Quote:
Originally Posted by jocampo
And let's face it ... if you are John Doe, you will never be treated the same as if your name is Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates. If someone can't deal with it, well... sorry ... do something more important or creative with your life so you can also be recognized at that level too.
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Or we can choose role models who were prepared for obscurity even as the quality of their work left no option after their deaths but artistic immortality.
Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Charles Ives and Gerard Manley Hopkins are all examples of people who gave themselves to creative work exhaustively -- all the while
knowing that obscurity and even social denigration were the likely result.
They have one trait in common with Jobs: Their artistic ideal was more important to them than social standing, health and other human concerns. The difference was that they were unconcerned about their
own social standing and health, not other people’s.
As someone who's spent a fair amount of his studio career around rock stars, I can tell you that the kind ones are memorable, but the indifferent and occasionally cruel ones are typical.
We'd love to believe that the powerful are considerate of others and grateful for the advantages they enjoy. Rarely have I found that to be the case. That Jobs was often neither is more indicative of the temptations of his position than his idiosyncrasies as a man.
Would society be more humane if conduct and not financial success were its measure of individual worth? It’s a fun idea, but I have zero faith that human beings would accept such a system without
undermining its fairness systematically, as they have in virtually every instance in which a government has tried to impose a sense of collective conscience.