Everyday People

As LinkedIn has become a blend of business networking and Facebook-style validation-focused social media, it’s also become something of a repository for morality stories. There are several different genres of such tales, but two in particular have caught my attention recently, perhaps because the overall library of stories is small enough that the same ones tend to recur over and over.

The first such genre of morality story can be viewed as “simple lessons from famous people.” The story of Albert Einstein writing 9 x 10 = 91 on a blackboard or the poem attributed to Frida Kahlo that says “If I have to ask, I don’t want it” fall into this category. These are stories with dirt simple morals, such as “be more focused on a person’s successes than their failures” or “if you really love someone, you’ll give them what they need without them having to ask” that are given relevance by their association with this or that famous (and supposedly virtuous) person. Most of these stories, at least in my experience, are bogus. Despite the fact that the famous person at the center of them had a very well chronicled life, and was often an author themselves, no verifiable documentation of the event or quote in question seems to exist anywhere.

As an aside, there is a subgenre of this, like the story of a woman cutting the head and tail from a fish before cooking it without understanding why (other than her mother had done it), where there actually is a real story there, but the original isn’t tied to a famous enough person and so they’re dropped in favor of an anonymous “everyperson” protagonist. In this case, the specific moral of the story, that “[the traditional gender role was not] a malevolent system designed to oppress, but [...] something that had outlived its usefulness and needlessly hemmed people in” was lost, and “don’t do things just because they’ve always been done that way” was subbed in. And former National Organization for Women president Karen DeCrow is no longer credited as the story’s source.

The second genre of morality story can be termed “life school.” The story of students needing to search a hallway for a balloon with their name on it or a class being easily divided when goaded into a witch hunt are recent examples of this trope. Again, these stories deal with simple, or even simplistic morals, namely, “helping other people find their happiness will lead to you finding yours” or “don’t allow ‘élites’ to divide you against one another.” The vehicles for these tales are anonymous students of unspecified ages, attending anonymous schools in unnamed locations and being taught by brilliant, but anonymous, teachers. Generally, the teller of the tale claims secondhand knowledge of the event; either a child of a friend, or a friend of their child, learned the alleged lesson and reported back. (Which means that the poster should know some, if not all, of the absent details.) While vaguely uplifting, these stories are often dubious on their face, something obscured by the lack of detail. It takes an awful lot of balloons to ensure that no-one is capable of finding the one that belongs to them in under five minutes. And the initial student behavior, the thing that sets up the lesson of the story, is often itself suspicious. Because let’s be real: there’s always that one student (if not those half-dozen students) in any classroom who have such a bold, decorative and unique way of writing their name on large objects that its recognizable from low Earth orbit. It’s unreasonable to presume that none of the students suspected that there was a scavenger hunt in the offing. And oddities in the way the alleged teacher behaves are also glossed over. Setting up a situation in which a failure to determine which students the teacher has secretly assigned the role of “witch” results in a “failing grade?” When there are no clues other than what students might drag out of one another by interrogation? Not likely, even as a lesson in unity.

And again, there is a subgenre of these stories; the wise adult (usually dying of age or disease) who imparts a powerful life lesson, like finding one’s “true worth” by sending a clueless adolescent on a quest to find a buyer for a watch, book or classic car by speaking to a series of conveniently-available acquaintances of the adult, rather than just entering the details into a search engine. This, of course, is likely because the stories pre-date the internet, even if the valuable item in question is updated to something that would be understood to be prized by modern collectors, rather than those of the past century.

I have a theory about these stories, and it is, I will admit, a somewhat uncharitable take on American culture. People attribute wisdom based on the understanding that a person is already wise, and simple lessons are best directly delivered to simple minds. The idea that valuable insights can come from ordinary people, or that adults can benefit from simple statements without being simple-minded, seems to meet with resistance.

Take the balloon story. I know that making other people happy makes me happy is very true for me. Encountering a person on the street for whom I can do a good turn literally brightens my mood for the rest of the day. And I doubt that I’m the only person this is true for. So why not just tell one’s own story of making someone happy and then feeling good about having done so? And I’ll admit to being part of the problem, to a degree. I don’t normally tell stories about myself; I find my life to be dull and uninteresting. So I can’t image that people would find value in hearing about the time that I brightened an admin’s day with the simple gift of a set of colored pencils. But clearly there’s something there, the number of “likes” that the balloon story garners on LinkedIn (which I presume is part of the reason it recurs so often) speaks to that. And I’ve found things I’ve considered deeply wise in all sorts of banal places.

Sometimes, I think, people aren’t really the problem. The stories people tell themselves about other people are the problem. And this includes me. I’ve admitted to an uncharitable take on American culture. Because the uncharitable take, that Americans are unwilling or unable to see one another’s life experiences as sources of wisdom, speaks to me. It becomes a tidy explanation of an observed phenomenon. But that’s different from it actually being true. Despite the joy I find in bringing joy to other people, I’m still a cynic at heart; someone who believes in the idealism of other people only when all of the other explanations have been exhausted. Perhaps it’s time that I devoted more of myself to being the change I want to see in the world.