and specific fact that to question the specialness of America’s oh-so-meritorious golden boys and girls amounts to an egregious breach of social decorum, nay the very social contract around which the Wellesley schools of the land are built (and not just in America either). To overstep the bounds of politeness even more brutally and think out loud that most of them are bound to be ordinary as a matter of statistical course—indeed to mouth the unspeakable word itself—well that is going too far, verging on secular blasphemy, and must be retracted before it is too late. So it goes, even in a speech that sets out so boldly to go where no man has gone before. We are still on Planet Earth, and the laws of gravity apply.

     To propitiate the enraged ancestral spirits of the Puritan heartland (not the country’s, in the Midwest, but those of the Northeast, centered on Boston), the reluctant prophet in tweeds quickly retracts his heresy not only in the final words of the speech, but also in a more elaborate passage of casuistry in the foreword to the book. These kids, he writes, over-indulged and fussed-over to excess as they are, should still be leading the way to solve the problems not only of the United States (plenty there to work on), but of the very world. So fret not, over-invested parents: “They could be, should be, each of them, among the ablest, clearest of head, best informed, best prepared, most inspired, most innovative, most empathetic—and therefore a great cause for hope, for confidence even, worldwide.” We hail ye, soccer moms and tutelary deities hovering over Boston Common: the City on Beacon Hill is alive and well in these not-special, but still extraordinary gifts to mankind, every last one of them!

     No, we do not live in times when the true spirit of Calvin’s theology must be reckoned a living force, if ever there was such a time. The world is governed not by the ideas of great thinkers, but by debased iterations suitably simplified for their followers. Calvin was no more a Calvinist than Marx a Marxist or Freud a Freudian. But the outlines of the Genevan’s theology persist, in vulgar and secularized form, to this day. To wit: the elect are preselected and there is nothing, strictly speaking, that any of us can do either to ascertain the verdict or to influence it in any way. All is grace, with the pastoral advice, for the spiritually anxious, to put their faith in God and refrain from trying to pry into the counsels of providence. So far so good. But the mass of human beings cannot, perhaps, be expected to live by so exalted a creed, especially in modern times when putting your faith in the grace of God alone has become unintuitive, and so they seek by any and all means to reassure themselves that they (and their precious offspring) are, after all, among the chosen, by parading before themselves and the world an endless succession of worldly blessings that must surely bespeak some manner of divine favor. For why should God bestow such conspicuous treasures upon the damned? Surely he is too sensible a fellow for that.

     We cannot all be either superior or special, or even above average—but here is the cheerier part of the message: we also do not need to be. We should not, mind you, be under any illusions about how great the benefits are, in the human world, of making one’s life (and living) at the upper end of most human distributions (perhaps not all: being seven feet tall is not much of a blessing on balance, though it might have its local compensations). If you had a choice to make, and hopes of a commodious earthly existence, you should not wish to live as one of the meek and the poor in spirit; but there is wisdom in the Beatitudes, nonetheless, and we might remember a little more often that it would profit a man little if he gained the world but lost his soul.

     Whatever place in the distribution we might aspire to, our natural position is somewhere near the middle. To say that you are ordinary is no curse on your life, or at least it should not be, but a homely verity, and a recognition that leaves much room for identifying areas where you might nonetheless make very considerable contributions, and find very real happiness. We get obsessed with the rewards and recognitions of the few; we overlook, in our eagerness, the price they often pay, usually behind the scenes, and the stresses and anxieties that line their paths in life. Not only is it hard to get ahead; not only will doing so plow, sow, and water the fields of envy and resentment to overflowing; but it is also, by its very nature, an exceedingly anxious place, because there are always others coming up behind you, stronger perhaps, or more determined, gifted, and voracious. We must accept this state of affairs; it speaks with the imperious voice of nature herself. But we should not idolize it, at least, if we would not pay the dire penalty that worshipping the golden calf always commands in the end.

     Anxiety and depression (so many cowed refugees from life’s everyday terrors hidden away in the roomy basements of glittering bourgeois success), rampant narcissism, and a stupefying sense of entitlement—all these have a common connection to mistaking the inescapability of competition, and the need to make a contribution, with the idea that we should be mainly motivated by reward and recognition, and not by a sense of value and merit that can, and should, inhere even in the most humble, but sincere and earnestly performed acts of service, taken in the broadest sense possible.** The armies of janitors who will continue to sweep up after the gilded youth of America (and of every other affluent corner in the world) until they are replaced by robots, should not be glorified unduly. Theirs is no glamorous or enviable life by any standard, but a way to make ends meet, no more and no less. Even in such modest capacities, however, important contributions are made and lives have meaning no less than for the youngsters who go on from the custodians’ bathrooms to Harvard.

