America Needs to Stop Celebrating Mediocrity and Sneering at Success

Replacing survival of the fittest with survival of the least fit.

Have you seen the new statue in the middle of Times Square? It’s uh… It’s something, all right:

So, why was this statue put up? Well…

The description of the installation reads, “Through scale, materiality, and posture, ‘Grounded in the Stars’ disrupts traditional ideas around what defines a triumphant figure and challenges who should be rendered immortal through monumentalization.”

In other words, the artist created a statue of a mediocre-looking person because it would get attention.

This is reminiscent of fashion magazines declaring fat women to be “super models” and putting them on the cover, or ugly men pretending to be women winning beauty contests:

Now, if we’re going to be perfectly honest, we have to acknowledge that SOME OF THIS has to do with the nature of the modern media environment.

We live in a world where we are bombarded with people vying for our attention to such an extent that being truly outrageous or subverting people’s expectations has become one of the most reliable ways to get attention. Put another way, if you saw a news headline that said, “Meth is bad for you,” you’re not going to read it because, “Duh, of course it’s bad for you!”

On the other hand, if there was a headline that said, “Meth is the new heart healthy, drug of weight loss for the stars,” you’d be much more likely to go, “Wait, what the hell? METH? I need to click on that and find out what they’re talking about.”

This creates a dynamic where the most radical, extreme, dubious, and outrageous claims are constantly being pushed in the media while simple sanity gets mostly ignored because it doesn’t draw clicks.

In and of itself, that is an incredibly unhealthy dynamic that’s bad for our society.

However, it goes much further than that.

The Left in America has become obsessed with trying to make everything revolve around the most easily outraged, dysfunctional, and broken people in our society. We’re constantly being encouraged to change how our entire society works to cater to the WORST, the least capable and the least admirable people in our entire country.

We saw a lot of this with the Black Lives Matter movement. There are still arguments about whether police officer Derek Chauvin’s utter indifference to whether George Floyd lived or died was ultimately responsible for Floyd’s death or whether the massive amount of fentanyl he had in his system caused him to lose his life. What shouldn’t be worth arguing about is that George Floyd was a terrible human being who shouldn’t be honored in any way, shape, or form for his life. Yet and still, multiple statues of him went up:

Why in the world should a man with a long criminal record who died on drugs be honored with statues?

Similarly, it is good to question this:

Why would a college want to take a weird, unattractive, mentally ill person and broadcast them as the face of their college?

Of course, under Biden, our military did the same thing over and over again:

While it’s not the only factor involved, it’s no coincidence that as the Trump administration has told trans soldiers they have to go, recruiting has gone through the roof:

Realistically, how many trans soldiers would ever even be able to fight? They’re mentally ill, on hormones more typical of the opposite sex, and getting large amounts of surgery. In other words, the Biden administration prioritized elevating mentally ill men in dresses over our military’s ability to field a fighting force.

Similarly, we’re seeing the welfare of this relatively small number of mentally ill weirdos and perverts being put ahead of every woman in the country. Men are being allowed to play women’s sports, share locker rooms with women, and even go to women’s prisons because what’s good for half the country is considered to be less important than the bad life choices made by a small percentage of heavily damaged men.

We see this attitude reflected in how the Left looks at criminals as well. Mentally ill, career criminals are allowed to roam the streets no matter how many times they get caught victimizing their fellow citizens.

Remember the Daniel Penny case? Here was an actual hero who stepped in with some of his fellow passengers to protect people from Jordan Neely, who was making violent threats toward everyone within earshot. Neely had severe mental problems and had been arrested 44 times previously, including for violent offenses. It’s sad that Neely died while Penny was restraining him, but Penny should be held up as an example of how people should behave while Neely was one of the worst people in our society. Meanwhile, of course, liberals SIDED WITH NEELY and felt like the system let HIM DOWN.

How about the regular, law-abiding citizens who just want to get home from work without being threatened, attacked, or set on fire? Why are they supposed to be less important than career criminals and violent lunatics? Incidentally, if you walk around New York City, you will think about that question a lot because you will regularly see homeless people talking loudly to themselves, punching the air, or generally being menacing enough to get arrested in the saner parts of the country.

We can go on with this. Wanting personalized pronouns? Complaining about “microaggressions?” Demanding “trigger warnings?” These are all PERSONAL PROBLEMS that the rest of society is being asked to fix for the person who has them.

Do you believe you’re a victim? Is racism, sexism, or homophobia holding you back? Well, have you ever considered the possibility that maybe you’re not a victim at all and that your problems are really your own fault?

Hey, maybe we shouldn’t let groups of thugs loot stores or college students push people around and threaten their fellow students because they feel aggrieved. Maybe instead, the looters should go to prison and the bad students should be expelled so the good students can continue their education in peace?

Instead of catering to the worst, most broken people in our society, we should be punishing bad behavior, telling them to work on themselves and pointing everyone toward successful examples.

You don’t celebrate losers. You don’t elevate bad examples. You don’t reward failure.

Along the same lines, you don’t sneer at success, act like it is “luck,” or try to figure out how to punish it.

Instead, you hold winners up as an example and encourage people to learn from them.

You know how you become more successful? You watch people who are good at doing things you want to do, you learn from them, and you try to implement it in your own life. You read books. You watch instructional videos. You talk to smart people and you let them teach you how to do things.

Part of this process is holding these people up as role models in the first place — and in America, we have lots of people like that.

For example, take that lame statue we opened up with. Well, how many great New Yorkers have there been throughout history? If you’re going to celebrate a New Yorker with a statue, why not Vince Lombardi? Patrick Ewing? Donald Trump? Humphrey Bogart? George Burns? FDR? Mae West? Walt Whitman? Sammy Davis Jr? Tom Cruise? Lucille Ball? Teddy Roosevelt? You can go on and on, and you might like or not like some of those people, but at least they make human beings want to be BETTER.

We need examples. We need people we can learn from. We need people we can aspire to be. We don’t need everyone to try to learn from mediocrities that we need to drag along because they’re so pathetic that they can’t even handle day-to-day life.

America has produced as many great people as the rest of the world combined, so why aren’t they being held up for everyone to copy? You can tell a lot about a society from who their heroes are along with what they reward and punish.

It’s time to stop centering everything around the worst of us and start encouraging everyone to look up to the best of us again.

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