On Perfectionism

I recently had a conversation with someone who objects to solar power because of material inefficiency. “Do you have any idea,” they said, “how much power you lose during transmission over wires?”

I’m not going to waste time poking holes because despite the problems with the argument, it was made in good faith. Furthermore, it’s not the first time I’ve had something like this come up. There’s another person in my life who hates solar panels specifically because they can’t collect energy from the full spectral range of light and also hates windmills because they kill birds for no good reason. Unlike power lines, windows, cats, and airplanes because, excuse me, do you want to tell people they can’t have cats? Is that what you eco-terrorists want?? Huh?!

Over the course of my career as an environmental busybee, ecological worrywart, and generally annoying caterpillar hugger, I’ve developed a seventh sense for disinformation that’s so sharp that it cuts even when the material isn’t present. I suspect that the desire of these folks to have perfect energy that flows directly from the pure heart of God (or, failing that, from poison so toxic that it will absolutely kill us all unless banned as soon as possible) is the result of clever anti-marketing on the part of energy companies that spend astronomical amounts of money making sure that nobody gets a better world. But I also don’t know if that’s real. I have no evidence. Plus, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, and I work hard not to follow my natural joy into that realm. Let’s just say it smells fishy.

Nothing stops effective people faster than perfection. Tie up a go-getter in details and you guarantee that nothing gets got. That’s why perfectionism’s polar antithesis, “move fast and break things,” can make shitloads of money even though this idea is also total trash.

For those less sincere, perfectionism makes for an excellent club with which to smack the well-meaning. The wielder doesn’t need to give an actual shit about flawless grant copy for a totally free and universally applicable 100% efficient geothermal energy device. All they need is a burning desire to win the argument once and for all and then never hear about the environment again. Meanwhile, they miss a flawed but good point in their excitement to pwn, so they kind of lose too.

The desire for purity is an infection. It leads to nothing good. I see this problem left of the fence a lot and it hurts my soul because it’s a known weakness that opponents exploit. (Meanwhile, the messier a Republican politician is, the better he’ll perform.) I used to flirt with veganism – still love me a fine tofu scramble, we eat vegan a few nights of the week in my home just because I like it that way. But despite my efforts, I never meshed with the group because I tend to develop serious B12 deficiencies and health problems were No Excuse For Eating An Animal Product. What if there were some flexibility there? Would I be eating more vegan meals and showing up at demonstrations? Compare that all-or-nothing attitude with the Zero Waste movement, which identified this problem early and smushed it with a catchphrase that needs to become universal. “We don’t need 1 person doing Zero Waste perfectly,”said chef Anne Marie Bonneau, “we need millions of people doing it imperfectly.”

On a grimmer note, a psychotic and delusional application of perfectionism exists on the far right ethnonationalist scene. It’s fun to laugh at these jibrones for five minutes when they find out that they have African ancestry, but sobering to realize that, actually, their vision of racial perfection is probably more of a long-term calculation designed for the group’s survival than an actual desire to make all humans extra vulnerable to melanoma. As long as there’s human life on Earth, there will be someone they consider imperfect, and as long as there’s someone they consider imperfect, there’s going to be a Ku Klux Klan or an Aryan Nation. There has to be. How else will racists maintain hope of living in a nation so ethnically pure that the only people available to marry them are their cousins?

In other words, we’d all do well to exchange an impossible cosmic watch for a messy but functional Rube Goldberg device any day, and throw in some typos and the least efficient solar panels while we’re at it. Because you know what? I’m in a mood to kinda fuck up today. It turns out that the last thing any of us needs is perfection.