page 43, Small Change, Nabeel Hamdi

‘Best’ means most excellent, most suitable, most desirable, something which surpasses all others. It is an ultimate state beyond which there can be little improvement, at least for now. It differentiates between talents hierarchically, and therefore unequally, and assumes single standards. It normalizes ambition and desires, differences in need and ideas from place to place, people to people. And, because it inspires envy, it undermines the self-respect of ordinary people. According to Sennet, ’self-respect fades when we respond to the example set by others’. In this sense, he quotes from Rousseau’s The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality:

He who sings or dances the best, he who is the most handsome, the strongest, and most adroit or the most elegant becomes the most highly regarded; and this is the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice.