I’m gonna live forever.
I’m gonna learn how to fly – high!
I feel it comin’ together.
People will see me and die. Fame!

I’m gonna make it to Heaven.
Light up the sky like a flame; fame!
I’m gonna live forever.
Baby, remember my name.
– From the musical Fame

I hope to persuade you that the seemingly frivolous title question holds a secret with the power to reshape human relations. That a wish for fame belies the existence of a crippling, undiagnosed malady, one rather like malnutrition, except that it’s a disease of the self, not the body. Let me explain.

In a world that sees people as Somebodies and Nobodies, indignities abound. The primary source of man-made indignity is rankism. By analogy with racism and sexism, rankism is defined as what somebodies do to nobodies. To be sure, not all somebodies abuse their power advantage. We’ve all known somebodies who are devoted to serving others and wouldn’t think of abusing their rank, just as prior to the civil rights and women’s movements there were whites who weren’t racist and men who weren’t sexist. On the other hand, most of us, even quasi-somebodies, have gotten a taste of the indignities routinely visited upon those taken for nobodies.

Rankism is now appearing on the radar screen. To do so, it needed a name, and at last it has one. (If it’s new to you, google “rankism” and see where the meme is taking hold.) But, many victims of rankism are still in the position of women before the word “sexism” elbowed its way into the language. Rankism’s victims know that the indignities to which they are subjected are unjustified, but as yet they have few tools with which to resist their tormentors.

So long as rank-based abuse is regarded as business-as-usual, humiliation and indignity will remain unchecked. There are two ways to deal with this. We can either follow the example of identity politics and de-legitimize rankism (as the civil rights and women’s movements have de-legitimized racism and sexism, and as the gay and disability movements are doing to overcome homophobia and ableism). Or, we can attempt to acquire enough power to place ourselves squarely in the Somebody camp and so enjoy the relative security that status provides in a society saturated with rankism. Everyone knows that it’s imprudent to indignify a somebody. Who hasn’t fantasized getting even with those who put us down when we were vulnerable by shoving our Oscar, Emmy, MVP award, Pulitzer, Nobel, or simply our promotion, in their faces? Accrue enough fame in life and you may even attain immortality and, in the words of the song, “live forever.”

It should be noted that avoiding rankism by seeking status and fame is the same strategem employed by victims of identity groups who sought to blend into the dominant group. Passing as a somebody is like passing as a white or a straight. Until we can dismantle rankism, this is an understandable recourse for sidestepping its cruel injustice.

Dignity assures belonging. It’s more than respect or courtesy. To live in dignity affirms, nurtures, and protects. Dignity is the social counterpart of interpersonal love. In the West Side Story ballad Somewhere, when the lovers sing “There’s a place for us,” they are claiming a right to the dignity of inclusion. Contrariwise, in her famous “nobody” poem, Emily Dickinson captures the indignity of exclusion:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
The there’s a pair of us—don’t tell.
They’d banish us, you know.

Nobodies are marginalized to the point of invisibility. Since humans are social creatures, banishment carries a threat of being deprived of social and material resources critical to health and happiness, and sometimes to survival itself. No wonder we’re so sensitive to indignity. It poses an existential threat.

Fame promises an escape from whatever ghetto we’re in, real or imagined. It deters detractors and may even squeeze a few crumbs of recognition from those who have begrudged us a smile while we were clawing our way out of Nobodyland. It’s no coincidence that Oscar-winners enjoy better health and longer lives than runners-up.

Like liberty, we’re often unaware of dignity until we lose it. A hint of disrespect may be a test of our resistance to subservience, or a reminder of our place in the hierarchy. A slight is often a precursor to pigeon-holing us as a nobody.

When strangers ply us with questions like “And you are?”, “Who are you with?”, or “Where did you go to school?” they are likely sizing up our power as belied by our affiliations.

The more recognition we can amass, the less likely it is that anyone will dare to nobody us. Fame is a bulwark against indignity. It proclaims our worth to anyone tempted to put us down and threatens retaliation if they persist. It even helps to quiet the critical voices we have internalized—of parents, classmates, and teachers—that echo in our heads long after these naysayers are gone.

