Have you noticed that every company selling goods or services has a web site and when you visit it you will be asked to click a mouse button to signify a “like” response to that company? I say that as a nation, if not as a global community of computer users — a sizeable community that — we are becoming obsessed with the notion of being liked, and it is making us into a collective of approval seekers without consideration for whether or not the approval is deserved. We seem to have reached a point as a society where the shallow “tweet” or Facebook “like” have become the standard for value.
This attitude manifests in school situations where a subject student presents not as an idiot savant, but rather as what I came to call an idiot arrogánt, about which more later. The primary quality of this condition is an unwarranted sense of entitlement such that mere desire without practice and effort would be offered as justification for academic standing.
Richard Wagner, was a complete sociopath viewing others as objects to satisfy his craving for admiration and wealth. Some writers have said his personal flaws did not matter when viewed next to the enormous contribution to the world of music made by him. Here was an individual possessed of great skill with a megalomania to match. The common attribute is the oversized sense of entitlement.
In 2016, we witnessed an individual’s successful campaign for the presidency of the United States. He postured, insulted adversaries, ignored historical and any other facts that did not suit his platform in amateurish rhetorical explosions. His history of sexual abuses, financial failings and dishonest business enterprises were examined daily by respected investigative journalists, and advertised of course by his opponents’ staff writers. He won the race, but we must ask whether the media assisted or hindered him in his rise by giving greatest time and space to the biggest boor with the biggest ego.For four years he governed by tweeting his opinions in the early hours of the morning, a time when old people usually get up to pee. His ruminations and bladder activities at such a time and circumstance have a certain expressive congruency.
Here in Canada, we have parties engaged in leadership contests, and besides the serious contenders raising serious national issues and presenting serious unique perspectives and solutions, there are a few posturing bombasts seeking to emulate that former president of south of the border. They speak of non-existent threats to individuals and the nation and then offer simple unworkable solutions to these non-problems. Refugees are not a cause of community crime or national unemployment rates as they state, and refusing refugees entry into Canada is not a solution to those problems. Nor should the act of smiling goofily while acting as a conductor to your sycophantic followers’ chant about a political opponent, “Lock her up! Lock her up!” be construed as legitimate campaigning.
The common factor in the above scenarios is the valuing of noise over substance and self over service. Wagner may have written some of the world’s greatest music, but his mother still should have taught him it is not nice to steal. And what megalomaniacal drive could impel the flaunting of one’s history of bullying in financial and social roles to stand as credential for leadership? In the environment where self-gratification is senior to community building, we may abhor but can still comprehend even murder as a means to achieving some perverse sense of self-worth. Unbridled ambition has been precursor to some of the darkest times of the past few centuries. The test of a modern democratic state, however, must be the nature and strength of the response from its electorate, and that response must be strong and informed or we risk a gradual slide into a slush of terminal humanism where we mistake rant and slander for free speech, and no one will like that.