By Manfred Kets de Vries
Against the cult of excellence that dominates contemporary political and cultural imagination, the idea of being “good enough” begins to look strangely appealing. Not incompetence or apathy, but procedural thinking, distributed responsibility, and reasonable expectations.
In this sense, being “good enough” is not a failure of aspiration but a psychological safeguard. For all the allure of the superman or superwoman ideal, the texture of real life is far more human. It tends to be uneven, limited, and necessarily imperfect. Hence, the notion of being “good enough” tempers grandiosity, resists mythmaking, and lowers the emotional temperature of collective life. Where greatness asks to be imagined, “being good enough” asks only to function in a reasonable manner. It resists idealisation, diffuses emotional intensity, and eliminates the fantasy of looking for people as rescuers. Rather than drawing our collective hopes and anxieties into a single figure, it allows responsibility, expectation, and failure to be distributed across people, processes, and time. In doing so, it trades spectacle for durability and promise for practicality.
Where exceptionalism demands belief, the good-enough position tolerates doubt. It does not ask to be idealised, only relied upon; not to embody salvation, but to remain usable under ordinary conditions. And in doing so, it lowers the emotional stakes of leadership, making room for fallibility, correction, and continuity.
We live in an age that’s intoxicated by intensity. Leaders are expected to be visionary, disruptive, charismatic, and transformative. Institutions market themselves as exceptional; individuals are urged “to stand out,” “to maximise their potential,” and “to change the world.” In this context, being “good enough” may sound like an insult. Yet beneath this rhetoric of excellence lies also a growing exhaustion. The promise of exceptional, more charismatic leadership has repeatedly delivered instability, polarisation, and disappointment. The drama of greatness, endlessly rehearsed, can become psychologically extremely costly.
Power, after all, has long been imagined as elevation: a rising above the ordinary, a widening of vision, a capacity to shape events from a higher vantage point. In fact, political language is saturated with metaphors of height and mastery — leaders “rise,” “stand above,” “take charge.”
History, however, offers a less flattering lesson. Power does not so much lift as expose. It does not free individuals from human limitations; it magnifies it. What appears from the outside as authority often feels, from within like vulnerability under permanent observation.
This exhaustion is not accidental. The cult of exceptional leadership places immense emotional demands on both leaders and followers. To be “good enough,” by contrast, quietly refuses this kind of escalation. It does not promise redemption or transcendence. It accepts finitude, fallibility, and constraint as the ordinary conditions of collective life. Precisely for that reason, it may be better suited to sustain it.
The virtue of lower expectations
Psychoanalysis has long emphasised that leadership is not merely a structural or procedural role but also an emotional relationship. Leaders do not simply govern; they transform into containers for collective hopes, fears, resentments, and fantasies. Followers project onto them qualities they long for or fear within themselves: strength, certainty, purity, decisiveness. Authority becomes symbolic before it becomes practical.
This psychological dynamic helps explain why societies oscillate so predictably between idealisation and disillusionment. When a leader is elevated as exceptional, expectations expand far beyond what any person can realistically sustain. The leader becomes a vessel for people’s unconscious wishes: to be protected, rescued, redeemed. But when reality inevitably intrudes, the same intensity of investment reverses direction. Admiration turns quickly into contempt. Loyalty curdles into betrayal. Love slides into rage.
From this perspective, leadership failure is rarely just a matter of incompetence. It is also the consequence of excessive psychological projections. Too much meaning is placed on too few figures. The leader becomes too much a screen for projection rather than a functionary within a system.
The notion of being “good enough,” however, interrupts what can be a very destructive process. By refusing transcendence, it limits projection. “Good enough” leaders do not invite worship and therefore are less likely to provoke hatred. They do not promise salvation, so their failures do not feel apocalyptic. Emotional investment is distributed rather than concentrated. Hence, the psychic temperature drops. This is not cynicism; it is containment.
In contemporary culture, however, having lower expectations sounds almost indecent. Yet psychologically, more realistic expectations are often a condition of resilience. Systems designed around human limitation rather than human exceptionalism tend to endure. They rely less on charisma and more on procedure, less on personality and more on structure. Decision-making becomes more routinised, perhaps somewhat slower, sometimes tedious, but also more stable.
Such systems do not necessarily inspire great enthusiasm. They do not generate myths or legends. But they also rarely collapse spectacularly. They tolerate disagreement because disagreement does not threaten their identity. They absorb error because error is to be anticipated. They correct course rather more incrementally rather than catastrophically.
Taking a psychological perspective, this reflects a healthier distribution of psychic load. Responsibility is shared. Anxiety is diffused. No single individual is required to embody the group’s ideal self. This reduces the pressure toward omnipotence and the likelihood of defensive grandiosity. To be “good enough,” in this sense, is not a lack of imagination but a form of emotional realism.
In fact, there is also something quietly comic about being “good enough.” Comedy, unlike tragedy, thrives on limitation. Its protagonists are not titans but strugglers. They stumble, adapt, compromise. They survive through improvisation rather than conquest. Where tragedy reaches for absolutes, comedy lives in the middle ground. And this is not accidental. Comedy presupposes an acceptance of imperfection. It assumes that people are inconsistent, flawed, and often ridiculous — and that life continues anyway. It does not deny suffering, but it resists absolutising it. It finds ways to live with contradiction rather than resolve it.
