I don’t know marketing guru Seth Godin very well, although I do know his work. We’ve never met in person, and I’m sure he’d only vaguely remember my name, if at all. But from time to time I write to him, and he writes back.

Sure, they’re brief 1-3 sentence notes, but they’re thoughtful, even if they’re a little distanced. I figure that only makes sense. You see, like another of my publishing heroes, Tape Op editor Larry Crane, Seth actually reads all of his emails. And if his replies to me are any indicator, he seems to respond to a lot of them.

I like Seth. I like that he’s a busy, well-known author who manages to get through all of his random personal correspondence. I like his simple, direct writing style, and I think history has proven a lot of his observations about the music industry to be true. I agree with him strongly and often. (At least much more often than I’ve disagreed with him on things like his laissez-faire attitude toward protecting artists’ rights on the web.)

But today, I read an article that made me think again about one of those personalized emails I value so much. This week, New York Times Op Ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman writes that “Average Is Over“:

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment.

It’s a refrain I’ve heard a lot from Seth over the years as well. He’s even written a book about it. Godin’s bestseller Linchpin is about becoming exceptional, because let’s face it: average isn’t cutting it any more.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I disagree that working hard to become the best in your niche is a bad idea. Actually, it’s fantastic, if not somewhat obvious, advice. And it’s not that I disagree that “average” Americans are in fact, no longer guaranteed an “average” lifestyle for working hard at average jobs. The state of wealth disparity and debt distribution today proves that point pretty well by itself. What I disagree about is whether we should, or could, do something about it.

If Seth Godin and Tom Friedman are looking for exceptional, they only have to look as far as the comments section on Friedman’s article. The Times employs a commenting system that allows users to “recommend” the best posts by other commenters. On average, one of the better comments might expect to get 10 recommendations from fellow readers. The following comment, from a poster with the handle “Angry American,” got 400 — 40 times that amount:

No kidding, Tom. You’ve been saying this for quite a while. The problem is that half the population has a “below-average” IQ. What can they possibly do to become “above average?” Smile a little harder (through whatever untreated physical or emotional pain they are experiencing) as they clean a .01-percenter’s toilet? Or, sing a little tune as they change an elderly 1-percenter’s sleeping diapers? Or, work 3 minimum wage jobs just to pay for their spouse’s dental work? Wait, are we sure we want them to smile? it might reveal their rotted teeth (from a lifetime without good nutrition or dental care)… COME ON, TOM. Not everyone is an artisan, an “Iron Chef,” or a Mother Teresa.

REAL PEOPLE ARE HURTING. We’ve shredded their safety net while simultaneously vaporizing the jobs that “average people” used to do.

Tom, of the other half of the population who are “above-average,” only about 5% have seen any increase in income growth over the past couple of decades. Why? Well, being above-average isn’t enough in our increasingly winner-take-all society. It’s not. With RARE exceptions, our society is only working out for those who are lucky enough to be born physically and emotionally healthy to married, healthy, telegenic, college-educated parents (preferably with advanced degrees), who earn more than $300,000 (enough for the children to afford a vibrant, safe neighborhood, and an elite education K through grad/med/law school education). Wake-up, Tom.

Over the years, I’ve picked up and read a few books on Seth’s recommendation. One of them was The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Near the end, author Jerome Karabel makes a point that Seth may have missed and that Friedman would be wise acknowledge.

That is – even if we’re able to make certain that all Americans have equal opportunities to show their best work and compete to get ahead (which happens to be yet another place we’re failing), there’s a dark side to adopting a complete meritocracy, even if its a fair one. To make the point, Karabel quotes Michael Young, the British sociologist who coined the very term “meritocracy” itself.

In Young’s view, equality of opportunity — the sacred principle of American meritocrats — meant the “equality of opportunity to be unequal.” Under the meritocracy, individual mobility for the talented children of the working class was a real possibility. “But for the working class as a whole the victory was a defeat.” Perhaps worst of all, from Young’s perspective, was the effect that meritocratic competition had on winners and losers alike.

In the meritocracy, Young writes, “the upper classes are … no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism,” for “the eminent know that success is just a reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their undeniable achievement … As for the lower classes,” they “know that they have had every chance” and have little choice but to recognize that their inferior status is due not as in the past to a denial of opportunity, but to their own deficiencies.

Though a meritocracy initially favors social mobility, Young observes that over time it produces “an elite [that] is on its way to becoming hereditary.” … This is what seems to have happened at the Big Three, where the children of the culturally capitaled enjoy a massive advantage in the competition for admission and the children of families not so endowed find themselves effectively excluded from the race before it begins.

…[T]he struggle for a more meritocratic university system — and for a more meritocratic society — is still worth waging. But Americans, whether at the Big Three and similar universities or well removed from them, would do well to heed Young’s final warning: we neglect the dark side of meritocracy at our collective peril.

Karabel raises a good point. In another portion of the book, he asks outright what good equality of opportunity is without equality of condition. I posed the same question to Seth. His hope was that if we could figure out equality of opportunity, and really get it right, we might be able to worry less about equality of condition.

Seth’s a self-described optimist, and he’s certainly entitled to his opinion, but I’m not so sure. I wonder if he ever read the book I recommended to him — Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard. It probably has more true things to say about art than any other novel I’ve read. In it, Vonnegut’s Narrator (an aging Abstract Expressionist painter) writes:

I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing or dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives — maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have someone to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything, and so on.

That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him in daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions.

The entire world can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffe table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.”

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning. “Wow! Were you ever so drunk last night!”

Maybe sometime, I’ll ask him.

(PS – Seth and Larry are the two biggest reasons I keep a clean inbox today. If they can do it,I figure that so can the rest of us. If you write to me I will read it. And as long as you’re not being insane, I’ll respond.)