The Miasma of Malrecognition

But alas, as everyone knows, there is not much room on the Red Carpet. Acquiring fame is like winning the lottery: many are called; few are chosen.

What then can we do until the dignity movement has garnered the support to put rankism in the doghouse with the other ignoble isms? Fortunately, there is an antidote to indignity more accessible than fame. It is called recognition. We gain recognition through the contributions we make to others and from their acknowledgment. These contributions need not be Oscar-worthy to gain us the dignity we need to thrive. In fact, they can be quite humble in conventional terms. But they must be accurately understood and acknowledged by all involved.

Genuine recognition must be differentiated from both false and inflated praise. The self-esteem movement fell into disrepute because the respect it offered was often disingenuous and exaggerated. What is required instead is a precise understanding and appreciation of each person’s role, and the contributions he or she makes to others. These contributions can be anything into which time, effort, and care have been put—a home, a theory, a dance, a business, a garden, a pie, a blog, any job well done.

Children sense insincerity in exaggerated praise, and soon learn to discount it. The extreme adulation visited upon celebrities and superstars can be deadly. Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Di, and Michael Jackson were first lionized and then destroyed by their responses to celebrity. The situation is reminiscent of the grotesque distortion that ordinary bees impose on their queen by force-feeding her royal jelly.

Recognition is to the self what food is to the body. And like food, too little or too much can be harmful. We must understand the effects on those who suffer from either a deficit or a surfeit of recognition and take steps to avoid malrecognition, much as we now guard against malnutrition. Seeking fame to preempt indignity and heal the wounds of malrecognition is like overeating to protect against malnutrition.

Rankism and its counterpart—the miasma of malrecognition—lie at the source of much of the social dysfunction that now vexes human societies worldwide. Effective policies to overcome school failure, poverty, chronic disease, criminality, discrimination against women, terrorism, and war require a redistribution of recognition and the de-legitimization of rankism.

In a subsequent post, I will describe a dignitarian society, one in which rankism has lost its bite, dignity is secure, and, although some people are better known than others, we seek salvation not via the vain pursuit of fame, but through service.

If I loved you,
Words wouldn’t come in an easy way—
Round in circles I’d go!
Longing to tell you …
How I loved you—
If I loved you.
– Carousel, Rodgers & Hammerstein

When we fall in love, we don’t know our beloved. She’s a mystery. We’re constantly looking for her—in our mind, on the street. We contrive “chance” encounters. When we meet, we’re jumpy and off-balance.

We want to gaze upon our beloved, inhale her aroma, absorb her essence. Everything we behold is suffused with love. The world is new.

Why do we love? To complete ourselves. To give us purpose. To know our quest. To bring us home. To accept ourselves. “You’re nobody till somebody loves you.”

In adolescence, as we struggle to put together a viable self, our basic guide is love—love for ideas, art, cultures, but above all, love for particular individuals. Love, while it sometimes leads to folly, is nonetheless the best catalyst there is for defining ourselves and identifying our task. As Charles Baudelaire said, “Nature, whether in cookery or in love, rarely gives us a taste for what is bad for us.”

Young love is fanciful, fleeting, and fragile—in a word, romantic. As we come to know our lover, we lose a piece of our innocence. Once love has been acknowledged and returned, it either evolves or turns into memorabilia. Memories aren’t experience, whereas love must be experienced or it’s just habit. Disappointed, we may conclude that love has not lasted. But, in truth, it has as many lives as a cat.

As routine displaces novelty, we may be tempted to shift our attention to someone new and taste again the thrill of romantic love. This is the point of no return. As the mystery that fuels romantic love is dispelled, we either move on or get serious.

If we follow its lead into deeper waters, love morphs into something with the potential to remake us. This is the love of familiar, committed partners, variously known as conjugal, married, or spousal love. Marriage is love’s crucible—it has the tensile strength to contain the heat of self-transformation.

Here, we know our partner. There’s neither the mystery nor the uncertainty to stoke fevered romance. In fact, relationships between mortals invariably include conflict as well as canoodling. But we do not abandon our partner or abort the process just because our ego takes a hit. The bonds of marriage bring us back to try and try again. In “sparring” with our partners, we root out the false in each other and grow.

