2018 Word of the Year

 Posted on July 07, 2019 in Uncategorized

A reader was kind enough to remind me, six months ago, that I hadn't written about 2018's Word of the Year yet.

To remind you: every year (since 2017) I've chosen a Word of the Year instead of making a resolution. I got the idea from my hypnosis teacher, Mike Mandel.

2017's WOTY was attention. And 2019's WOTY, which I haven't announced here yet (though I'd broadcast it on Twitter) is lead-as in "to lead," though the noun would probably work too.

2018's WOTY was not really one to broadcast. I'm still not sure I want to share it (which may be a reason it's taken me six months to respond to the reader's reminder): humility.

I have been called arrogant more than once by people whose opinions matter, and I wanted to spend 2018 looking at that aspect of myself.

I didn't do a very good job of it. I'm not very good at humility. Or maybe I'm wrong.

Humility is not the same as modesty. I recognize that I have gifts. If I pretended that I did not have them or recognize them, that would be a falsehood. What's more, it would be an arrogant falsehood, ascribing more importance to my own pretense than to the truth.

Nor is humility the same as humiliation. Humility is not allowing others to put themselves above or ahead of you.

An antonym of humility is arrogance, from arrogare, "to claim for oneself, assume" to me implies a false claim, an undeserved assumption, a pretense. Another falshehood.

I don't accept "arrogance" as a synonym for "self-confidence." If I accurately recognize my gifts (based, for example, on the world's reactions to me) that doesn't make me arrogant.

If I claimed that my gifts were not gifts, but that I was ultimately responsible for the obtaining of them, that would be arrogant. Or if I thought those gifts make me better than other people, or made me deserve more than other people, that would make me arrogant.

I am a hard determinist. Everything that will happen was determined at the instant of creation. This is not to say that any of it is predictable-a computer capable of predicting what will happen in the next instant would have to be at least as complex as the system that it was modeling, which is the Universe. But it is to say everything I am and do is ultimately attributable to my genes and upbringing, which I ultimately did not choose.

Contrast that with fundamental attribution error, which attributes to fortune one's own failures and others' successes, and attributes to character others' failures and one's own successes.

In my view, character is itself fortune.

All men are not created equal. I've been luckier than most. (And if you can bring yourself to zoom out far enough, so have you.) My good fortune doesn't make me superior, because I didn't ultimately choose it. I say "ultimately," because I have made some good choices, but those decisions were ultimately determined by the circumstances of my birth and early upbringing.

What my good fortune does make me is obligated to help those less fortunate. (Why? Heck if I know. This feeling of obligation is somehow on the same strands of genetic and memetic material as the good fortune I've been the beneficiary of. Many good things have come to me from helping those less fortunate.)

Which brings us back around to the WOTY at issue.

If I am going to live a life of humility, it's not going to be pretending to be something I'm not or concealing what I am, for good or bad. It's going to be using my talents to serve my fellow humans in need, and to bedevil those who would exploit them.