Avram Alpert

In this distinction, “great” refers to those who have power and significance in determining the course of many human lives, while “good” refers to those who act with ethics
and dignity. In practice, greatness and goodness often are opposed. Many great entrepreneurs, entertainers, or political rulers may not be particularly good people.

Many people worry that in a world that ensures decency and sufficiency for
all, most humans will become lazy free riders who do nothing but benefit from the continued hard work of others. Some of this might happen, of course—we’re aiming for a good-enough world, not a perfect one. But the idea that we will lose our motivation ignores the deep human passion to create and sustain a world that is decent and dignified for all.

I didn’t yet realize it, but I had made one of the mistakes that plagues our culture today: I had criticized material wealth, but
I had not given up my obsession with greatness.

Our morality thus
needs to be accompanied by a social transformation that gives a new logic to our social order—a logic that recognizes that good enough for all makes more sense than great for some.

Greatness is a standard paradigm of many social orders. They use it to justify castes, hierarchies, and the privileges of the few. And within each of these orders, thinkers and social movements rise up to contest the regime of greatness and present alternative models for how to create a world that works for the many.

And it is a call to appreciate that much of what is valuable in our world is overlooked by the regime of greatness—from the ordinary acts of labor that sustain our lives, to the ordinary caresses of intimacy that bring us home to ourselves.

the culture that tells us that we must be great at something in order to be of value undoes the possibility of a good-enough life for all of us. The ideology of greatness damages our
psyches, our relationships, our societies, and our environment. In overcoming this destruction, good-enoughness does not thereby become perfect. To the contrary, it embraces and appreciates our imperfections, all the while insisting on the goal of ensuring decency and sufficiency for all.

One of the most powerful influences on our aspirations today, which cuts across all of these spheres, is the pressure to be great, which is to say, to maximize our potential and be at the top of our field.

fool ourselves into thinking that wealth and success will make us happy. Most research shows, however, that winning is a leaky cup: the more we get, the more we want. There’s always another promotion or accomplishment around the bend. Community
and kindness, however, tend to have long-lasting benefits.5 Greatness really might not be so good after all.

is culturally accepted that making as much money as you can is not only an acceptable thing to do, but a morally justified aspiration.