A Nicaraguan, a ginger, and the forced disappearance of controversy

Last spring, the week before spring break, one of my top four favorite Nicaraguans, Juan Raul came up to me in Psych class and said, "Weeeeeeel.  You neeeeed to reeead dis boook," and shoved a copy of Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, into my hand.  I hadn't heard of it, but once I showed it to my mother she started to go on a tangent about how it was highly disputed and controversial and a lot of other things that I probably would have remembered if I had been paying attention.  I quickly found out that she was very right.  The book is in the same category as Orwell's 1984, but is focused on "perfecting" the population through genetic engineering as opposed to brainwashing.  Scary stuff.  Anyway, after reading it I'm fully convinced that Huxley was probably just bored one day, wanted to stir up some controversy, and cranked out this crazy novel in order to do so.

Juan Raul in the most Latino picture of all time

Huxley's main character, Bernard Marx, is frustrated with the new system in which all are expected (and created) to be the exact same.  At one point in the book, he says, "I don't want comfort.  I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness.  I want sin."

I fully support this concept.

The word "bore" is defined by whichever dictionary I installed on my dashboard as "a tedious situation or thing" or "to make someone feel weary or uninterested by tedious talk and dullness."  Basically, it's the opposite of anything exciting or interesting.  It is the absence of controversy.


Bernard Marx is put into what would seem like an ideal situation.  He has great genes, everybody in his world has sex with everybody, he is an "Alpha," which means that he's at the top of the social ladder.  Basically it's everything that we dream our lives could be, except that it's actually the complete opposite.  "But Young William," you say, "How can this be bad?  I would love to have sex with whoever I wanted, not have to worry about relationships, and be able to look down on all of the people who were inferior to me.  What could possibly go wrong?"


Unfortunately, about 99.82% of the time that the phrase "what could possibly go wrong?" is used, an average of 173.20928 things go wrong (statistics complied by LtP staff).  In this case, the problem was that there wasn't anything wrong.  I've been home for 23 days for Christmas break, and I have had approximately 3 responsibilities during that time.  My life has been pretty close to perfect.  It gets boring.  There's nothing to rush about.  There's nothing to accomplish.  There's nothing to argue.  There's nothing that makes me genuinely worry or be afraid or get excited about or make my adrenaline rush.  I love being able to be with my family and see my friends, but sometimes it feels like I'm living in a fish bowl and my mom drops food in three times a day.

Ironically, this "perfect," comfortable situation is one of the most uncomfortable in the world.  I feel like a waste of a person.  I feel like the world could go on in pretty much the exact same manner if I didn't exist (scary though, for me at least).  This is terrifying.  Instead of being somebody with a purpose and a role, I've suddenly become a filler for a space and a time.


I want sin.  I want things to go wrong.  I want things to blow up in my face (figuratively, of course).  I want to have to work to overcome difficulties.  These things are what define people as individuals.  These are what pull people out of the pot and put them into the spotlight.  These are the people that we remember.  It's no fun to talk to somebody who agrees with everything you say.  It may be refreshing for an hour, a day, a week, a month, but after a certain period of time it gets frustrating.  I hate "me too!" conversations more than just about anything in the world.  I'm prepared to call bullshit on anybody who believes that they have the same viewpoints as me on everything (or at least on the non-trivial things).  I'd rather talk to somebody who has a complete mirror image of my beliefs than somebody who matches mine.  It's fun to circulate ideas and have conflicts and controversies.  It's what advances us as a culture.


Without conflict and controversy we would still be single cell whatever-they-ares in the ocean.  If we were meant to meet the status quo we could have done it then, but we didn't.  We could have done it before we discovered fire.  As far as I know, most primates can't create fire, and they're still living.  The thing is; That wasn't good enough for Grandpa and Grandma Gorilla, so they hunted and gathered their way to fire, and to tools, and to culture.  We could have agreed with the English when they taxed us.  We could have agreed with Hitler that there was a superior race for the sake of avoiding controversy.


