Great opinion piece by David Brooks in this weekend’s Times about meritocracy. The main point he makes is that a lot of people’s lives are made up of two mountains. The first is building yourself and your reputation. School, career, start a family, buy a home, hustle. Then you go down the valley. Maybe a personal setback, family tragedy, existential crisis, dissatisfaction, disillusionment. This is where your ego is stripped away and you become “capable of freely giving and receiving love.” Your desire for esteem is stripped away and your real desires are made visible. Then you start to climb the second mountain and it isn’t about your ego anymore, but about your real purpose, and this changes the way you behave. Here is the best example:
“In their book “Practical Wisdom,” Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe tell the story of a hospital janitor named Luke. In Luke’s hospital there was a young man who’d gotten into a fight and was now in a permanent coma. The young man’s father sat with him every day in silent vigil, and every day Luke cleaned the room. But one day the father was out for a smoke when Luke cleaned it.
Later that afternoon, the father found Luke and snapped at him for not cleaning the room. The first-mountain response is to see your job as cleaning rooms. Luke could have snapped back: I did clean the room. You were out smoking. The second-mountain response is to see your job as serving patients and their families. In that case you’d go back in the room and clean it again, so that the father could have the comfort of seeing you do it. And that’s what Luke did.”
He argues that relationships used to be at the center of our culture but that is being eroded over time.
This meant something to me because it describes something that I think about a lot but that he says much more eloquently, which is that I think being secure with oneself is the most valuable attribute a person can have. Not needing recognition and praise to do your best work or be your best spouse/parent and being happy independent of anyone or anything around you. A meritocracy helps get you up the first mountain but humbling yourself and ditching your ego gets you up the second. You could say this another way by saying that “whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”
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