Each side can see through the self-congratulatory fictions and easy-thinking games of the other side, to the essential mediocrity being denied, but not their own. What neither will do is simply cheerfully accept mediocrity and ask how one can live well and build a world with it.
Conversation
You know why? Because to actually think about hard problems is to constantly be reminded of your mediocrity. It constantly triggers your FOBO. Why not just trust distant Greatness and enjoy chosenness instead?
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What makes supposedly Great Men great is that they are unreasonably effective and extraordinary in a narrow domain or two, but run into exactly the same FOBO problems outside, and flail and struggle and fail in thoroughly undignified and ungodlike ways that destroys the illusion
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What makes supposedly Great Principles great is that they are unreasonably effective and extraordinary in a narrow domain or two, but fail spectacularly when naively overextended to Universal Truth status without lots of ifs and buts and compromises.
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What kinda works is mediocre people who recognize they’re mediocre working with rules and laws they recognize as janky work-in-progress hacks that are at best imperfect heuristics for a time and place. Muddling through, committed to the infinite game of simply continuing to play.
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This is why the Woke vs NRx battle, which has dominated my corner of social media for a decade now is so damn silly. Great People above Great Principles or Great Principles Above Everybody are both equally wishful fantasies born of FOBO… that there are easy answers.
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Even the fact that NRxies (and their non-western equivalents like Hindutva types in India or Juche in North Korea) are usually ethnonationalists with genetic privileging of a Chosen People, while Wokies are in principle about everybody being Chosen makes no difference. Why?
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In both cases the actual principle of Chosenness is the same: acceptance of Greatness, denial of the existence of mediocrity and ordinariness (let alone statistically tautological dominance of it), and violent repression of behaviors in themselves and others that trigger FOBO.
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We have now wandered very far from should-Elon-buy-twitter, but we’re still circling the same broad question: should the ordinary be reduced to abject helplessness, in thrall to apparent greatness?
Or should the ordinary be let alone to simply do it’s best to continue existing?
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Replying to
If no one is allowed to be ordinary, no one is free to become extraordinary.
I disagree with Brad Bird, but a related point, with control located slightly differently, is something I could get behind.
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Replying to
Syndrome, villain in The Incredible, says something similar to describe his vision for the world.
Bird is an animation bigwig; I love his work, but he seems a little too focused on the specter of participation trophies.
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