peter keating

[the way to kill greatness is to] kill a man’s sense of values. kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. you stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed.

--ayn rand, the fountainhead

do we live in a world of mediocrity? is this the age of Everyman, where everyone is a winner? the Great American Dream seems to profess such, that if you work hard you can achieve whatever you want. anyone can grow up to be president. celebrities are every scandal-causing person that television can get their hands on, making people famous for being dumb and pretty and promiscuous. there’s a grade for citizenship and effort in many primary schoolrooms. rec soccer teams for young kids reward effort, failing to keep score and giving everyone trophies at the end of the season. everyone is special. which is another way of saying no one is.

by venerating the mediocre, what are we saying about it? simply that it’s ok, it’s acceptable, that average is good enough. if we look up to people who have no desirable qualities to speak of we become able to justify to ourselves that it’s ok if we have no qualities either. past the Real World culture (where everyone had to be a Something Guy—the sport guy, the funny girl, the protective mother, etc) of reducing our personalities to an adjective, we now are allowed to reduce them to something shocking, or to nothing.

but is greatness dead? there still are things we can see and aspire to, and even more than ever before. forerunners in music and art and literature and politics and philosophy still exist and are standing up for something to look toward. they still matter, at least to me, more than any falsely famous person or shocking situation. and amidst everything great that is being done by every amazing person, I can look at things and people who are living their lives (subjectively, of course) less successfully than I am, and feel better about that. but when we get to the dangerous stage where living large and reaching higher no longer holds any interest for an individual, that is where the cult of mediocrity has won its battle.