Are Great Men Ever Really Good?

"Is Peter Wiggin a good man?"

Petra shrugged. "Are great men ever really good? I know they can be, but we judge them by a different standard. Greatness changes them, whatever they were to start with. It's like war - does any war ever settle anything? But we can't judge that way. The test of a war isn't whether it solved things. You have to ask, Was fighting the war better than not fighting it: And I guess the same kind of test ought to be used on great men."

From Shadow of the Giant, by Orson Scott Card

I am, functionally, I suppose, a narcissist.

Not quite solipsistic: I do believe in the existence of other minds, of independent consciousnesses other than my own; though, I confess, often my actions quite often are consistent with the notion that I discount their importance.

I won’t bother making excuses for who I am; it is who I am: and quite enough moralizers who would look at my utter selfishness are the selfsame individuals who marginalized me, during my formative years, to the extent that I had, truly, no one to turn to but myself. (Ironically enough, it’s also true that, starved for any degree of acceptance, from any external source, my emotional development became stunted through an inability to look to myself for approval.) I am a product, and I must accept that: and I accept that my self-centeredness is indeed crippling. There have been a number of occasions when I found myself unable to approach, and properly be attentive to, people I truly care about. I too often don’t know how to escape my own skull, and it is difficult to realize that

OSC’s opinion of greatness (that is, great individuals) is perhaps more balanced, more nuanced, more insightful than almost anyone else’s that I know. Unlike Nietzsche, who glorifies greatness as the one true and proper end of mankind (though, admittedly, he paradoxically recognizes that it is only through moving above – “over” – the mass of humanity that greatness can be ascertained) Card is clearly ambivalent. Greatness is necessary, but it is not self-evidently good: that is not the kind of measure by which it is judged. Indeed, for Card, the good seems to be identified with the almost prosaic, the ordinary; however you may deem his conservative views on social issues such as homosexual marriage, it is consistent with his overall picture of society and the role of the family as the proper place for a human to live his or (and!) her life.

Thus, there is a tension between those who shape the world, and those who live in it. His greatest characters, in fact, are the ones who, like Cincinnatus, accomplish their great feats, and then return to the quiet life of the everyday. Obviously I cannot speak authoritatively of his world view, but I suspect that he finds permanent overachievers – the Michael Jordan’s and Donald Trump’s of the world – to be in some sense unbalanced and incomplete, having missed out on what is really important to a person , as a human, by sacrificing it to the altar of accomplishment.

Tonight, I had the pleasure of running into another old friend, whom I have not seen in a long time. He is one of the few people I know that I can unqualifiedly describe as being more intelligent than myself, and he is also an impressive musical talent to boot. And like me, he has wandered in the wilderness of uncertainty as to how to live his life, how to accomplish his own personal work. He is a musician, first and foremost – embracing a path that I myself turned my back – but, more importantly, he is someone with something to say, something worth listening to.

He was not expecting me: we lost touch six months or so ago, and I only discovered he had a gig tonight purely by accident. But afterward we had a very good conversation, though for much of the time I was around, I was waiting in the wings. See, he has his friends, his peers, his network; and I don’t quite know how to throw myself into groups of people I don’t already know. My – I wouldn’t exactly call it shyness, but perhaps social insecurity is a better term – around strangers is a matter of great personal frustration to me. But as I was… standing off, seeing his friends and associates congregate – mind you, with the exception of two people, I had no previous connection to any of them, and those two were, honestly, little more than little more than acquaintances – it dawned on me that I was approaching the situation all wrong.

I was being too nice.

I’m not really adept at being breezily sociable. My formative years have made sure of that: I learned so much at the hands of my nice (read: close-minded, provincial, and insular) friends (read: acquaintances I had the misfortune of being associated with due to the circumstances of my life) that I never had time to learn how to relate to others. But I am decent at being self-interestedly manipulative: I’ll never be as Machiavellian as Richard Hatch – and quite frankly, being non-empathetic is a liability when it comes to motivating people – but I can maneuver people toward ends that are my own if I feel it sufficiently important.

Honestly, I haven’t done anything like that in a very long time; and even then I was motivated to such action by anger, and it was more a whisper campaign than anything else. But I remembered that I could do it, and that, by gum, if I wasn’t going to effortlessly slip into a crowd of people for the purpose of actually making friends, I could at least be mercenary enough to be charming for the purpose of making contacts. And that was what I realized, that I no longer had to hold myself hostage to my inability to make friends easily and naturally, because I didn’t have to think of people I might meet as potential friends: I could think of them as assets, and simply treat them accordingly.

And that, honestly, was an incredible revelation to me.

If you haven’t heard me rant about the myths of modern dating (the first of which is the claim that women “like nice guys” – a fact which, as a recovering nice guy, I can most emphatically contradict) you will probably understand much of my deep-seated anger better by doing so. But there has been a bit of an inconsistency in me, which this situation brought to my attention. Whereas I have discarded the misguided inclination to “be nice” in the area of romantic relationships – and in other areas, beside – I have failed to take the lesson completely to heart.

I have failed to realize that if I am ever to accomplish, I must learn to unleash that which is aggressive, opportunistic, and predatory within me. I must learn the value of ruthlessness.

I must embrace the inherent wickedness of greatness.

I realize it is… almost sheer hubris to reflect upon myself in an essay about greatness, but the simple fact of the matter is that my (inescapably) self-conscious musings are couched in the context of my own personal evolution. As I have already mentioned, I do not view my narcissism as an unqualified good; there is a high price to it that is exacted often enough to be debilitating. But it is also an intrinsic part of who, of what, I am; and for the purposes of bringing about much that I want to accomplish, it may even be an asset. But accomplishment is precisely the metric that is most relevant to my concerns right now; and learning that to attain accomplishment means to be driven, even to the point of discarding traits that others may find laudable – well, that is the price to pay to be myself.