The Best Myth – Why Bestness Is the Death of Excellence (Part 1)
- Brainz Magazine
- Sep 18
- 11 min read
Updated: Oct 2
Fabio da Silva Fernandes knows what it's like to stumble. In 2021, he left his long career in the fintech industry to start his own wellness practice focused on mindfulness and Reiki, and now he explores the complex topic of resilience on his inspiring podcast called The Stumbling Spirit.
By virtue of being neighbours to the United States, Canadians, like myself, tend to consume a lot of American media content. As a consequence, it’s not unusual for me to hear American TV personalities, pundits, and politicians proclaim that the United States is “the best country in the world.” Although less frequent, Canadian politicians use similar rhetoric, especially around election time, to describe Canada. I’m sure this tactic of ingratiating the public is something that happens in other nations as well.
More broadly, we see this kind of bestness language and attitude used in politics, entertainment, sports, and business. In our society, bestness is often determined by contest, competition, popularity, and power, but not always based on truth or merit. What if I told you that bestness is a myth and it’s the Achilles heel of excellence? This is such a layered and complex topic that I need to break up this article into three parts (and I still won’t be able to entirely unpack it). However, I will highlight examples and show how bestness limits and sometimes oppresses us. I will also draw a direct link between excellence and resilience itself. This is Part 1 of 3.
Myths we create
When it comes to myths, what might immediately come to mind are ancient Greek stories of all-powerful gods and goddesses who command the elements, commune with and rule over mortals, and impose severe punishments for sins and transgressions. Myths are creative allegories that contain supernatural archetypes and themes to explain human nature, the cosmos, extreme weather, and cataclysmic events.
According to Oxford Languages, a myth also means “a widely held but false belief or idea, e.g., a misrepresentation of the truth, an exaggerated or idealized conception of a person or thing.”
In this digital age, one kind of bestness is driven by the number of likes, followers, and subscribers people have on social media. With platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, we each have our own profiles, handles, and channels to showcase the “best” sides of ourselves, and perhaps overshare our personal lives. Nowadays, there seems to be a filter on everything. For example, concertgoers now watch live performances through the screens of their smartphones, arms in the air, trying to record the “best” snippets to post on social media.
Although there are benefits to using social media, such as keeping in touch with friends and family, building a professional network, and increasing business brand awareness, it can also be extremely addictive and distracting. Furthermore, the continual need for attention and validation can fuel people’s craving for instant celebrity to become the “best.”
Reality check
Since the early 2000s, the success of reality TV shows like Big Brother, Survivor, The Bachelor, and Simon Cowell’s juggernaut talent shows, American Idol and X Factor, has changed the definition of celebrity to include the everyday person, sometimes at the expense of their reputation and mental health. These programs represent the colosseum of today, and the jeering crowds get to vote for their favourite gladiators and shame those they deem unworthy. This includes the commenters on social media who add further humiliation to those “losers” who are defeated in the arena. And we spectators thirst for more blood and find defeat just as entertaining as cheering for the underdog.
Full disclosure. I enjoy my fair share of reality TV shows that typically relate to love (i.e., Netflix’s Love Is Blind), food (i.e., the successful MasterChef franchise), and a dash of Real Housewives.
One can argue that the current U.S. President capitalized on his celebrity with his widely popular show, The Apprentice.
On Season 1 of my podcast, Story Editor Mark Peacock broke down how reality TV works, saying, “they come up with a situation, a premise. We’ll use Amazing Race [Canada] because that’s what I’m working on right now. As a story editor for reality TV, I watch all the footage and then I create a script on what I see and what I hear. Everything on The Amazing Race is real, but the game that they’re in is constructed. Production creates the premise for people, let’s call it the arena that they’re operating in, and everything that those people do within those parameters is real. Everything they say is real. Our job in post-production is just to tell a coherent story based on what we’re hearing, and then choose how to piece this show together based on what is emerging naturally in the show. What they say is not manipulated or altered. It’s cleaned up, but their reaction to something is always the truth.”
Of course, there is one reality TV barrier that no cast member is allowed to cross, which is “breaking the fourth wall.” According to the online publication Backstage, this means acknowledging the camera, production, and the viewing audience. In other words, engaging with the reality outside of reality. Think The Truman Show.
The talent shows are particularly interesting because what was once judged as the “best” five or ten years ago might be considered mediocre today. Now more than ever, we are in constant search of the next big act and viral moment, which for some, after a couple of days on TikTok, might seem like a flash in the pan and a distant memory. There appears to be an acceleration in our collective attention deficit and our lack of sustained interest, driven by the rapid pace of technological advancement and the very nature of social networking tools. Dating apps, for example, have become a game of perpetual swiping for the “next shiny object” rather than finding a real connection. Also, in this world of dating gamification, we have become so quick to discard people in search of the “best.”
