As a teenager, I remember on Saturday nights staying up to watch MAD TV, a comedy show. One of its funnier recurring clips was a spoof on dating services called “Lower Expectations,” which featured personal videos from less than desirable singles attempting to woo the members of the opposite sex that were themselves desperate enough to settle. Admittedly, one of the pleasures of making fun of such people is the knowledge that everyone in the audience would see themselves as more desirable than those people (this is true even of me). Nonetheless, there is a savvy in lowering expectations that is not always evident, just as there is a great danger in increasing expectations beyond reason.
Being a somewhat intelligent blond fellow myself, I am often bothered by the ways in which famous blond women (I have in mind here women like Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton) have often sold their intelligence short and appeared to be immensely vapid and brainless when in reality they were at least a bit more intelligent than average, through taking advantage of the space between the intelligence that was assumed by others and the genuine intelligence that these women did possess. I personally consider it immensely foolish to underestimate other people in general, and also consider it a shabby trick to pretend incompetence to take advantage of the arrogance of others that results from misjudging someone’s true ability because of skillful image management. I do not think anyone would ever accuse most blond starlets of being Mensa members, but at the same time they are capable and intelligent, and ruthlessly ambitious women, and there ought to be some respect both for their ambitions as well as for their competence, without the need for such women to pretend to be less intelligent than they are to seem relatable.
It is not only the sort of insults about intelligence about being blond that bother me, but the fact that people in some parts of the United States (and no doubt this is true of other nations as well) think of others as losing a few hundred IQ points simply because of the places they happen to be from. I find it immensely offensive when people think that posting a youtube link of the “Dueling Banjos” scene from Deliverance counts as an intellectual refutation of my own arguments, as if I could help being raised in the rural Southern United States, proud Appalachian-born Yankee man that I am. When people view hair color and place of upbringing as signs of intelligence (or the lack thereof), than a genuine knowledge and respect of others is impossible. In such an environment, some people might be surprised if I can speak coherently, meaning they are clearly not prepared to handle the content of my communications with any degree of sophistication or appreciation.
Nor is it only in my own personal life that I find the issue of excessively low or high expectations to be problematic. It has long struck me as rather perverse that marriages should be much better lasting in the past than in the present. Part of this, no doubt, has to do with the fact that the options were far worse for women, leading people to put up with what would be unacceptable now because the other choices were even less pleasant. But in addition to this, a lot of our problems today have to do with expectations. If we expect and demand perfection, we are likely to be immensely bothered by what is good. If our expectations were more realistic, and if we demanded more from ourselves and less from others, we would be better equipped to handle the inevitable disappointments in our friends, family, and spouses, when they failed to meet up with our unrealistic images of them, whether that image was unrealistically perfect or unrealistically poor.
And in politics too, the issue of expectations is a critical one. All too often we see our allies and our enemies through crude caricatures that seem to demonize our opponents and to present our chosen side as being the only hope of our republic (again, this process seems present for more countries than the United States, but I speak most accurately about those situations I know the best). Politicians regularly seek to alternatively lower and raise expectations to achieve victory, and then are unable (inevitably) to deliver the goods that they promised, in large part because they are only a very small part (and usually a negative one) of the success that people foolishly trust them to enable and promote. Some people keep a low profile to avoid presenting themselves to be a target, others try to present themselves as a messianic hope–and in both occasions the people are generally poorly served by both, who tend to serve their own interests more than the interests of the people as a whole.
And there are other results of this focus on image management that are easy to recognize and hard to deal with. The result of cynical management of expectations tends to be a cynicism and a lack of trust on the part of those people who are manipulated, and that trust, once lost, is extremely difficult to regain. Despite a widespread recognition of the seriousness of our times, we lack the ability to recognize and appreciate virtue in others because we have spent so much time trying to read the coded language and see beneath the stage presentation of others. As a result simple and honest and unadorned virtue goes unappreciated, whether it is to be found in people or institutions, simply because we struggle so deeply with mistrust. It is hard to see how we can recover from this without some drastic changes in ourselves, and in our expectations from others.
