Democritizing Talents

Retreat.  Retreat.  Retreat.  Be less.  Become less.  Become nothing, or at least become lower than you truly are.

You don’t need to be in an explicitly totalitarian system in order to receive this message.  Collectivist thoughts spoken out loud with an aim of extinguishing individuality can be found anywhere.  They just happen to become more pronounced when collectivism turns into an outward political system, with an effort to maintain control over people.

I learned how to read and write when I was three or four years old.  With a little help from my father, I would open up my picture books and copy letters and words that I saw, over and over again, until I got better at it.  I have always loved to read and so I continued.  Book after book.  I read my first Dostoyevsky when I was ten years old.  I also began to teach myself English by simply watching television.  I began to pick up other languages too, comparing their structure and similarities in grammar and expression.  I didn’t do this to impress anyone, or with an expectation that I will get something in return.  I simply did it because I enjoyed it. 

There was and is always something autodidactic about how I have approached learning for myself.  There were a few teachers (not that many to be honest with you) that I can think of that have contributed to my learning process, but on the whole, when I wanted to learn something, I sought the best ways to learn it and I did.  I followed the threads in history and literature if I wanted to see the continuity of an idea, and this early practice made my current efforts at research quite easy. 

Teaching yourself also can be daunting.  Sometimes you fail.  Sometimes you think that you are ready to read something, some text which has eluded you for quite some time, and you pick it up, and you realize that you need to leave it alone and perhaps come back to it later.  But teaching yourself can also mean that you are gaining discipline in your daily activities and that you are not waiting for anyone else to make a schedule for you. 

As it was to be expected, my hard work of learning often times went either unrecognized or worse—it was frowned upon.  I am not about to make a victim out of myself and have a pity party but being scolded for knowing a lot is to say the least, unpleasant.  Implicitly (or perhaps even explicitly), you are told to decrease yourself in order for someone else to increase.  The degrees of decrease and increase I am speaking of are only to do with intellectual abilitites.

Why such efforts at totalizing the other person’s gifts even exist?  Making everyone the same in talents is the worst kind of “equality.”  Gifts which have been given to us, gifts which can express themselves in art, or writing, or any other effort of the intellect are not democratic.  Art is not democratic. 

I don’t believe in hoarding of knowledge.  If I learn something, then it seems to me that the most logical thing to do is to share it with others.  But to make myself less than I am so someone else can feel better about themselves, so that they can increase their self-esteem (whatever the heck that is!), I refuse to bend.  I refuse to be totalized into a mediocre blob.

We are all strong and weak in one area or the other.  When I am weak, I would like to be helped, lifted by the strong.  When I am strong, then I will offer my hand to someone who is having moments of difficulties.  This is only logical.  But we cannot impose a tyranny of mediocrity.  Mediocrity breeds sameness and sameness extinguishes passion for life.  A little bit of competition is good for the mind.  If we are challenged, we are pushed to the area of our being that we would otherwise not discover. 

Having knowledge, of course, has nothing to do with being good.  And so, whatever our intellectual strengths are (which should be cultivated), we have to be careful not to become a Nietzschean “Superman,” who is above the law and deems himself morally superior to others because of this accumulation of knowledge. 

It’s funny when you go through your memories, whether past or somewhat recent ones, and you realize how many times you were called “too ambitious,” or “too passionate,” or “too intense” and that you need to “tone it down.”  Yeah, well, thanks for the tip, folks, but I think I’m going to go about this my way.