But even outside of the realm of reality TV, there are contests within the traditional entertainment industry that sometimes favour bestness over excellence. Take the Academy Awards as an example. The Oscars is a popularity contest based on votes from Academy members. On the surface, it would seem a privilege to be considered for a prize by peers in your field of expertise. However, as reported by ABC News, some industry insiders, like film and TV producer Joe Pichirallo, argue that the Oscars have become political because of campaigning and lobbying by the big Hollywood studios.
In other words, Academy members might be influenced to vote for someone put forward as the “best” in a given category, but that individual might not necessarily be the most deserving. It’s possible that this form of lobbying might exclude artists who excel in their respective categories in favour of others with the right backing. I’m not suggesting that this always happens. I expect that the Academy gets it right most of the time.
Bloody censor
According to Oxford Languages, best is defined as “of the most excellent, effective, or desirable type or quality.” However, there is always someone or some group who sets the rules of bestness, and as Google points out, it’s “used to identify the top-tier item or person within a group.” And, as of the mid-1800s, best also denotes “to get the better of, outdo, surpass,” as per Etymonline.
Throughout history, there have been many artists, scientists, and philosophers who excelled at their craft and vocation with little or no regard for fame. They were just as passionate about their work and shared it as an offering to humanity and the world. In fact, many of these people were disregarded in their lifetimes only to be recognized posthumously for their brilliance, such as Vincent van Gogh, Franz Kafka, and Galileo Galilei.
In the 17th century, Galileo was investigated and prosecuted by the Inquisition for his scientific theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun. To the Holy See, this was viewed as heretical because the Catholic Church’s version of cosmology placed the Earth at the centre of the universe. After all, who was Galileo to question the position of the Catholic Church, which viewed itself as the “best”?
Rome attempted to muzzle Galileo and suppress his work to no avail. His scientific papers were smuggled to the Netherlands where they were published widely. However, Galileo spent the remainder of his days under house arrest until he died.
Sanctioned by the Catholic Church, Inquisitors were secret police who collected accusations from the public about suspected heretics and held secret tribunals for those charged, who, unfortunately, had no right to legal representation.
Regardless of whether it was the Medieval, Roman, Spanish, or Portuguese Inquisition, they all favoured one ideology and group. Everything else was heresy.
The Catholic Church sought control over everyone in its reach, and it targeted intellectuals, scientists, and followers of other sects and faiths, such as Protestants, Jews, and Muslims. Even nuns and priests within their own ranks who held points of view deviating from official church doctrine came under attack, such as Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, both of whom were persecuted throughout their lifetimes and are now venerated saints. It’s important to note that both of their families were Conversos, meaning they had converted from Judaism to Catholicism (likely to conform, under duress, to what was viewed by the church as “best”).
The Inquisition was brutal. It led to coercion, censorship, forced conversions, exile, seizure of property, torture, death, and mass killings that spread throughout Europe and across the Atlantic to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas (Spain and Portugal being two of a handful of European nations competing against one another to conquer and colonize the “New World” and expand their global power and dominance to become the “best”).
Similar tactics were used by the Nazis in the lead-up to World War II. In fact, Franz Kafka’s writings were censored by the Nazis, and although Vincent van Gogh had long since died in 1890, his paintings were considered “degenerate art” by the Third Reich in the 1930s.
Wikipedia explains that “degenerate art” referred to art that was an “insult to German feeling,” which meant anything “un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included dismissal from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art.”
Under the Nazis, anything Aryan and German was considered the “best.”
The Nazis also went after Queers. In fact, one of the many book burnings that took place in Nazi Germany targeted the Institute for Sexual Science, established by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who provided gender-affirming care to Trans people and was a staunch LGBTQ+ advocate. As per Wikipedia, in 1933, “Less than four months after the Nazis took power, Hirschfeld’s Institute was sacked. On the morning of 6 May, a group of university students stormed the institution and began to beat up its staff and smash up the premises. In the afternoon, the SA (Sturmabteilung or ‘Storm Troopers’) came to the institute, removing all volumes from the library and storing them for a book-burning event which was to be held four days later.”
Book burnings were an extreme form of censorship used by the Nazis, which had also been leveraged by the Spanish Inquisition.
