Below is a wonderful Ted talk (if you are not aware of Ted talks, you’ve been missing out on snappy, brilliant presentations by some of the great minds of today) by Alain de Botton. I’d recommend the whole video, but if you jump to 5:20 you’ll find the part I’m blogging about today.
One of my graduate classes I had little hope for going in and did not want to end coming out was a multiculturalism class. We discussed a lot of things, and as most good teaching involves he did not give out pre-chewed answers but let use stew in the issues. ¬†We talked about meritocracy, which, if you’re not familiar with that term, is a fancy word, in many respects for the American dream: work hard enough, put in enough elbow grease, and you too can be Bill Gates, Donald Trump, etc. It is an inspiring promise that has produced the wealthiest nation in the history of the world.
But, like its Puritanical cousin of yester-centuries, it also has implications if you swing it the opposite way: if you do not succeed, if you are on the bottom, it is because you belong to be there, you’ve earned it by being so unexceptional. Finding the balance between those two poles: the agency and freedom of “you can be anything you want to be if you work hard enough” while not “grinding upon the face of the poor” (Isa 3:15, 2 Ne 13:15, 2 Ne 26:20)¬†is one of the timeless challenges that our society is facing.
I am hopeful because I believe as we become aware of some of the ideology that underlies our assumptions we can find the right balance within our own psyches (so avoid some of the depression and anxiety connected with imbalanced world views) and our communities as a whole.