What Is The Greatest Honor?

Hello, Vsauce. Miguel here. But where is it here and how much does it weigh? That's supposed to be me, huh? Imitation is a form of flattery. An

honor

. But

what

is the

greatest

possible

honor

? Let's begin our journey by looking at challenges and achievements worthy of honor. First, the physicists. Being the fastest person to run a 26-mile marathon is great, but why stop there? The Iron Man triathlon involves swimming: 2.4 miles, cycling 112 miles, and then running a full marathon. Record holder Craig Alexander did it all in 8 hours, 3 minutes and 56 seconds. Beyond that, things start to get mental.

The Self-Transcendence Race held each summer in New York is the longest certified foot race on the planet. It's not 26 miles long, it's 3,100. And instead of running thousands of miles across the varied landscape of the US, competitors simply circle the same block in Queens 5,649 times. You have 52 days to complete the race, and in doing so, you can wear out up to 12 pairs of shoes. The fastest time to complete the race goes to Wolfgang Schwerk, who finished in just 41 days, averaging 75 miles of running every day. In the field of entertainment there are very clear physical rewards, statuettes such as the Emmy, the Grammy, the Oscar and the Tony.

Earning at least one of each is called EGOT. So far, 11 people have won the four awards in competitive categories. Marvin Hamlisch and Richard Rodgers also each won a Pulitzer Prize. Lynn Redgrave is the only person to have been nominated for all four awards without winning any. Some people have won surprising combinations of prizes. Steve Tisch, as president and executive vice president of the New York Giants and producer of films such as Forrest Gump, American History X and Snatch, is the only person in history to win a Super Bowl ring and an Oscar. And throughout the entire history of humanity, only one person has won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize.

George Bernard Shaw. Those are interesting facts, but let's define honor. There are two types we should go to. The first is Noah Webster, whose American Dictionary is the reason Americans spell honor. The second guy is Samuel Johnson, whose English Dictionary is the reason people on the other side of the Atlantic, where I usually am, spell it honor. Johnson differentiated two types of honorees that are relevant to the question in the title of this video. The first is

what

he calls nobility of soul, magnanimity and contempt for meanness. This is an honor that derives not from achievement in something competitive but rather from the perception of virtuous conduct and personal integrity.

But what is considered virtue? One of my favorite attempts to catalog human virtues was by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman. Frustrated by the persistent focus on mental illness, they came up with a guide to mental well-being. His catalog contains 24 virtues and strengths shared in almost all human cultures. They attached historical figures believed to embody each trait and their list of 24 included justice, humility, hope, humor, appreciation of beauty and love of learning. Using their list as a virtue point scorecard to determine who is the most honorable person is impossible, but that hasn't stopped people from talking about the

greatest

honor in terms of virtue.

Richard Nixon did some things that people might consider dishonorable, but his perspective is illuminating. In his first inaugural address he said that "the greatest honor that history can bestow is the title of peacemaker." Pacifier. But who has the authority to judge virtue? I hope they are not individuals. Richard Wiseman's brilliant "Quirkology" analyzes a 1997 survey by US News & World Report, which asked people who they thought had some chance of going to heaven as a marker of perceived virtuous behavior and personal integrity. It's really enlightening. 52 percent thought Bill Clinton would do it, 60 percent but Princess Diana and 79 percent said they thought Mother Teresa would go to heaven but she was only in second place. 87 percent of respondents agreed that it was likely that someone else would go to heaven.

Who do you think it was? Themselves. The greatest honor a country bestows on those who have defended and fought for it often comes with the most impressive stories. The highest military honor in the United Kingdom is the Victoria Cross. In the United States it is the Medal of Honor, awarded for conspicuous bravery and intrepidity at the risk of loss of life above and beyond the call of duty. Many of its recipients receive a posthumous honor. They are people who acted instantly and without regard for their own safety, walked into enemy fire, losing their lives to communicate messages that saved their lives.

They have fallen on grenades to absorb the impact with their bodies, so that others around them don't have to. Samuel Johnson's second definition of honor focuses not so much on the honor that comes from being ethically excellent, but on the honor that comes from power, from being royal or famous. Global surveys have shown that many corporate logos, such as the golden arches, are more famous than any celebrity or other symbols. So, technically speaking, the greatest honor in terms of becoming famous and known worldwide might simply be becoming a fast food mascot. Not all honorable people receive honors.

How do you compare a big, recognized public act made possible by being in the right place, at the right time, with the right opportunities, with the honor of simply being the best person you can be? A good citizen, a mother, a father, a person who would otherwise go unrecognized but yet is an amazing hero to a few. Your family, your friends, that person who really needed you. Is recognition simply an accident of luck? A snowball effect, an accumulation of advantages. People who excel when they are young often have access to more opportunities, which then entitles them to more opportunities in the future, accumulating overtime like snow on a snowball that eventually turns into an entire rock of snow. which only the original snowball was the original person.

Historians have pointed out this phenomenon, the accumulation of advantages, in criticizing the great man theory of history. The idea that human history can be spoken or understood as a timeline of a few important and honored individuals. Study by Philip Zimbardo, the researcher behind the infamous Stanford prison, has shown that the wrong situation can bring out evil in almost anyone. In his recent TED talk he highlighted that not all of us will find the right opportunities to become the next Gandhi or Neil Armstrong. But what we can do is live our lives with what Zimbardo calls heroic imagination.

Like a hero and expectant, who thinks sociocentrically, not egocentrically. He says that most heroes are ordinary people, who emerge as heroes in particular situations. Therefore, it can be fairly argued that simply knowing that you did the right thing when presented with the situation involving Peterson and Seligman's virtues and strengths is the highest possible honor, the most honorable life. Now, whether or not such honorable behavior is recognized? Well, Cato the Elder questioned the value imparted by physical awards by simply saying: "After my death, I would rather have people ask me why I don't have a monument than why I have one." "It is an honor to speak with you every week.

So, as always, thanks for watching.