Fuelled by anti-Semitism and hate, the Gestapo, like the Inquisition, was a secret police set up by the Nazis that relied on informants from the public to report on “un-German” people and activities, primarily targeting Jews, but also Queers and Romanies, among others. Ultimately, countless millions were killed in concentration camps in one of the worst atrocities in human history, the Holocaust.
The end of World War II ushered in the arms race between the U.S. and Russia, where they engaged in a decades-long stare-down of nuclear warheads pointed towards each other in what was termed “The Cold War.” It literally was a “best” bomb contest.
It also pitted democracy against communism, and vice versa.
In the late 1940s and throughout the ’50s, the paranoia of communism infiltrating life and politics in the United States led to McCarthyism (named after U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was the mastermind behind this intimidation and humiliation program).
McCarthyism used Inquisition and Gestapo tactics to arrest and try suspected communists and anyone else who didn’t fit into the all-American “best” mold, including homosexuals. The accusations, blacklists, and persecution had far-reaching impacts, including job loss, ruined reputations, and people taking their own lives. Sadly, this crackdown on perceived dissidents was not only implemented in the United States but abroad.
This is what the well-deserved Oscar-winning film I’m Still Here/Ainda Estou Aqui is all about, the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Brazil in 1964, which led to the kidnapping, torture, and murder of its own people in the 1970s. Writers and artists were censored, some fled into exile. Others left Brazil in search of a better life.
It can be argued that similar tactics are being used today by the U.S. and countries around the world.
The Globe and Mail reports that this year alone, roughly 150 Canadians have been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the majority of whom (70%) have a criminal record or pending charges. That is double the number from the previous year. In June, one such Canadian, who was a legal U.S. resident, died while in custody in Florida. Equally disturbing, two Canadian toddlers from separate families, under four years old, were held in ICE detention for weeks at a time, one of them for over 51 days. There are several allegations of mistreatment at these detention centres, some of which are privately run.
To some Americans, using such measures might seem necessary to crack down on illegal migrants, especially those who commit serious crimes. However, the CBC reports that most detainees in ICE custody don’t have any criminal records and states that, “Research has consistently found that immigrants are not driving violent crime in the U.S. and that they actually commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.”
As per NPR and BBC, ICE is also targeting asylum seekers, migrant workers, student activists, and even tourists (many of whom are People of Colour).
Eerily similar to the methods employed by the Inquisition and Gestapo, ICE is raiding workplaces, schools, and churches to round up and arrest their prime targets.
Besides the ethics and morality of these ICE raids and forcible detentions, there is also a question of abuse of power. The National Immigration Justice Center has written a brief on the “Inhumane Conditions and Alarming Expansion” of ICE, which includes solitary confinement, medical neglect, racist treatment, and preventable deaths.
Apart from ICE, there is an alarming rise in censorship of literature in America and across the globe, as per PEN International and PEN America (affiliated organizations whose mission is to celebrate literature and protect freedom of expression).
In the United States, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has 67 bans against it, and in Alberta, Canada, the very same book has been removed from school shelves in Edmonton, along with 225 other books, due to new provincial rules. The CBC reports that the reason is to prevent students from reading any content that contains sexual subject matter.
The Walrus says that book bans and censorship are on the rise in Canada, and like the U.S., they disproportionately target titles with racial and LGBTQ+ themes, essentially books related to diversity of people and thought.
It is a cruel irony that one of Kafka’s novels that was banned by the Nazis in the 1930s, is about a man who is arrested by police on unknown charges, tried in court with no verdict, and ultimately executed. It’s called The Trial.
Related article: The Best Myth – Why Bestness Is the Death of Excellence (Part 2)
Related article: The Best Myth – Why Bestness Is the Death of Excellence (Part 3)
To learn more, book me for a talk and consultation today. To listen to The Stumbling Spirit Podcast, click here or find it on your favourite podcast streaming platform.
Read more from Fabio da Silva Fernandes
Fabio da Silva Fernandes, Resilience, Mindfulness, and Reiki Enthusiast
For most of his professional career, Fabio da Silva Fernandes worked in the tech industry as a customer support leader. About a decade ago, Fabio began his mindfulness journey, incorporating the practice of presence into his life on a regular basis. In his pursuit of personal wellness, Fabio attained several mindfulness certifications and, in 2018, delved into the world of energy work and started his Reiki training. Fabio is now a certified Reiki Master and Reiki Master Teacher. In 2021, Fabio left his career in fintech to launch his own wellness business called Resting Bell Wellness Inc., which is now branded under the name of his resilience podcast, The Stumbling Spirit.