In a long-running, committed relationship, we love our partners because they love us in spite of the fact that they may hate something about us (often the very same things that bother us about ourselves). A love strong enough to incorporate criticism continually renews its lease on life. As we respond to our partner, a subtly altered person steps into our shoes. Instead of settling into habit, the relationship is recharged by the advent of changed partners.

Sometimes the business of love completes itself for one or both partners. Two people may either hit an impasse or, for reasons they may only dimly surmise, cease to support one another’s continued development.

At moments like these it will seem that love has indeed ended, that the relationship is beyond hope. The point of the sword is hard to find, and having found it, it’s a mistake to wriggle off before getting as clear as you possibly can as to why you’re doing so. Achieving a blameless understanding of a break-up may take years, but it’s a high-return investment in the rest of your life. As we better understand how ex-partners served our development, they may come to feel like old friends.

During a long relationship, there are moments when we see our partners as we did at the outset—with beginner’s eyes. A certain smile, a fragrance, a toss of the head, a posture or gait, can make our hearts leap.

At the start, there was mystery: What does a smile mean? Will our love be returned? Now, we know. The smile holds not mystery but meaning: together, we go forward. The gaze of love holds not a question, but an answer: refreshed, love endures.

For years, poet William Butler Yeats famously courted Maude Gonne—in vain. As part of his suit, he wrote When You Are Old, in which he reproaches his beloved:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Yeats’s attempt to draw Maude Gonne to him by conjuring up a regretful old age for her was no more successful than are most self-serving admonitions. Yet it produced a diamond of unrequited love.

In Words, another poem written long after his failed suit, Yeats asks himself how it would have affected his life if his court had succeeded. By this time, he’d “come into [his] strength” as a poet, “and words obey[ed his] call” (though Maude Gonne did not):

That had she done so who can say
What would have shaken from the sieve?
I might have thrown poor words away
And been content to live.

When life won’t oblige us, we too can draw inspiration from those who refuse our call and crush our hopes. No suitor wants to admit it, but those who don’t return our love often give us something as valuable as those who do. Like Yeats, novelist Henry James saw an upside in the failure of love, remarking stoically that he’d had to “give up life to be conscious of it.”

We tend to discount our unrequited loves. But not having our way with someone is often as important to the narrative of our lives as the outcome we so ardently desire. The next time you raise a glass to love, consider a silent toast to love unrequited.

Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.
– Tennessee Williams

This question comes from an old friend in response to Quests and Questions—A Path to Your Self. When a Facebook friend said she was struggling with the same question, I decided to put off blogging on “Why do we procrastinate?” and grapple with this one instead.

If you have to stick with your job to pay the bills, then you may feel that asking this question of yourself is pointless. But it’s not. Rich or poor, young and old, we all dream of something different, something better, if only when we gaze at the stars. And, regardless of our lot in life, we can give this perennial question a new answer—either by doing differently what we’ve been doing, or by pursuing something else on the side.

To those “nine to fivers” who feel stuck in their jobs, I want to say that what you’re doing with your life isn’t just what you’re being paid for. No matter how humdrum or even hateful your job, “what you’re doing” consists not only of the tangible product of your labor, but also of the effects you’re having on others as you go about your work and life.

The actual contribution made by people emptying bedpans is less the clean pans and more the dignity or indignity sown among those for whom they’re working. The indelible contribution of a teacher is less the knowledge she imparts than the confidence she builds in her students. What you give a child is not your time, but your self.

Even for those who love their work, a job has two aspects: what we do and how we do it. The “how” may trump the “what” and so displace it as a truer description of the impact your life is having on others. And, in the end, isn’t our effect on others the best measure of what we’re doing with our lives? A “nobody” janitor may spread wellbeing among his co-workers, while his “somebody” boss makes his subordinates ill.

If finances require you to put up with work you’d never choose of your own accord, you can nonetheless begin doing your job in a manner that endows your life with renewed purpose. We all know people who, while coping with personal hardship, bring out the best in everyone they touch.

Like many of the questions listed in Quests and Questions, this one benefits from tweaking. If you say to yourself, “Yipes! I probably have only twenty years left! I better get going and do something significant,” then you’ve raised the bar on yourself and made it all the harder to risk a new venture.