     I shall never forget an encounter I once had near the urinals of a particularly dreary highway rest-stop in upstate New York, late at night, in winter, a setting about as godforsaken as I can imagine this side of war, famine, pestilence, and death. There was a guy sweeping the floors with a mop who looked as if he had been recently discharged from behind bars, penal or medical. We caught each other’s eye and I wished him a good night in the usual American manner, the dread how-are-you to which one only gives, and gets, predictable answers most of the time. But not in this case. “I’m great,” he said, with a big grin and the usual Yankee disregard for the finer points of the language of Shakespeare. “It’s just so great to be living the American Dream.” The Pythia could not have replied more fittingly, and the brief exchange made a bigger impression on me than Donald Trump and Elon Musk taken together.

     If you are of the punctiliously gift-wrapped, Harvard-bound set, very well, and congratulations to you and your breeders and handlers. Enjoy your good fortune, but be prepared, there too (perhaps there especially), to be reminded that you are not as special as you may have thought, lest that first B floor you and bring your life to an existential crisis. Or should it come to that, thank your stars and get the inevitable over with as soon as possible: you are not special, remember, and you need not be. To be sure, you have been given certain gifts and talents, perhaps ample ones, but that is all. Put them to be best use, for your own sake as much as that of others, but do not live by the laws of the treadmill and the mirror alone, or you will miss out on your life. And be reborn as a hamster.

     “But no, you will make your life!” the so-called tiger parents and their apologists might exclaim here with all the fury of centuries spent under the rod and the shadow of the Chinese civil service exams. I beg to differ. I do not care how many billions have been raised, or rather reduced, to the beat of this most squalid and barren of educational scripts. When it is the only way to escape from the maws of grinding poverty, then the soul-crushing drudgery it imposes on the young, like its bone-crushing physical equivalent for adults, can be cause only for regret, not censure; but in circumstances of reasonable material prosperity, it makes a mockery of the higher purposes and ends for which wealth and commodious means are given to us in this life. I would take from no one what his rightfully his, least of all on pretense of “social justice” (#68); but I reserve the right to form the most uncharitable opinions of those who put their good fortune to ill uses.

     Be it known, then, that parents who will not let their children take classes that they enjoy but in which they might not score As, or play instruments that are not sufficiently career-advancing, or engage in extracurricular activities that are not ornamental enough for their nascent resumes (let alone unsupervised by adults!) are not beautiful striped creatures of the wild, but dull and over-domesticated beasts of burden—mules, not Mulans. Luckily their educational attitudes are likely to be so mercenary, so narrowly focused on social advancement by the crassest measures, that we may expect them to be exceptionally responsive to crude incentives. It is perfectly legitimate, then, for significant penalties to be attached to this kind of domestically enforced nerdism, not only on grounds of insufficient personality development, but also because it is the only way, via the parental feedback loop, to prevent further generations from being deformed and victimized by this most retrograde and blinkered of parental pedagogies.***

     Not that there is any shortage of more homegrown horrors around parental attitudes to schooling, of course. Boastful Christmas cards and bumper-stickers extolling the “achievements” of minors should be banned more categorically and punished with more draconian severity than underage drinking or sex, and instead of shiny degrees and diplomas, which only the incurably vulgar put on display in their living rooms, it should be that first C you ever earn (if you are the narrow A-type) that should be put in a golden frame beside your cold bed. Like mumps and measles, the disease of being motivated only by crude payoffs should be gotten out of the way early, lest in debilitate you later, for life. Which is not to say that you should not work towards goals, and do the best you can, but only that the spirit counts in such endeavors, as much or more than the result by other people’s reckoning.

     “But I will not be loved, and I will not be happy, if I do not succeed,” screeches the peevish little voice that so many of us (or perhaps all of us at one time or another) cannot get out of our heads. The most tragic misconception of all. You may be under the impression that your parents love you for your accomplishments only, such as they are; if so, you are probably wrong, and much to be condoled with if you are right. Real love has nothing to do with success, and as for the wider world, it would be more true, upon closer inspection, to conclude that we are probably loved more for our flaws than our imperfections, though never our failings alone, of course (#21). Yes, the successful tend to get more than their share of attention, and that is probably what you are after too; suit yourself, and see where it gets you.

     The need to be special must create horrible feelings of anxiety among winners and losers alike, whether acknowledged or not; there are, properly speaking, no real winners in this game, only seeming ones. Some may move ahead, and so they should, if they can; but to imagine that happiness comes from such advances alone is a grievous misunderstanding of our condition. We get some fleeting satisfaction from our triumphs, no doubt about it, and some very material and significant practical advantages to boot. I am not saying anything to belittle or scorn such gifts of fortune (#109). What I am insisting on, with no claim to originality whatsoever and a bow to the wisdom of the ages, is that happiness does not come only, and indeed not even predominantly, from what we do for ourselves, however successful we may be, but from what we do for others—that is to say, what we contribute not with a view to our own wellbeing alone, but in the sincere desire to make ourselves useful. This may get recompensed overtly and amply, materially and financially too, and is in no wise devalued thereby; but it should also bring benefits more subtle, which may look like nothing much, nothing special outwardly, but which make life worth living nonetheless, and often more so than the shiniest prizes.

