your friends, and everyone dreads your parties. Who cares if you are prime
minister of Canada when someone else is the president of the United States?
Inside us dwells a critical internal voice and spirit that knows all this. It’s
predisposed to make its noisy case. It condemns our mediocre efforts. It can
be very difficult to quell. Worse, critics of its sort are necessary. There is no
shortage of tasteless artists, tuneless musicians, poisonous cooks,
bureaucratically-personality-disordered middle managers, hack novelists and
tedious, ideology-ridden professors. Things and people differ importantly in
their qualities. Awful music torments listeners everywhere. Poorly designed
buildings crumble in earthquakes. Substandard automobiles kill their drivers
when they crash. Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because
mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.
We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small
number of people produce very much of everything. The winners don’t take
all, but they take most, and the bottom is not a good place to be. People are
unhappy at the bottom. They get sick there, and remain unknown and
unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the
self-denigrating voice in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale. Life
is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition. What but willful
blindness could possibly shelter people from such withering criticism? It is
for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists
recommended “positive illusions” as the only reliable route to mental
health.^69 Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A more dismal, wretched,
pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined: things are so terrible that
only delusion can save you.
Here is an alternative approach (and one that requires no illusions). If the
cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is
somehow rigged (perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself). If the internal
voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours—or your life, or life
itself—perhaps you should stop listening. If the critical voice within says the
same denigrating things about everyone, no matter how successful, how
reliable can it be? Maybe its comments are chatter, not wisdom. There will
always be people better than you—that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase,
In a million years, who’s going to know the difference? The proper response
to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot