We had our eye on the Scoreboard, not on our autonomy. In fact, we watched it carefully and it watched us, whether we comply with its commands in a low profile way à la Bohemia or a high profile conspicuous consumption way. Adamant that it has the real lowdown, and monopoly, on success, the Scoreboard’s propaganda and ads are everywhere. We learned about Scoreboarding from others, of course, and from movies, newspapers, magazines, television, the Internet, from the front of tee shirts and artfully placed designer labels.
Blitzed, bedazzled, bedecked, we could have been billboards ourselves. Think about the brands we buy and display; the taste, style, image and opinion we like to represent; the profiles we create for our social networks; the resumes we present to establish ourselves and the blurbs we write for alumni publications.
Think about how insulted we are if our position on the Scoreboard is underestimated with regard to, for example, education, community spirit or charitable obligation, fitness and nutrition, job title, home’s value, highbrow tastes in literature, cuisine, wine, art and travel, the success of our children, or money.
The Scoreboard’s influence is pervasive and insidiously overtakes our motivation. As a result, we’d automatically make decisions based on its mandates, believing we’d made thoughtful choices about what we wanted to possess and who we wanted to be. However ironically, much of what the Scoreboard has led us to want and acquire is not the right stuff. Built on sizzle, hyperbole, bandwagon appeal and its advertisers’ profits, it markets image and its correspondent products and affiliations.
To one extent, Scoreboarding may have served a purpose though the cost to principle and personhood, not to mention life and limb, was always extensive. It might have been an experimental means to organize and standardize the average human’s focus and output. And it might have been inevitable. The rivalrous impulse is almost universally instilled, by nature—its purpose survival, and by culture—its seeming purpose, to motivate competence, contribution, and achievement.
Albeit stretching it, the Scoreboard may have also prevented some vicious corporal punishment. Yes, the Scoreboard continues to flog us mentally. But at least recently, most of us in this land of opportunity weren’t literally whipped to get the job done; low ratings on the Scoreboard had been threat enough.
And the Scoreboard did, of course, fulfill one of its purposes. It gave us bragging rights: best baby, ride, schools, pets, lawn, wine collection, cell phone, television, kitchen appliances and countertops and, of course, best dad or supermom.
However, we can hardly say that the Scoreboard serves a purpose when it bestowed upon us the “right” to flaunt the superiority of our choices and show contempt for, humiliate or scorn the actions of those beneath us in the pecking order. Too often, a covert or overt condescension is our attitude towards those we’ve passed on the way “up.” Does it hurt them? Terribly.
In the main, though, does the Scoreboard get it right? No. Scoreboarding almost took us down. Well, then is it right about the points it awards; do the highest points represent the very best people? No. Why were Wall Street Scoreboarders given so many points? (Money.) And for what? (Money.)
The dissolute speculators, financial titans and other captains of industry who recklessly compromised the nation’s economy aren’t the only people on the Scoreboard whose merit is suspect. There are many other cheats and pretenders at the top of the pecking order, as well as in the rank and file. And, of course, the Scoreboard regularly fails to reward—with points, position and status—the ordinary hard work and contribution of many done in, as they are, by the Machiavellian self.
But I object to the Scoreboard as a measure of worth not because it is unfair, superficial and corrupt, though it is. I object to it because it is too often oblivious to the existential opportunity facing all of humanity.
Our real opportunity and challenge is autonomy, the mother of civilized behavior. Autonomy is the possibility for each of us to acquire a most precious possession—the personal authority to live a life as deliberately rich, contributory and expansive as the reach of our commitments, imagination and affinity. But the Scoreboard is insensible to the opportunity that autonomy is because its method, ruthlessly exploitive and dependent on our ever-increasing appetite for evermore stuff, breeds discontent.
This is not to say that the Scoreboard is not very savvy. It doesn’t portray us as marks or dupes when it shackles us to its shallow purposes. In fact, it’ll promise us anything and everything to gain our servitude. What is more, its equations “more stuff equals better people” and “fame and celebrity equal substance,” warn us that a failure to jump on its bandwagon is tantamount to a failed life.
To get out from under the thumb of the Scoreboard is not to relinquish ambition, excitement or life’s comforts or to abandon the desire to excel on the playing fields where we have talent or obligations. Nor is it to give up competing at sports, chess or art fairs, or cheering for one’s favorite team and shouting at the opposing team’s umpire. But it is to get out from under a mercenary, shop-worn and counterproductive guideline for designing and determining how we live out our lives.
Unless we believe that the Scoreboard is a stand-in for the Almighty, and many do, life need not be about accumulating points or winning the contest for who has the most stuff. It is true, though, that much of life is a fight, a struggle. Even the good fight for how life ought to be, as decreed by divine will or declared by conscience, faces a great deal of interpretative, or malicious, opposition.
The Scoreboarding, point-accumulating mentality is a mean one, and arguably if it once served a purpose, it is no longer needed. With respect to identity and authority, to recognize autonomy is to recognize the turn in discipline that the self took towards its sovereignty over its humanity—a turn not unlike those made in other disciplines such as science, technology, philosophy and other human studies.
Autonomous, in control, knowledgeable, gifted and conscionable, we don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And we don’t need a Scoreboard to motivate us individually to flourish or collectively to find our bearings, our shared humanity. We know how to thrive in the flow of life, how to recognize well and true who we are, and how to heed the call to who we might yet be—strong in solitude, strong in communion.
And, of course, it may be that the jig is up for the Scoreboard-shaped, Machiavellian self so prominent in the last few decades. It may have imploded along with the economy it sabotaged and the lives it ruined.
What else besides such a soulless mindset could have driven the Scoreboarders to take so much liberty with the profit motive that all hell broke loose? Their private pursuit of profit with no value added has burdened all of us with the catastrophic consequences of burst financial and real estate bubbles (both booms largely built upon bogus data supplied by these very same people), not to mention the heart-wrenching and spirit-impoverishing double-digit unemployment fostered by the recession.
Supportive of the politicians and pundits who cunningly exploit and profit from the public’s fears, the Scoreboarding mentality has driven us far beyond bragging and showing off. In its shallows, we lost sight of the promise and reward of the real heart and soul around which we are to be known and our life is to be played out.
The world is far from perfect but the public spirit and allotment of money and energy needed to make life the way it ought to be will never be a focus or priority of the Scoreboard. In fact, it is in the margins of the Scoreboard that we have taken it upon ourselves to acquire the enlightened ways and means and the imagination and the resources to make the world a richer, fairer place.
When our most precious possession is our autonomy, something profound, humane, compassionate, happens. From this authored perspective, we know who others are. Their struggle is the human struggle, too. In this moment of informed recognition, we are mentally able to respect and grant them their autonomy, their dignity. All of which enable us to pursue and realize our goals and ambitions with a more measured and humane assessment of what constitutes a successful life and to exceed the immediacy of brute survival and the vulgar promises of the Scoreboard.