Under the yoke of mediocrity

Some part of all of us wants to be excellent, the best rather. Determination and hard work can help achieve a lot but still there are never millions of places at the top - only a few. There is a fight for those few places. But sadly the law of numbers prevails and numbers matter more than being the best. The multitude is, as expected, most aptly described as mediocre. This notion of democracy has been extended to mean that even this mediocrity of talent (in whatever field) is a desirable thing. Whatever this large proportion of the audience interested in, is sure to find lots of people fighting to get in providing. Thus we have a lot of mediocre products - be it movies, art, music, food, clothes, educated professionals or anything else for that matter. It is as simple as the business adapting as per the market requirements. Thus we see that a lot of mediocre stuff being pushed in - of these inferior things getting precedence over the better ones. People who actually have an eye for the excellent, the best of them are left out in the cold. Let take a practical example - say there is an exam on some logical subject. This is something where you should have people think over new/original problems - but the exam ends up testing attendance in class instead of logical reasoning, it has all the questions that have been 'taught' earlier. This is done to accommodate the majority of people incapable of coping with an intellectual test. In this way people who mug up achieve higher than people who actually think logically and have an understanding of the course material. This is the way that medicrity of the entire society stifles the better ones.

The reign of mediocrity was beautifully portrayed in Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. It remains one of the best pieces of literary work till date. There is a Howard Roark (the protagonist, defender of excellence in himself) in many of us, just the fact that most don't take up the battle of excellence and mediocrity - for it needs you to risk everything in your life at times. Thus the being who is a bearer of some form of excellence - under the slavery of practicality is forced to hide his talent and live intermingled and tinged with the poisoned of compelled mediocrity. And thus mediocrity begets more mediocrity and even stops the mushrooming of excellence.

But where do we see hope - there is always supposed to be some hope! Well in this case the only hope is going to come from individualistic strength to challenge the promotion of sub-standard things in any walk of our lives.