God-given talents and rewards
I HAVE been widely accused of generally having the strangest and the most outof-the-box opinions on matters of sport and life. However, I was still shocked into curious bewilderment during a recent casual exchange with one of my female colleagues, who vehemently opined that people such as sportsmen and sportswomen who have been endowed with God-given talent should not earn such great wealth relative to other people with less God-given talent.
Upon seeing the blank look on the faces of the four or five people who were within earshot of those comments, my colleague further explained that the talents that these people develop and exploit for such handsome financial rewards had less to do with these individuals’ deliberate and strategic efforts, but was more due to natural and God-given attributes, and if persons with less talent worked just as hard or even harder, they would not reap the same level of rewards because they were not endowed with the same level of the God-given component. According to my colleague, that in and of itself is inherently unfair.
Seeking to pinch an emotional nerve, I asked her about Usain Bolt, a man from humble beginnings, who used his God-given talent to elevate himself to such a comfortable financial status. Does he deserve is rewards? Her answer was no, he does not, because Bolt got his talent from God, and while he nurtured and developed that talent, it was more the inbuilt advantage of his talent that made him the man he is and less about what he deliberately did.
So whether it’s Bolt or Lionel Messi or LeBron James or Beyoncé or Rihanna or even the winner of the Miss World beauty pageant, none of these stars, she argued, worked for their talent or beauty (in the case of the beauty queen). They all got their comparative advantages by chance and not by effort and design, so they should enjoy no extra privileges.
I walked away from the conversation and sat thinking for few quiet moments before making the return trek to confront my colleague again. Far less strident and aggressive in my tone, I admitted to understanding the principle of her theory while pointing out that the fundamental flaw in her thinking is that it presumes that all men and all women are created equal and that the playing field is actually level, which is the furthest thing from the truth.
The simple fact of the matter is that each human being is an individual with individual qualities inclusive of strengths and weaknesses. It is basically the luck of the draw in tandem with some supporting cultural and circumstantial nuances that give rise to athletes like Usain Bolt, LeBron James and Lionel Messi.
NOT ENTITLED
To take my colleague’s theory to its logical conclusion, a son or daughter, who is the legal heir to their parent’s fortune, should not be entitled to that fortune since those children did nothing of their own volition to earn that fortune. Likewise, children born with unusually high IQ levels and who proceed to become brilliant rocket scientists or innovative inventors ought not to benefit to the now accepted disproportionate extent because his or her IQ level was God-given and not in any way of their own doing. The same applies to the great artists and artistes, who my colleague’s theory says are getting free luxurious and ostentatious lives without just merit. What my colleague still refuses to accept is that this theory is premised on the existence of a certain place in a certain space that we are all still searching for. A place in a space where all things are and remain infinitely equal and perfect. A place where there is no disparity in talent and the resultant difference in rewards earned from that talent. The bad news for my colleague is that that place exists only in the minds of the residents of Utopia. Oral Tracey