This is a follow up article to the one below on 'High Calibre'. A cut down version of the blog piece appeared in the ANU student paper - Woroni. Unfortunately it had been edited in a way that I was not fond of. A technology breakdown meant the article was not cleared with me before print. Unlucky. In any case, the article below touches on some stuff I've been meaning to write about for a while about the idea that everyone must consider themselves worthy and valuable.
My last article ended with a question: ‘would you rather be high calibre or a quality human being’. This line was inserted by one of the editors after an unfortunate technology failure. Entirely the fault of Microsoft, but it did kind of miss the point of the article.
I intended to communicate that being high calibre and a quality human being shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. There is no reason why the ‘average’ individual cannot be just as high calibre as Nick Reiwoldt, Nietzsche, Mozart or Einstein, albeit for different reasons.
The content of ‘high calibre’ is too often narrowly defined as a degree of ultra-specialised perfection. Individuals capable of this kind of quality often manifest negative traits like obsessive compulsion, prickliness, poor social skills, limited personality and the like. They are doubtless high calibre, but this definition excludes a great many fantastic people.
A much healthier definition would revolve around whether someone is the best they can be, whether they make a valuable contribution to society, whether they are a genuinely ‘good’ person, or even whether they are easy to get along with.
Such a change in attitude towards what constitutes a quality human being has broad ramifications for society. At present, our narrow conception funnels people towards the neurotic pursuit of perfection, or self-identification with mediocrity. If you’re not going to be the best, you might as well aim low and hit.
I consider this attitude toxic. Just because you aren’t capable of standing out doesn’t mean you should be content with pedestrian existence. Celebrating the average should not be synonymous with idealising or even accepting laziness, fear or wretchedness.
Happiness and wellbeing are intimately tied up with being who you are and comfortable in your skin. So long as we encourage people to conform to objective standards of worthiness that don’t acknowledge individuality we are laying the foundations for neurosis. It is for this reason that the bourgeois/private school obsession with medical and legal careers grinds my gears. A builder, physiotherapist or jeweller should have just as much social status as a QC. What counts is the degree to which the individual flourishes in their career and life.
Education, but also our cultural standards and ideals more generally, must grow in scope to capture a deeper conception of worthiness and quality.
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