Every quest begins with a single step, and baby steps are wobbly. Moreover, we never know if we’ve got twenty or forty years, or ten minutes. It seems to take most of us about ten years to get good at anything, but typically we have a lot more time than that. Even at seventy, age is not a convincing excuse for standing pat, because when you stop growing you start dying.

So, let’s recast the question in age-independent form, and simply ask “What shall I do with my life?”

Where to look for the answer? How to identify your quest? I know of no better advice than that of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

Look back upon your life and ask: What up to now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and see how they form a ladder on which you have so far climbed up toward your true self.

In our formative years, we fancy ourselves doing this or that, but life may have led us to do neither. Later, in maturity, what draws our attention is usually something that has bid for it on previous occasions. Our early loves keep calling out to us: Don’t forget me, please don’t forget. Even when we’ve labeled a relationship a disaster, there is usually something about a spontaneous affinity that remains pertinent to our present predicament—if we could only locate the baby in the bathwater.

If we can but give our loves their due, they will guide and motivate us for a lifetime. This is not as easy and painless as it might sound, however, because becoming a novice and revisiting virgin terrain means dropping the pretense of being in control. This should not be surprising: a quest is not a quest if the end is known; a question’s not a question if the answer’s given.

We love certain things and people—books, ideas, films, music, art, characters in literature, and the special people in our lives—because they offer hints to realizing the dreams of our youth. Each of those dreams is a rung in the ladder of love on which we’ve climbed toward our self.

But the self towards which our loves lead does not pre-exist. Rather, we build it as we climb the ladder in pursuit of our quest. Step by step we forge a more integral identity, a more selfless self.

To figure out what to do with your life, take stock of your past enthusiams and passions. Line up the objects you’ve revered, the things and people you’ve loved, and then extrapolate love’s arrow. It won’t point to the end of your quest, but it may suggest your next step. Risk that step. Then another. Three steps and you won’t look back.

You can’t know where your quest will take you, but as you go forward, the bridge that connects your old and emergent selves will rise out of the mist, like a developing Polaroid, and come into sharp focus. Not only you, but others, too, will recognize and acknowledge your new vocation.

The price you have to pay for the vitality and joys of the questing life is uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes the certainty of multiple failures. As Samuel Beckett says, “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.” And then, fail better still, until, little by little, you come up with something you want to share with others. As it happens, that’s enough.

Quests and Questions—A Path to Your Self

Every other mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: “So? Did you learn anything today?” But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?”
– Isidore I. Rabi, (1900-88), Nobel-laureate in physics

The knights of the Round Table sought a quest and then lived it—to the ends of the Earth. Through their quests, Arthur’s knights forged their identities. Their quests inspire and guide us as we recapitulate in our own lives their character-building trials.

Today, quests come to us as questions. They begin as tiny discrepancies between our felt experience and the conventional wisdom and end only when we either abandon ourselves and join the prevailing consensus or we bring conventional thought into alignment with our personal truth.

Instead of slaying dragons, we pose and answer questions. Our questions can be personal, political, aesthetic, scientific—anything. A question lies at the heart of any troubling confusion in our life.

Identifying a heartfelt question and pursuing it with integrity is no less demanding than chivalric questing used to be—and no less transformative. Questioning something that others take for granted may isolate you. Some will take you for a nobody and drop you. But if you can survive lonely vigils, surmount criticism, and endure disrespect, then the pursuit of a question is a contemporary path to finding out who you are.

The first step in a modern-day identity quest is to stop brushing our questions aside and take them to heart. This means putting them into words, no matter how sophomoric, outrageous, or politically incorrect they may sound. Once you’ve got a crude first draft of your question, you can begin revising it until suddenly you realize you can’t rest till you’ve found an answer. Pursuing a question may still take you to the ends of the Earth. Rarely do earnest attempts to answer well-formulated questions not yield at least a taste of enlightenment.

The best gifts I’ve ever received have been questions I couldn’t shake off. Good questions are better than good answers, in this sense: they give us purpose, whereas a good answer stops our exploring and makes us a teacher. Catching a good question—and most questions come uninvited and whispered, not shouted—is a skill to be cultivated, as Izzy Rabi’s mother knew. Those who learn to notice and follow their questions, never get old. When I taught physics at Columbia, I knew Rabi. In his sixties, he was as playful as my own children. I ran into him at a conference a decade later and he announced, “Today I am three score and ten plus ten percent.” Do the math and you’ll see it was his way of letting me know it was his 77th birthday.

