Lately, I’ve been reminiscing about my past experience in the school system, and one of the common themes that I keep coming back to is the sheer tolerance of prideful incompetence, e.g., being wrong in a loud way.
Arguing loudly when you’re wrong is, in a way non-threatening to the teacher, they’re right at the end of the day. But the moment you speak up to correct your pedagogue’s mistake, you got held by a whole plethora of social standards that did not apply for the blundering schoolmate before you.
It’s weird how tolerance sometimes comes back to oppress the overachievers, essentially dumbing them down by imposing more rules on them just by their virtue of being right.
That made me think: In a modern society like ours, one achieves much greater social prowess by being a loud, but marginally nice, idiot. Being wrong loudly, but on the verge of respectfulness, allows you to construct a social sphere of tolerant observers informing you much better than striving to be right in the first place.
I guess quitting to stay ahead is a real strategy after all.
Leave a Reply