Anyway, I was young. I was in the social group run by my church where you play games and memorize things and earned batches and little stars or jewels to go on those badges. Each badge represented one whole book in which you had memorized every Passage. And each Jewel represented a section of that book. Generally speaking, most people completed around one book a year oh, and when you tagged completed that level of the group and moved on to the next level you presumably had finished all three books. One of my friends have been doing the program for the last two years, and when I arrived he was already part way done with the third book when the year began. As for myself, I was starting from the beginning. Luckily, I was unusually good at memorizing things, and I used that skill to advance quickly. In fact I decided that I would try to finish all three books in a single year. I managed to finish the first book and the second book and even got a long way through the third book before we reached the end of the year. I didn’t quite reach my goal, but I knew that I had done something no one had ever done.

So, when the end of the Year awards ceremony arrived and they were handing out the awards, I fully expected to receive one, since I had set a record for progressing through the material. In particular I was expecting to receive the award for “most accomplished.” because I had literally accomplished the most, not just among my peers, but of anyone ever in that grade level.

But when the awards were handed out, my best friend got that award, because he had finished the third book. He had gotten farther than anyone in our level. I was deeply disappointed. any theater with my reaction my instinctive thought was “Well, I’m never going to bother doing something like that again.” The moment I realized that I could make that effort and do all that work and not even get recognized for it, I decided that it wasn’t really worth doing. And I very quickly generalized it to a lesson abiut life in general. There’s no point in putting any exceptional effort into anything if you aren’t going to be able to be recognized for it or enjoy the rewards for it. Better to not bother striving and just do enough to get by.

Now, I know that that was the wrong lesson to learn. That’s not my point. Obviously that was a terrible lesson to take from that experience. But look how easy and obvious and instinctual it was for me to draw that response! I was a high performer in life. I had parents who had high expectations for me because they knew what I was capable of. And I immediately drew the conclusion in that situation. If that’s the conclusion a fairly principled, high performer takes from that kind of situation, what kind of lesson might less principled people take from similar situations? Why do your best if all results will be averaged? Why strive to be top of the class if it won’t mean anything or even be seen?

To some degree, the problem with all political theory is that we have to work with people as they actually are, not how we wish they were. And if even your best people aren’t good enough to thrive in a given system, if it fundamentally disincentivizes them from being their best, then just maybe there’s an unrecognized problem with the system. Maybe, given time, you could make people better and then the system would work. But that’s a pretty big if, whereas the obvious immediate evidence is that people as they are and are the system as it is produces some very undesirable outcomes. Maybe those outcomes are something we can accept, maybe that’s the price we all pay for equality. Being less than we could. Or maybe that loss harms everyone enough to require taking another look at the system.