I’ve often find that my first “answer” to a question, though it may feel like a breakthrough, later ceases to satisfy. Revisions proliferate, and may even bring about a reformulation of the original question. Recast, it gets back under my skin. Also, it’s not unusual to have several questions in play at a time. Progress on one question often leads to progress on another. As the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, a familiar old identity morphs into a new one.

Answering questions may not seem as glamorous as slaying dragons, but it’s a mistake to think of pursuing questions as mere intellectual exercise. Every one of my questions had its origin in emotional turmoil, and, until I found an answer, sent me questing far and wide.

A key criterion that an answer has to meet before it satisfies is that it must explain behavior not judge it—no matter how bizarre or even repugnant the behavior may be. For example, damning laziness or lying or bullying or prejudice, illuminates nothing, but examining these behaviors for what they reveal about power relationships is revelatory and holds the promise of changing them.

The classic example of substituting righteous judgment for sober understanding was dismissing Hitler as an evil madman. Partisan ideologues continue to make the same mistake today. Vilification reinforces in people the very behaviors we would like to change. Humiliation only stokes revenge. Even subtle condescension comes round to bite.

What does work is dignity. What’s required for individual and social wellbeing is dignity for all. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That breathtakingly simple idea is what leapt out at me once I had answers to the apparently unrelated questions that I propose to share with you over the coming months.

I’ve already posted a few of these questions, and my personal answers:

• Why are we obsessed with sex?
• Why do we seek a partner?
• Why do we hate good-byes?
• What is the source of indignity?
• Who are the somebodies and nobodies?

In future, I’ll take up other questions that fueled quests, including:

• Who am I?
• What is intelligence?
• What is genius?
• What is enlightenment?
• What happens to us after we die?
• Are people the same the world over?
• Why are we fascinated by celebrities?
• Why are we drawn to mystery?
• Must love end?
• Why do we get bored?
• Why is it hard to admit we’re wrong?
• Why are we lazy? (Why do we procrastinate?)
• Why do we like to travel?
• Why do we want to be rich? famous?
• Why are we skeptical of do-gooders?
• Why do we lie? exaggerate? hate?
• Why do we use drugs?
• Why are we prejudiced?
• Why is there torture? rape?
• Is there a better game than war?
• Why is life hard?

Some of these questions are cuddly dog-sized dragons. Others are fire-breathing tyrannosauruses. All they have in common is that they grabbed hold of me.

Your own questions will announce themselves to you—if you’ll let them. There are no “right” answers, only right pursuit. Follow your “dragons” and they’ll lead you to your self. Slay even one, and you’ve earned a place at the Round Table.

Who are the nobodies? Those with less power. At the moment.

Who are the somebodies? Those with more power. At the moment.

Power is signified by rank. Rank in a particular setting. Somebodies hold higher rank than nobodies. In that setting. For that moment.

A somebody in one setting can be a nobody in another. A somebody now may be a nobody later. Because rank is contextual and precarious, we’re all once and future nobodies.

Abuse of the power signified by rank is rankism. When somebodies use the power of their position to put or to keep others down, that’s rankism. When somebodies use the power of their position in one setting to exercise power in another, that, too, is rankism.

Dignity is innate, universal, and non-negotiable. No person’s dignity is less sacred than anyone else’s. Equal dignity requires equal opportunity. Rankism is an indefensible abridgment of the dignity of nobodies, and a stain on the honor of somebodies.

We’re all potential victims of rankism, and equally, we’re all potential perpetrators. Securing dignity for all means disallowing rankism. Though we haven’t eradicated the familiar, ignoble isms, we have de-legitimized them and that’s not nothing. To bury them, we must take on the mother, the source, of them all, and that’s rankism.

Who are the nobodies? They are Everyman, Everywoman, Everychild. In our heart, each of us aspires to become someone new, someone more. The nobodies are us. Therein lies our power.

Nobodies of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our shame.