No kidding, there I was, sitting in the club meeting going over the events of the past few years and trying to come up with an official history of the group. Somebody came up with the idea that we should make a commemorative gesture to those people who were the first to achieve a goal commonly held by the club members.  Maybe that would encourage diversity in our efforts and give  little competitive motivation for people to try harder to achieve something.

One of the members objected. Quite firmly. She absolutely hated the idea of giving a “first to do X” recognition. It’s not that she objected to them succeeding. Oh no, that was very commendable. Her problem was that, once you become the first person to do something, nobody else can ever be the first to do it. She felt it promoted a feeling of exclusion and inferiority by recognizing someone as better than everyone else.

After about half an hour, we just started ignoring her. I mean, really how can you make headway against that kind of belief?

That was the first time I realized what a powerful investment many people have in their own failure, and the equal investment they have in making sure no one else succeeds.

The analogy goes like this : I am a small fish in a big pond. I don’t like that. I could move to a smaller pond. Then I’d be big by comparison. But I don’t like small ponds because they’re too small and I won’t know any of the other fish and I’d be lonely. I could try to become a big fish, but that’s a lot of work and I’m not really sure how to do that anyway. Plus, I don’t really know what it is that big fish do so, if I succeed, I’d feel stupid when I’m around all the other big fish. And there’s a lot of big fish. Bigger is better, everybody knows that. That means smaller is worse. Inferior. Substandard. Worthless. Being smaller than other fish makes me feel really sad. What to do, what to do…

I KNOW! If I try to make all the other fish smaller, then we’d all be the same size, I wouldn’t have to work as hard, I’d still be in a big pond, and everyone will be happy! Wow, I’m so smart! Time to start tearing down all the other fish for their own good.

If you look, you can see this same thought process in every form of daily life. Schools make sure they cater to the lowest-performing children, causing the better-performing children to falter and begin to under-perform from a lack of support. Grading on a curve is a fine example.

The children themselves do this. Who’s considered superior in playground politics, the nerd or the jock? Who gets the majority of peer abuse, the one who over-achieves or the one who under-achieves?

But Wait! you say, The captain of the football team is successful and we don’t try to tear him down!

Sure. That’s because he’s only going to be the team super-star until he graduates in a year or two. Then he’ll be just another Average Joe. We can cut him some slack because his glory is fleeting. But the nerd will always be smart. Unforgivable.

There was a guy I knew who worked at a salvage yard. Nice guy. A little nutty, but nice. We knew each other for a couple of years and always got along great. One day I happily said that  the money I was getting for the scrap I had brought in would be enough to pay for a nice graduation dinner in the following week.

“What, your GED graduation?” he asked.

“No, college graduation.”

Suddenly, he wasn’t my friend anymore. By going to college, I was trying to be better than him, and that was intolerable. I was evil. And educated. Evil and smart. It could only be worse if I was rich… which I must be because I was graduating college. Poor people  might go but only rich people finish, everybody knows that. Ignore the fact that I’d been collecting cans off the roadside and whatever other scrap I could find to pay the bills. Let not facts get in the way of drama.

Look at movies, TV, books, and so on. Who are the villains and who are the heroes? The villains are almost always smart, self-reliant, successful, and wealthy enough to afford their own Fortress of Doom. The heroes are the tattered underdogs who have to get by on courage, stubbornness, luck, and lots of aspirin and band-aids. You get the occasional gutter-level villain, but they never last except as goons to upper-management.

Seriously, who is more popular, Spider-Man or Iron Man? The hand-to-mouth poor kid with a radioactive infection or the billionaire playboy in a fancy suit.

But Wait! you say, Batman is rich AND popular!

Yeah, and Batman is critically afflicted with multiple mental disorders. He is such a tragic figure we can forgive him for being a billionaire. Besides, he inherited it. It’s not like he did anything to earn it.

Personally, I think it’s King George’s fault. As a British colony we were populated with a lot of people who came to America because their lives in Britain stunk. Sure, there were the wealthy landowners and industrialists (by the definition of the time), but these were in the minority. If you wanted to see nobility, aristocracy, and royalty, you had to go to England. Then came the revolution and England became the enemy. So did the royals, nobles, and aristocrats. To be a plucky farmer carving a life out of the wilderness was a good thing. To be wealthy and powerful old-world nobility was a bad thing. It make you a tyrant. Tyranny is un-American, therefore success is un-American.

We are often proclaimed as the richest and most powerful country in the world, and we take great pride in that. (Actually, America is the 10th richest by most standards, but let not facts get in the way of drama.) So  think of what must it do the ego of so many people who adopt the “make all fish smaller” philosophy to know that they have invested themselves so heavily into their own failure yet live in a nation that has been so successful. It must be absolute torture. But American success is what caused the philosophy to form in the first place? Maybe winning the Cold War was the straw that broke the camel’s back? I dunno. Maybe it’s just coincidence.

Shout out, all those who believe coincidence occurs on a national or global level? Are those crickets I hear?