In this sense, to be “good enough” carries a comic wisdom. It recognises that most human endeavours are provisional, that solutions are partial, that progress is uneven. It resists grand narratives in favour of ongoing adjustment. Psychologically, this corresponds to what psychoanalysts have long described as maturity: the capacity to tolerate ambivalence, frustration, and compromise. The “good enough” parent, the “good enough” institution, the “good enough” leader.
Still, what’s striking, is how countercultural this has become. We live amid maximal aspiration and minimal tolerance for limitation. But the result may be chronic disappointment. To be “good enough,” by contrast, lowers the stakes. It replaces salvation with maintenance.
Against the fantasy of exceptional leadership
One of the quiet virtues of being “good enough” is that it resists hero worship. It leaves less room for grandiosity and fewer illusions of indispensability. We know the dangers of heroic leadership: sooner or later, hubris surfaces. Leaders begin to believe their own mythology, criticism fades, and dissent is filtered out. Surrounded by admiration, they drift into an echo chamber, hearing only what confirms their self-image. In that narrowing space, blind spots widen and small errors quietly grow into larger failures.
Heroic systems concentrate agency in a few figures; less exalted systems distribute it. In these systems, responsibility circulates through institutions, procedures, and roles rather than accumulating in a single person. Authority becomes impersonal rather than charismatic, functional rather than theatrical.
And this redistribution matters. Where authority concentrates, projection intensifies. The leader becomes a screen for unconscious fantasies of strength, certainty, and salvation. Where authority is dispersed, projection loses its focal point. Emotional investment is diluted; the system becomes less dramatic but more resilient. This helps explain why bureaucracies, for all their frustrations, often outlast charismatic regimes. Their impersonality is not merely dehumanising; it is also protective. It prevents any one individual from becoming the symbolic centre of collective life and allows failure without collective collapse.
By contrast, concentrated authority invites fantasies of rescue, mastery, and omnipotence. the hope that someone can rise above uncertainty and make things whole. In doing so, it activates a deeply human impulse: the displacement of anxiety onto a figure imagined to be strong enough to contain it.
Bureaucracy, of course, has its own pathologies like rigidity, inertia, alienation. To be “good enough” is no utopia. It can feel dull, slow, even uninspiring. Yet its failures tend to be incremental rather than catastrophic. That is the paradox: what feels less heroic often proves more enduring.
Still, despite its downsides, the romance of exceptional leadership persists because it speaks to deep psychological needs. We long for figures who appear to transcend confusion and act with clarity. In moments of uncertainty, this longing intensifies. The fantasy of the strong charismatic leader functions as a defence against helplessness and ambiguity. It promises relief from doubt and responsibility, offering the comforting illusion that someone else knows what to do.
Psychologically, this longing often masks anxiety about dependency and uncertainty. The wish for an omnipotent leader expresses a desire to offload responsibility, to be spared the burden of judgment, ambivalence, and collective effort. When we invest too heavily in this fantasy, we quietly disavow our own role in sustaining political life.
But being “good enough” interrupts this dynamic. It refuses transcendence and insists on shared responsibility and limited expectations. It reminds us that no one is coming to save us, and that governance is not a redemptive event but an ongoing, imperfect labour.
This is not a call to cynicism, but to sobriety. The alternative to grandiosity is not despair, but proportion. To accept being “good enough” is to accept that improvement tends to be slow, uneven, and often invisible. It is to value reliability over brilliance, continuity over spectacle, maintenance over miracle.
In this sense, being “good enough” carries a quiet ethical force. It lowers the emotional temperature of politics. It tempers the urge to idealise and the impulse to destroy. It creates space for disagreement without collapse, for error without catastrophe. It replaces the drama of salvation with the discipline of care.
The paradox is that this position, as suggested before, runs against our deepest wishes. Despite the many downsides, we seem to be drawn, again and again, to the promise of greatness, to leaders who rise above the mess, speak with certainty, and seem to embody coherence itself. Experience repeatedly shows, however, that such figures rarely deliver what they promise. The comedy lies in our refusal to learn, the tragedy, in the cost of each repetition.
But what needs to be emphasised once more, to praise being “good enough” is not to celebrate smallness or resign to stagnation. It is to acknowledge human limits without humiliation. It is to design systems that can survive our flaws rather than deny them. It is to accept that the most humane forms of power are those that do not require extraordinary psychology to function.
In a world intoxicated by extremes, the more ordinary can become quietly radical. And in that ordinariness, be it procedural, restrained, emotionally modest, lies a form of wisdom we ignore at our peril.
The advantages of modesty
From a psychoanalytic perspective, modest systems regulate affect more effectively. They limit extremes of hope and fear. They discourage manic investment and catastrophic collapse. By keeping expectations within human bounds, they make disappointment tolerable.
