PODCAST: Who we might becomeWith too much attention on the Scoreboard—when it plays us, when it determines how we think and act—a certain coarseness and artifice begin to define us.
It could be said we get a good deal when we play Scoreboard because it hides us in plain sight. Let me tell you what I mean.
By manufacturing a dazzling aura, with glitter, gloss and stuff, Scoreboard hides our lack of substance, heart and soul. It hides their absence from others also being played. It is a kind of ego protection for those who don’t want to get even glimpses of their own superficiality. In other words, when Scoreboard does its job well, what is shallow and vain is hidden by the hoopla.
Here, in America, of course, big heads and swelled egos are always in our face. If not in person, we see them on television or read about them in magazines and online. (The media is playing us, too. Doesn’t their audience share increase when they feature the self-promoting, conceited behavior of celebrities or fame-seeking politicians, addicts and convicted criminals pretending to be born-again?)
But status-seeking, ego-protected self-promotion doesn’t need a media circus. Against often capricious or bogus standards, millions of people find much to celebrate, admire and praise about themselves and are cruelly contemptuous or dismissive of others.
We boast obviously—our bids for approval and admiration naked and cheap. But we who know how to do our bragging modestly do it best. First, we try to hide our status anxiety and contentiousness. Then, we “objectively” tick off our achievements. Finally, after mentioning a minor, acceptable mistake (“yes, I did inhale”), piously acknowledging team effort (a team we’ve exploited), and making a faux show of reticence, we hammer down our righteous place on the Scoreboard.
Not all chronically self-centered people are necessarily big show-offs. Many of us take a less is more approach. We like to have our “modest” and “deep” choices and tastes displayed as if they were in some crucial sense more fundamentally meaningful than those made by others who conspicuously display their stuff.
Needless to say, such coarseness (or bogus humility) and artifice are not only unattractive. They actually impoverish the environment in which human possibility may thrive. For even as religious teaching fades from the consciousness of many, the demand for humane, decent and thoughtful behavior remains of critical importance to individual, family, community and state.
There is little cause for celebration until we understand that our lives—absent the ability to “get over” what is coarse, brute-like and obsessively selfish—are small and petty lives that barely scratch the surface of human possibility.
On the other hand, there IS something to celebrate. We honor the self when we temper the aggression, antagonism and rivalry common in human relations. We show respect for the self and our unique possibility when we respond to the challenge of a substantive life and take responsibility for who we are, for who we might yet be, and for how we might be known.