Meritocracy is the Role
Say what you will about the modern world, but the invention of the combined theater kid / front-row kid archetype is a world historic achievement. You’d think these would be opposites. You’d think the grey-suited organization man would be over there grimly checking his boxes while out the streets the hippy would be cross-legged on the corner strumming his mandolin. But no. You clearly lack the breadth of vision and iron will of 21st century modernity. What do we not dare! Not only will we create this unholy amalgam, we will set it over us.
Is there a vice synthesis from a virtue chart peaking out at us?
Front row kid is the vice that distorts accomplishing things and succeeding at competition. Theater kid is the vice of what? Having flair? having zest? Those are pretty generic terms so I don’t think we have got down into the heart of the matter. I am tempted to say that there is a virtue that has something to do with entertaining yourself or others, something to do with playfully and joyfully inhabiting roles, and the vice is inhabiting roles out of fear or out of desire for gain, or perhaps just because you want to be seen inhabiting the role. Maybe the virtuous version has something to do with enjoying playing a role and the vicious version enjoys playing the role of someone who enjoys playing a role. Maybe. I would understand the virtue better if I understood better what the righteous purpose and good in playing roles is. But I don’t fully. Anyhow,
Front row kid : DEEDS :: theater kid : ROLES
The synthesis of these two virtues would be Teddy Roosevelt (‘the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral” but also an accomplished writer, statesman, athlete, etc.– “the man in the arena”). The vicious synthesis is the striver theater kid.
Herewith the inspiring story of the striver.
He sat at the front, took careful notes,
and pleased the teacher every day.
Until they told him his careful rotes
were old and done and passed away.
He vowed you cannot set me back
if victims are good to be a victim I’ll strive
I’ll have A+ fears, and that’s a fact
I’ll tranny harder than any alive
And xe did.
The end.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | Tags: Virtue Chart
seriouslypleasedropit
January 23, 2024
were vader still w/us, he would surely communicate His Majesty’s snort at the poem
Talkingbuffalo
January 23, 2024
I’m not entirely familiar with the terms front row kid and theatre kid so forgive my ignorance if my comment is in left field. As I was reading the thought occurred to me that perhaps the issue with the front row kid’s efforts are that he seeks to please an unworthy and unholy master in his striving. Likewise, the theatre kid, also seeks to please an unworthy master and thus plays the wrong roles.
The road to sanctification through the blood of the Lamb requires honest striving towards holiness and involves many holy roles to play.
G.
January 23, 2024
A comment wiser than the post that elicited it
Handle
January 24, 2024
My impression of the common vice is a kind of sycophancy combined with an oblivious naivete. In the manner of Goodhart’s Law, these are examples of a misdirection effort by mistaking a proxy measure for the true higher purpose of some process involving evaluation. In particular, the modern front row kid or theater kid (also some sports kids taking it too literally and seriously) are not brought into their areas of effort with the kind of basic philosophical grounding of the greater purposes of all these highly artificial constructed contexts, and instead they are just thrown into them where the only environmental cues and feedbacks of carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments to their intuitive attempts to infer what to do are the reactions of their evaluators, and so, they naturally tend to unreflectively optimize for pleasing the evaluator, and they become the kind of person who strikes one as “someone optimizing to please a particular evaluator instead of – and at some cost to – pursuing actual excellence or greater purpose for its own sake regardless of what authorities think or how evaluators react.” It is a combination of being a toady but also embracing the phony and artificial that no one can really care about except for its instrumental utility, over what is of real value, which one cares about even at personal expense. A teacher that teaches to the test and only cares about the average score so she can get a bonus or promotion but is indifferent to any real development in her students the day after the exam or of waste everybody’s time and money is an example of being corrupted by the phony system unbalanced by attempts to keep it anchored to achievement of its actual, higher purpose. The grind who successfully crams for the test and dumps it all the next day is the flip side of this coin. There is something of “the spirit of the law vs the letter of the law” here too, and of the sense of injustice when strict adherence to the letter is clearly and perversely at odds with the intent and spirit of what the rule was written to achieve.
