Being the Best

Want to get into heaven? Better be the best. That’s what the teachers, managers, and senators say. It may be nice to share when you’re young, but underlying that kindergarten kindness is the need to lull those fellows into a false sense of security. Because your A’s need to outdo, your PowerPoints need to suck in the most capital, and your children had better do even better. If not, of course, your species will pass out of existence. Darwin said it and Rockefeller repeated it: the strong, the fittest are the survivors of the pin factory and the Leviathan’s dispassionate jaws. If you’re not better, your life is going to be nasty, it’s going to be brutish, and it’s going to be short. It’s the American way. An electoral college where electors are chosen by money and power; boards of directors, really. The New York Times and their readers loved Hamilton, a musical and a man obsessed with bestness. It’s not particularly necessary to talk about other media outlets and their relationship with the absolutely necessity of winners to sell their ads and subscriptions, because none could deny it. “To win the esteem of my fellow man”; Abraham Lincoln wanted to be seen as the best. And he managed it, though it helped that he got shot; always a Reagany accelerant. The clarity with which believers in the gold-plated myth of “to the victor ought to go the spoils” articulate their comfort with their position, earned, and the positions of others, earned or unearned, is disturbing in its regularity. “I worked hard.” “I did well.” “I paid my dues.” The whingeing of those contented with Veblen’s idea, that everyone loves a layer cake, hates the layer below, covets the layer above, and gives the frosting divine right. Consider, for a moment, murder. Isn’t the murderer the fittest of the pair? They have survived. Darwin would be chagrined. The human animal is one of many exceptions that disproves the absurd rule: winning does not mean one is better than another, winning is not the result of natural or divine processes, and winning is not protected by the fact of its fact in its legitimacy. Winning is an accident, a malicious crash designed by a sadistic traffic engineer. To take pride in being that traffic engineer is to celebrate the crash, the accident, the murder. To think twice before setting out to be the best is to consider that almost all of the cultural messages you have received have deceived you. Try it out.