Why didn't we?

"Ehhhhhhh, screw it.  Wouldn't want to stir anything up!"

Because overcoming controversy and working through conflict are the only ways to accomplish anything.  Did George Washington call off the troops across the Delaware because it was cold and Christmas Eve?  Hell no.  The British had been abusing him and 2.5 million of his closest friends in the colonies and he wanted to do something about it.  He wanted to beat them.

This brings me to my next point.  Nine days ago (and only a few days after Ed Rendall called out Philadelphia, the NFL, and America for being wusses), my favorite left-handed ginger this side of the Mississippi sent me this link about how competition is being eliminated in many schools.  This is the worst idea I've heard since my friend Eric jumped into Lake Michigan on New Years Day (I guess that's not that long ago, just pretend that it is).  It reminded me of this classic Rick Reilly article (from before he sold out his soul to the devil and started writing crappy, meaningless stuff for ESPN after leaving SI), which basically points out that, well, some people end up winning in the world and some people end up losing.

Can't imagine why this kid would be sending me articles on New Years Eve instead of going out.  Nope.  Looks like he has a lot of friends to me...

Not everybody is the best in the world at something and not everybody is the best in the world at everything.  This doesn't mean that we have to pretend that they are.  If some kids suck at sports, why do we have to pretend that they're just as good as everybody else?  (Can you imagine how bad pro sports would be if we had to do this on that level?  We'd probably have 7-9 teams in the NFL playoffs or something stupid like that)  We don't give all kids the same GPAs or ACT scores.  We don't prevent some kids from singing or dancing or writing as well as they can because some others can't.  Life is made up of a million different competitions every day, and while we may not be directly pitted against another team or another athlete or anything like that, we are always competing against something.  We're in constant competition against curves for grades, against co-workers for promotions, and against ourselves to just be better people.  Imagine if Thomas Edison or John Adams or Jesus or Edward Sorin had given up and said, "Welp, I tried.  That's all anybody can ask of me."

Success is a relative term.  If even the poorest of the poor was bringing in billions of dollars a year Bill Gates and Donald Trump would be living in the slums.  Just like there isn't a set score to win a baseball game, there isn't a set amount of success that is needed in order for one to become successful.  All you have to do is beat the competition.  Instead, we're beginning to train people to avoid this competition all together.  How are we supposed to beat them if we avoid them?  

"Ya know Franklin, I bet that ol' Adolf is just feeling a little blue because he got picked on in our Leaders of the Modern World class.  I bet that if instead of trying to be better leaders with better nations than him, we tried to help him become as powerful as us, he'd forget all this "Aryan Race" stuff and be a really nice guy on the inside."

Nobody strives to maintain an entry-level position at a company.  Nobody busts their butt to be the best if there's no reward for doing so.  We are only as strong as the weakest link in our groups, so why are we intentionally helping weak links join our groups?  In the Boston Globe article, it mentions the case of four students helping one student finish the mile run.  This case takes FOUR kids who could have run the mile faster than the ONE kid who couldn't.  So we're actually WORSENING the four's own expectations of themselves and their own ceilings in order to assist the one kid who probably won't ever run in his life.  How would N.W.A. feel if they were ordered to put me in their group and not be able to finish a song until I'd contributed 1/6th of it because my rap skills would be made fun of if I did it on my own and without peer support?  This is stupid.


America is one of the most powerful countries in the world today because of the work of Barack Obama because of the way that we have repeatedly outworked, outschemed, and outperformed anything that stands in our way.  Cuba is one of the weakest, worst off countries in the world because they don't encourage their residents to do anything but meet the status quo.  By trying to eliminate competition, we are telling our youth that it's okay to fail.  That it's okay to not try as hard to succeed because no matter what you'll get a trophy.  That we'll all end up in the same place no matter what our abilities and work ethic and morals are.  Sounds promising to me...