Outliers, 2 – Little People

I don’t think I realized that the cost of fame is that it’s open season on every moment of your life. – Julia Roberts

The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. – Eric Schmidt

… the little places, where I can more easily be close to God, should be my preference …. Quietness and peace before God are more important than any influence a position may seem to give … – Francis A. Schaeffer, No Little People, 1974, chapter 1.

(Photo image – Yelena Bonner – Quotefancy)

Our three opening citations cover enormous ground, but give insight on the phenomenon of outliers, the present subject of discussion in World.V.You.

Julia Roberts reminds us that stardom and fame make it extremely difficult to live anything approaching a “normal” life. Media and social-media scrutiny to find “stories” to gossip about are unending. Being a “Super-Outlier” puts you on continuous display before all the millions of voyeurs who care to look. We live in a peeping-Tom society because we can. It’s a sort of sneaky compulsion, a “harmless” venial sin we excuse ourselves for indulging in.

Schmidt points out that in the virtual world, anyone can assert and seek just about anything without much accountability, despite the best efforts of public and industry police and regulators to gain some sort of control over the worst elements who are exploiting it for all kinds of malignant purposes. Wannabe and actual negative outliers abound in this “Wild-Wild-West” virtual universe.

Francis Schaeffer, a Christian thinker who wrote well before the Internet took form and computer use was still embryonic in its application to personal uses, offers a perspective that any God/Creator seeker should heed, and all the more if they are hungering and thirsting for recognition and, as he puts it, a position of influence, no matter how modest it may be.

Outliers exist from the humblest to the grandest social settings. Every family has its weird uncle/aunt, its black sheep and wayward son/daughter, its over-achieving acquisitor, its relentless zealot, its hyper-intelligent know-it-all with a chip on her/his shoulder, etc. I’m sure you can put names on these roles right now in your own sphere.

Every level of community has them – the local celebrities whom everyone talks and gossips about, the town troublemakers, the glitzy, trendy set – whether in the local service and social clubs, businesses of any size, churches/religious institutions, political affairs, the cultural influencers who arbitrate what art and literature it’s cool to accept and boost in the area.

You, dear reader, may be one of them.

Then there are the quieter sorts of outliers – people more in tune with the spirit of Schaeffer’s observation. These stand out because they don’t go after the local, or any, version of fame and acclaim. Their priorities are different, and this makes them stand out, “weird”, out of tune with the normal ways of people seeking a voice. The curious, the sceptical, and the cynical mockers find them strangely attractive or repulsive because they are somehow a threat.

Among these idealists, the abilities that lead to outliership are used to walk “the road less traveled”. They do not seek the same sort of recognition most people who want it go after. Idealist outliers choose to keep remote from the mainstream frenzy because of conviction and principle, because their view of the world and its underlying reality is out of step with what the general culture declares is of first importance.

Mostly, power and acquiring it are far down their list of what is really important. It may come to them despite their unconcern for such things, but living in a fashion consistent with their convictions is foremost. To that end they may well choose to forego the pursuit of the wealth, position, and recognition most of our society admires so much. If any of it comes to them, they turn it towards furthering their idealistic goals. (Think Mother Teresa.)

Withdrawing from society altogether is one way to become an outlier. Hermits and recluses still exist, and a few may even become well-known local “characters”. However, short of living a hundred kilometers out in the wilderness with no neighbours except the birds and local fauna, total withdrawal has become a near impossibility.

The life-road based on firm principles and consistently seeking to live by them can be a costly one. Becoming an outlier in this way can lead to just as much outside scrutiny as the road to celebrity and fame which Julia Roberts represents and deliberately chose to withdraw from. The sceptics, critics, and cynics are just as prepared to exploit the failures and inconsistencies of the idealist as those of the deliberate ladder-climber, perhaps even moreso. To the media and other salacious voyeurs who lurk everywhere, it seems more delicious to revel in the fall of the “goody-two-shoes” than the tortured angst of the hoi-polloi. The fall of the pursuers of good and social betterment lets the rest of us off the hook. Then we can all smugly declare, “See! There’s no use in being overzealous about making yourself and the world a better place! Even the saints just fall into sin, and, when they fall, they leave behind a huge mess of disillusionment, broken hopes and shattered dreams!”

However, these humbler, meeker outliers of whom we are speaking now are very often the true world-changers. Most of what leads to peace and hope and joy comes from them. They are almost all “simple folk” who want to raise good kids and do more than fill their lives with glitz and bling and silly pursuits that add little of value to their own or other lives.

It is not the demigods of business, entertainment, politics, and sport who have raised the poor from the slums, ended slavery, fought for workers’ rights, brought in universal healthcare (at least in the nations which have it), fought to end discrimination of every sort, and poured out their blood to defeat the horrors of Nazism, Fascism and other tyrannies. And it will not be the Superstar Outliers who will continue to lead the defense of freedom, liberty, and what is left of morality.

Over the last century, we have been defrauded of much of our heritage. We have been taught that traditional beliefs and values are destructive of our personal freedoms and rights. We have been and are bombarded daily with propaganda about truth being strictly “scientific” and “rational”. We have been instructed that scientific methodology shows us “objectively” that spirituality is largely for chumps and losers when deciding how to create a better tomorrow. Our educational, social, financial, and political institutions have been cajoled and indoctrinated en masse into a worldview where moral values and categories are plastic and entirely transmutable according preference, context and current social needs/wants. Like drugged spectators, we have watched and continue to watch the systematic deconstruction of that heritage of 1500 years which laid the foundations of who and what the West became, and, to a large extent, still is.

We are told that our past and its creations are almost entirely reprehensible, despicable for our oppressions, repressions, persecutions, imperialistic colonialism, and acquisitive greed and exploitation. It is now the established and ensconced ideology in Big Academia to renounce and denounce all of it. Instead, it seems that all the other cultures and heritages of every other origin are superior and, apparently, even innocent of the kinds of terrible crimes against humanity we here in the West have perpetrated on all the other races and peoples of Earth. Lastly, it is we who have devastated this planet’s biome and should pay the price of making all that right.

There is truth in much of what we are accused of. But, there is an enormous paradox in it all, as well as not just a little blind and even deliberate hypocrisy. We are quick to excoriate our own ancestors and look upon their monumental handiwork with dripping disdain. Yet the virulent critics of our life continue to function within and exploit the very structures and institutions created by those same forebears they despise, glad to have the bully-pulpit of learned prestige their foremothers and forefathers earned for them.

And as they paint the West as a terrible blight upon the world, the rest of the world nods in agreement while lusting to adopt and adapt all the West’s major methods and models to surpass the West in its own game and move into the vacuum the West’s self-deconstruction is creating. Racial and ethnic superiority complexes will not disappear from the earth just because the West hates its own manifestations of them. Imperialism and colonialism and ethnic cleansing and genocide have never been the exclusive purview of the West. Honesty about history is as applicable to Asia and Africa as it is to the West.

Somehow, ironically (could it actually be because of the kind of built-in conscience our despised archaic values and morals still saddle us with?), the West has grown an acute case of moral shame and guilt for all its sins, but most of the rest of the world seems not to suffer the same kind of remorse about their equivalent forays into horrific inflictions on their neighbors. Thus, they nod and accuse and point their fingers to push the West’s self-flagellation along while preparing to step in and sweep up the shambles.

Even now, most of the charity and real aid for the world’s most desperate flows generously from the nations once known as Christendom.

Food for thought!

TO BE CONTINUED