     The profound insight of no-self, which I do not claim to possess, only perhaps to glimpse a little here and there, has nothing to do with denying our existence in the moment. It is about the dangers of misconstruing a phenomenon that is always shifting and without clear boundaries, not only transient but ephemeral upon closer scrutiny, and all the while so deeply enmeshed in the surrounding world as to be altogether beyond extrication. In reality nothing ever is identical from one moment to the next, like film-frames on a roll of celluloid that are none of them the same, but that succeed each other so rapidly when projected on the screen of our minds that the smoothness of the transitions tricks us into imagining a continuity that isn’t actually there. Thus we solidify and personalize what is really a process, not a thing, until we cannot even think of it as anything other than an object, which we call the self—and we accomplish this mostly by the stories we tell about ourselves, weaving them together into something coherent even while we understand full-well that we do not at all stay the same, day by day no more than year by year or decade by decade. We all contain multitudes.

     Our preoccupation with recognition and reward (and the agonizing slights and crushing disappointments that are its inevitable concomitants) is central to this process of shoring up a false sense of self, and it suffers from the same fundamental disability. We cling to our phantom-selves as if they were our greatest possessions in life, the very guarantors of our earthly happiness and perhaps even something we hope to carry with us beyond the grave to eternity. Yet what it is, exactly, that we supposedly own so securely, is not made very clear, to put it mildly. If 2500 years of Buddhist teaching and experience are any guide (and a few corresponding strands of other traditions besides), what we are clutching so desperately turns out to be the trap itself, in the manner of monkeys cruelly caught by African hunters who lure them to their ends with bait inside spaces in trees so narrow that their hands, once inside and grabbing the prized object, can no longer be pulled out unless they let go of what they so covet. Sad to say, they will not let go, these poor monkeys, in the desperate plight of their desire for what they are holding, even as the captors are closing in on them. And we with them. Liberate me, we think, and thereby close off the possibility at the very outset.

     That we really are all of us unique, never again to arise, just this once and once only, is a crucial feature of human existence to which I have myself paid homage with Nietzsche (#16). To make one’s proper contribution in this life is vitally important, for our individual and collective flourishing alike, and some contributions are no doubt more momentous than others. (One could distinguish, perhaps, between saying you are not special, and saying you are nothing special, sticking to the former so as not to risk sounding too dismissive.) At the same time, all is impermanent and carried along in a flux, a momentary gift not a possession (#109). To get caught up in the all-too familiar obsession with recognition and reward—which afflicts all of us to some extent—is unhealthy, unwholesome, and productive of unhappiness on all sides, let it put on a brave or beaming face for the camera all it wants. On the side of the putative winners, it creates a wretched mix of anxiety and arrogance, of intolerable pressure and insufferable conceit (with inevitable feelings of inadequacy even at the highest levels of accomplishment); on the losing side, it spawns resentment and aggression, or despond. If that is how you want to live, go ahead. I’ve seen enough of it and I would rather not.

*I shall be quoting from the foreword and the afterword, which also includes a transcript of his address. Since I could only get access to an e-book and since the speech may be more familiar from YouTube than from the written version, I shall dispense with page numbers.

**The call to faithful service beyond thought of reward has a deep connection to Buddhism and Christianity, and many other spiritual traditions besides, but it should not be considered an exclusively religious idea. Thus we read in The Shadow-Line by Joseph Conrad (whose author’s note on the text stridently disavows all interest in the supernatural): “The reward of faithful service. Well. Faithful service was all right. One would naturally give that for one’s own sake, for the sake of the ship, for the love of the life of one’s choice; not for the sake of the reward. There is something distasteful in the notion of a reward.”

     The discussion by Kishimi and Koga of the Adlerian “guiding star” of contribution (see previous post), a variation on the theme of selfless service, which need by no means be taken all the way to self-abnegation or self-sacrifice, is one of the best parts of their book (pp. 234–36): “When we speak of contribution to others, it does not matter whether or not the contribution is a visible one. You are not the one who decides whether your contributions are of use. Even in principle, there is no way you can be sure whether you have really made a contribution. All you need is the subjective sense that ‘I am of use to someone.’ In a word, happiness is the feeling of contribution. That is the very definition of happiness.”

     Recognition from others is a poor substitute for this feeling of contribution, and we would have no need for it (or much less anyway), if we focused instead on working in a self-accepting manner towards the good of others as well as ourselves. Again, this is not an argument against our usual mechanisms for guiding the work that needs to get done, by prices and pay, but much more about the spirit in which we undertake our labors. How the need for recognition ends up combining insecurity with self-centeredness in a most unfortunate manner is discussed on pp. 166–67: “People who are obsessed with a desire for recognition will seem to be looking to other people, when actually they are only looking at themselves. You want to be thought well of by others; that is why you worry about the way they look at you. But that’s not concern for others at all: it’s nothing but attachment to self.”

***No question of ethnic slurring here, I must insist. Not only does the history of education by the whip cross cultural and national lines, but the best students I ever had, by far, were those at the National University of Singapore, just before the advent of the smartphone. They too were raised within view of the cane, in every sense; but they were also highly amenable to more enlightened methods, and it was this, not the toiling alone, that made them so unforgettable.