Nobody is perfect.

There is a motto I try my best to live by. That motto is "Better than I was yesterday" because that is my goal every day: to be at least marginally better than the previous day. There is a motto that some of the most disgusting individuals on earth live by. That motto is "Everyone is perfect just the way they are." You may have guessed it by now but I have a huge bone to pick with the idea of universal perfection.

It's objectively false. No matter which direction you approach it, it is false. For one thing, everyone is different; not just as far as their interests are concerned but also the degree of natural talent everyone has or the amount of progress they have achieved. Universal perfection is fundamentally incompatible with reality because there is no universal category into which everyone falls aside from "human" and being human doesn't automatically remove the potential for imperfection.

It's harmful to progress. What good does it do anyone to internalize the belief that they are perfect? You may feel less like killing yourself for being so near to worthlessness that your death would almost benefit humanity but that doesn't change the fact that you're almost worthless if, in fact, you are almost worthless. (I say *almost* worthless because everyone has the potential to improve and become not worthless, even if they are a detriment to the species) But if you are almost worthless and you internalize the idea that you are actually perfect, nobody benefits. You don't benefit because you're still the same almost worthless douche and society doesn't benefit because it's still having to deal with your near worthlessness.

It's harmful to people's self-image. If, somehow, you managed to actually start believing and acting as though you were perfect based solely on the fact that you both exist and are human, it would be a delicate sort of existence. In order to maintain this sort of belief, one would need to ignore practically all information available to them about themselves. If you found some piece of information about yourself and believed it to be true, it would be catastrophic since it would inevitably lend itself to the idea that you aren't perfect. The only way to have both - an understanding of facts about yourself and a belief that you are perfect - is to perform some sort of double-think. If it turned out that you were not capable of double-think, believed that you were perfect, and then discovered a fact about yourself and believed it, it would inevitably lead to even more pain as your poor little deluded world fell apart.

There is of course another way to do things. I would call it humility. Humility isn't the assumption that everyone is better than you but the knowledge that there is almost definitely someone somewhere who knows something that could help you improve, that asking for help and being malleable and coachable is not shameful no matter how accomplished you are, that you are not perfect nor will you ever be, and that being content with yourself is the best way to stagnate.

Humanity makes progress. That anything humans have ever done to improve themselves, their own condition, or the condition of anything has actually had a quantifiable and objectively positive effect on anything is enough evidence to overthrow this idea of universal perfection.

I'm going to make a pretty bold statement: the meaning of life is to improve or transcend. (that's up for debate, of course) That's what all organisms do: they get better; better at living in a particular environment, better at reproducing and spreading their genes, whatever. To claim that perfection has already been achieved is to say life has no point anymore. "We've already done it. Go home. Nothing to see here. We're already perfect. There's no sense in doing anything at all." THAT is what disgusts me.

-Ben