Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) Read Free Page A

that bus ride, to the beckoning bottles of cherry schnapps. Back then I knew where I was going, and that to get there I’d have to keep my head clear. But now I’m here, I’ve arrived, I’ve topped the hill, and my head doesn’t function the way it used to. All thanks to an education and a test that measured and rewarded … what, exactly? Nothing important, I’ve discovered. Nothing sustaining. Just “aptitude.”
    That’s why we’re all here: we all showed aptitude. Aptitude for showing aptitude, mainly. That’s what they wanted, so that’s what we delivered. A talent for some things, a knack for many things, and a genius for one thing: running up the count.
    Nobody told us it wouldn’t be enough.

A CCORDING TO A PSYCHIATRIST I SAW DURING A LOW spell in my early thirties, a person’s education, his formal schooling, does little to shape his fate or personality compared to the deeper, more mysterious process of his development . It’s not what we’re taught that determines who we become, it’s what we experience, he said, particularly in our earliest childhoods, before conscious learning is even possible, when the self is a welter of appetite and instinct and the world that surrounds it a sort of fog out of which vivid, mythic figures emerge, sometimes offering sustenance and comfort, sometimes delivering shocks and traumas. The problem is that these events are largely lost to us, unlike the behaviors that they spawn, but he assured me that, through skillful therapy and honest self-examination, people can overcome, to some degree, the legacies of their buried pasts.
    I agreed to give his theory a try. I spilled all my secrets, recounted all my dreams, and dredged up all my shames. We talked masturbation, sibling rivalry, incest fantasies, sexual rejections, the death of a beloved childhood dog, the effects of a deep depression my father suffered during my early teens that was marked by frequent threats of suicide, my history with drugs and alcohol, and a hundred other disturbing subjects that I should have felt relieved to finally air. And yet we got nowhere. Nothing changed. I still couldn’t sleep, keep a girlfriend, curb my drinking, or pay my bills on time. But none of that was what bothered me, finally. What bothered me was that I’d spent the last ten months playing to my doctor’s theories on developmental psychology rather than telling him what I believed to be the simple truth about myself: that I was precisely the person I’d been trained to be, and that the essence of my training was to confuse the approval of my trainers—of whom he was just the latest—with my own happiness.
    “It sounds like you plan to quit therapy.”
    I nodded.
    “A final observation?”
    “Sure.”
    “Your feelings about authority figures remind me of your descriptions of your father. You fear their power but also envy it. You tend to ingratiate them initially, but then you despise yourself for it and reject them, which is, in fact, a rejection of yourself.”
    “I’ll think about that. Thanks.” I checked my watch. Eight more minutes of this and I’d be free.
    “One more thing,” my doctor said. “A guess. You idolized someone once. You had a hero. You saw in him an almost godlike wisdom, a sort of benevolent omniscience. But then he abandoned you—or you felt he did. Is that correct? Are we getting somewhere finally?”
    I looked down at the floor, and then over at a wall—everywhere but at my doctor’s face. Only moments ago I’d dismissed him as a quack, but I’d misjudged him. I’d misjudged him badly. The man was a seer, a magician.
    “Yes,” I whispered.
    “Describe him. Take your time.”
    R ear Admiral Robert Knox, Retired—Uncle Admiral, as I learned to call him—was my first teacher and my first love. I met him when I was four years old, in Fairfax, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., where my family was living in a small apartment building occupied mostly by people just out of college who