The front row kid strikes us as a kind of disgusting toady, an eager player of the role of “teacher’s pet” when managing the teacher’s affection for him seems to have displaced academic excellence as his primary goal, and he fits into that role of someone too obsessed with being liked and trying too hard to be liked. The theater kid is similarly obsessed and trying too hard just with a different set of evaluators to please and with different ways of showing off to get the literal applause of positive feedback and falling into habits of being and attitudes and preferences where that morphs into their personality and identity, to the point where they can no longer stop performing all the time trying to get another hit of validation from the positive reactions of those around them.
Some sports-kids get like this too, become totally unbalanced in over-focus, forget that athletics is not just about winning or some particular capabilities, but health, fitness, discipline, mental toughness, comeraderie, teamwork, morale, etc. It’s not so much they lose sight of the forest for the trees as they are mistaking a small group of the trees for the whole forest and forgetting about the actual large forest with all the other trees that deserve proper consideration as well.
The bureaucratic / managerial mindset and the societies deformed by the being run according to that mindset in too many ways and for too long is highly encouraging of the emergence of these disordered personalities of what could otherwise be perfectly healthy tendencies associated with respective talents. “Kids Of The System” are those rewarded for being pleasers of their audiences, evaluators, managers, bureaucratic gatekeepers, selection committees, and so forth, and thus must focus on those social measurements. “Children of the Spirit” are those rewarded by the inner satisfaction of higher pursuits and commited to the values of higher purpose, even at the cost of social penalty.
G.
January 24, 2024
Amen to all that. Managerialism is at root a form of virtual reality.
Handle
January 25, 2024
Here is my first guess as to how to draw the virtue set diagram.
1. Vice: Ingratiation for Validation, distorts
2. Virtue: Diligence in Applying Talents, opposed by
3. Vice: Sloth, diminishes
4. Virtue: Courageous Devotion
It seems to me that when we recognize a type of positive or negative personality to give it a name, we are focused on one of the vices or virtues and its two neighbors.
Consider two alternatives for the young person gifted with intelligence or with talent for entertainment.
In the first case we have the corruption of the system to make “a kid of the system”, “the front row kid” or “the theater kid” by replacing the satisfaction of real accomplishment with that of social approval from judgers (a judger seems different enough an idea from a judge that I’ll keep the extra r) “The social system” when it corrupts in this virtue-deforming way really seems to me have a demonic character, the opposite of when it harnesses for good, cultivates, and uplifts.
So we focus on Ingratiation as it misdirects Diligence and opposes “Devotion” (the purpose-driven life).
The kid works hard, but not to the right end. He cannot resist social pressure to do the right thing the right way when his judgers reward him more for doing otherwise. He is constantly trying to get a good grade or applause and to please his teacher or audience in the artificial, socially- constructed situation arranged by the system, that he sacrifices much potential for development, improvement, progress, and achievement in reality.
Contrast with the Child of the Spirit. I think of the child who loves to consume huge amounts of history – not just the minimum assigned and selectively curated by the system to leave out inconvenient instances – but who never loses sight of the higher purposes of knowledge of truth for its own sake, connection to the past and his heritage, and the potential to extract genuine wisdom from the story of man, and that the story is messy and the facts rarely fit some simplistic ideological narrative of purely good team vs purely evil team. When assigned an essay, he knows the lie that will please the teacher enough to grant him the A, and he knows that doing the minimum will save a lot of time and effort and get him an easy C, and that the truth will require extra research and get him an F, but he writes the truth anyway. He is a kind of “Scholar in Exile Child” to contrast with “The Front Row Kid”. The analogy for the theater kid is I think the child who takes seriously the idea of stepping into the role that starts as respectful imitation and becomes the living of one’s whole life in the model of a mensch, a saint, a prophet, a holy family, a savior.
E.C.
January 25, 2024
@ Handle,
That explanation of the ‘Scholar in Exile Child’ is kind of what happened to me when I was still in school. I was trying a new curriculum, they had some mistakes (memorably, that Egypt was invaded by the Hyssops, which I knew wasn’t right, ’cause Hyssop is an herb!) and when I tried to point that out, all my grades for the entire year disappeared into the aether. Not just for history, for everything.
I never did recover those grades – and got very, very sick the next year, probably from the stress. Just know that, for the record, I went to the library and did some studying – Egypt was invaded by the Hyksos, not by an army of shrubs. Neither did Nimrod build the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.