This insight extends beyond politics. Universities, corporations, and cultural institutions often suffer when they adopt narratives of exceptionalism. When everything must be excellent, nothing can simply function. Failure becomes intolerable, while image eclipses substance.
Being “good enough,” paradoxically, makes for greater honesty. It creates space to admit error without humiliation. It allows criticism without annihilation. It supports learning rather than denial. It fosters repair instead of blame. In this sense, being “good enough” is ethically generative. It permits accountability because it does not demand perfection. It allows conflict without collapse. It sustains dialogue where grandiosity demands allegiance.
What is quietly tragic is how difficult it is to accept this wisdom. Again and again, societies elevate figures as embodiments of order and meaning — and again and again, those figures disappoint, falter, or fall. The script changes, but the psychology does not. Insecurity masquerades as destiny. Fear dresses itself as strength. Domination presents itself as protection. Leaders appear as answers to anxieties that precede them, and the irony lies not in their failure, but in the persistence of the pattern itself.
The paradoxical dimension lies in its repetition. We keep rediscovering the same lesson, failing to learn it, and rediscovering it again. Each generation believes it has finally found the exceptional figure who will resolve the contradictions of power. Each generation is disappointed. And what we learn from it is not that aspiration is foolish, but that our longing for salvation is misplaced. To laugh gently at this longing is not to abandon ideals but to loosen their grip. To recognise how often our craving for greatness masks a fear of ordinariness.
But being “good enough,” in this light, becomes a quiet form of courage. It accepts limits without despair. It works within constraints without mythologising them. It resists both cynicism and grandiosity. It is, paradoxically, a mature achievement.
Toward a more humane politics
Systems built around reasonable expectations rely more on rules than personalities, on institutions rather than heroes. They tolerate disagreement, absorb error, and correct course incrementally. They may lack drama, but they also lack catastrophe. They rarely inspire devotion, yet they rarely provoke violent disillusionment.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, being “good enough” also softens the intensity of projection. It diminishes the tendency toward splitting, the compulsion to oscillate between idealisation and devaluation. Hence, when leaders are not imagined as saviours, they are far less likely to become scapegoats. Emotional investment becomes distributed rather than concentrated; responsibility is shared rather than personalised. Authority shifts from the symbolic to the functional, from fantasy to role, and in doing so becomes more stable, more realistic, and ultimately more humane.
This does not mean that intelligence, vision, or excellence are undesirable. The danger arises when excellence fuses with destiny, when leadership is romanticised as salvation. At that point, psychological pressures intensify. The longing for exceptional leaders often reflects a wish to escape uncertainty, to offload responsibility, to find reassurance in another’s certainty. What appears political is frequently emotional at its core.
In this sense, the attraction to great, charismatic leaders expresses discomfort with ambiguity, pluralism, and conflict. It reflects a desire for unity and clarity in a world that resists both. Authoritarian figures do not invent this longing; they exploit it.
From this perspective, leadership failure is not simply the result of individual flaws. It is relational and co-produced by leaders and followers alike. It arises from shared fantasies, mutual dependencies, and unexamined emotional needs. Power does not corrupt in isolation; it is sustained by projections that make corruption meaningful.
The alternative to this cycle is not cynicism, but maturity. Political maturity means tolerating uncertainty without fleeing into illusion, accepting limitation without humiliation, and recognising that no leader can carry the full weight of collective desire without distortion.
A mature political culture therefore values restraint over spectacle, process over personality, accountability over charisma. It limits authority precisely because human beings are fallible. It resists fantasies of omnipotence and accepts the slower, less glamorous labour of shared responsibility.
To praise being “good enough” is not to excuse injustice or incompetence. It is to argue for systems that do not require extraordinary psychology to function. It is to design institutions that assume human limitation rather than deny it, and to distribute authority so that failure is survivable rather than fatal.
Such systems rarely inspire legends or heroic narratives. But they protect us from our own extremes. They represent a quiet ethical shift: away from omnipotence and toward limitation, away from fantasy and toward reality, away from heroes and toward responsibility.
In this sense, being “good enough” becomes an underappreciated moral achievement. It tempers ambition, contains aggression, and lowers the emotional temperature of power. It makes room for disagreement, repair, and continuity. It keeps catastrophe at bay not through brilliance, but through balance.
Perhaps the hardest lesson is also the simplest: leadership is not redemption. It cannot abolish anxiety, resolve conflict, or guarantee order. It can only manage uncertainty with varying degrees of wisdom. When this is accepted, illusion loosens its grip, emotional intensity subsides, and fallibility becomes tolerable rather than catastrophic.
The most humane politics, then, may be the least dramatic one, not a politics of heroes or villains, but of ordinary people doing imperfect work under imperfect conditions. A politics that understands power not as a pedestal, but as a burden, and recognises that the healthiest response to that burden is not grandeur, but restraint.
The deepest wisdom, ironic though it may sound, is this: human flourishing does not require greatness. It requires enoughness — enough competence, enough care, enough structure to hold us, and enough humility to accept our limits.
In a world intoxicated by extremes, this enoughness becomes quietly radical. And in that ordinariness, be it procedural, restrained, and emotionally modest, lies a form of wisdom that we ignore at our peril.