Category: Thinking

Back in Jan­u­ary, I briefly talked a bit about the need for more sin­cer­i­ty in the world. I still think that post holds true, but, as in most things, could be expand­ed upon after more reflec­tion. I’ve had chats with friends about call-out cul­ture & seen eye-rolling amounts of out­raged head­lines & no end of online chat­ter about how some thing or some one did­n’t do some thing well enough to please some one. As cliche as it is: per­fect remains the ene­my of good; and those who expect their def­i­n­i­tion of per­fec­tion to be met will for­ev­er be out­raged by the fal­li­bil­i­ty of every one.

What I almost nev­er see is mag­na­nim­i­ty — I don’t see acknowl­edge­ment and praise of effort, or under­stand­ing & encour­age­ment when some­one is try­ing but makes mis­takes. I under­stand that it may be hard to be mag­nan­i­mous when most peo­ple are push­ing their own agen­da (either disin­gen­u­ous­ly or sin­cere­ly), but I fail to see how the exco­ri­a­tion of imper­fec­tion & fal­li­bil­i­ty is use­ful for any­thing oth­er than vain­glo­ri­ous virtue-sig­nal­ing & self-aggran­dize­ment. It’s a neat lit­tle tau­to­log­i­cal flip to sup­port the type of pride that was once con­sid­ered sin­ful back when peo­ple believed in sin. With­out a sense of humil­i­ty, it’s nigh impos­si­ble to be mag­nan­i­mous. The world would cer­tain­ly be a bit bet­ter off if we prac­ticed it from time to time.

Peo­ple need to chill.