Posts Tagged: Lake Wobegone

“Everyone Above Average?”

On August 11, 2024 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

“Eccl. 4:4 ¶ Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.”

“. . . “where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average” (Garrison Keillor’s tagline for his Lake Wobegone “news” monologs).

My wife and I like to do online trivia quizzes. Well, “like” may be a bit of exaggeration. We like doing the quizzes when they don’t ask questions that are too hard. (Come on now! Who knows or cares who Warren G. Harding’s secretary of defense was?)

And then, there is the matter of the scores we get on these quizzes. We usually get somewhere in the 70% range. If we only get 50%, we are not happy. And if we get below 50%? You don’t want to be around us at those moments!

I was listening to an episode of “Hidden Brain” that deals with the science of humility the other day. The guest on the program was a teacher who frequently asked his students to rate themselves in terms of their humility. Were they humbler than most folks? Almost always, they were more humble than 70% of the general population.

Can anyone say, “blind spot!”?

Perhaps the problem isn’t where we are on the scale of humility or any other scale. Maybe the problem is that we have these scales at all. We all know different things. Some of them are trivial. Some of them are important. Perhaps the world would be a better, saner, more peaceful place if we quit comparing ourselves to one another and started pooling our knowledge, instead of mourning our ignorance. We could be extraordinary together.

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