Who is your social Ideal?

 

An interesting idea crossed my mind. What exactly is the ideal modern man? It seems no one knows. Every society has had an anthromorphic ideal. The guy that everyone should be like, Plato would call him the philosopher king.  Confucious defined the perfect man as one who "combines the qualities of saint, scholar, and gentleman".

In more recent thought there has been the idea of the Ubermensch, the guy who will overcome all that is baser and lower. Of course, Nietzsche expounded at great length what the Ubermensch wasn’t but not much of what the Ubermensch was.

So really for the modern man empowered by technology where does that leave us?

Are we supposed to be the best we can be at every field that we can conceive because technology allows us so much more ability to do so. For example is it possible for me to learn more things and excel at them then my predecessors? Or am I still bound by very real limiting factors that will prevent me from being anything different from generations before. Will the most used aspect of technology today end up being Facebook and Twitter?

It is starting to seem like a typical economic problem of opportunity cost which I must say I am not very good practitioner of. If it were to be this, would the perfect person in today’s society be one who does a lot of things at a high degree of excellence or does one thing significantly better then others.

It seems that even our modern fictional characters who are most likely to be perfect contradict this idea of perfection by being deeply imperfect. Think about House, Tyler Durden and the comic book characters from Kick-ass and Watchmen.

Is this the new climax or peak?  Juggling a million stimuli and making sense of it or is perfection for you back in the old days where it was one man to one undertaking? What do you think? Who is the peak of perfection for you and why?