Two very ordinary people
I.
I was irritated to recently hear a Hollywood type who, having relocated to a village in Ireland in 2024, spoke of her joy in being able to go about her daily business in peace and quiet and mingle with the locals whom she termed very ordinary people.
I immediately thought of a famous song by Pulp - you know the one [1].
And I immediately noted the use of an intensifier: the locals were not just ordinary people, they were very ordinary people. Which is, I suppose, just about as ordinary as you can be; almost extraordinarily ordinary in the manner that W. H. Auden once noted [2].
If she had just said ordinary people, I might have overlooked her remark as a slightly ill-judged attempt to say down-to-earth or interpreted it as a clumsy search for authenticity: a kind of faux pas rather than an example of toxic privilege. But adding very makes the phrase feel doubly insulting.
I was only thankful that they didn't speak of simple folk, which would have made things even more triggering.
II.
The word ordinary comes from the Latin for regular or orderly. So an ordinary person is one who might be termed straight - one who follows the rules and conventions without fuss; one who subscribes to common sense and likes to keep up with the news.
Someone very much like the hard-working family man identified by the Bureau of Statistics as JS/07M378, about whom no official complaint had ever been lodged [3].
III.
Somehow, the fact that this person is a filmmaker who speaks a lot about the sensitivity needed to be an artist, deepens the irony.
Do they not see that rather than sounding grounded and approachable, their phrasing makes them sound self-important and patronising; someone who mingles only in order to observe and perhaps find inspiration from very ordinary people and their charming (somewhat tragic) little lives?
In other words, even if their intent was to express (or perform) humility in order to virtue signal and gain moral credit, their language is inherently exclusionary and problematic.
IV.
Having said that, as a Nietzschean, I accept that there's an order of rank in this life and that some individuals are more important, more influential, more interesting, or more intelligent than others. But I'm not sure they should be accorded special rights or priority treatment.
In fact, the truly extraordinary individual has no need to announce their superiority by asserting VIP status and patronising those they deem beneath them. The performative humility of a Hollywood expat is not a sign of higher rank, but of a deeply internalised bourgeois anxiety - a desperate need to look down from a self-constructed pedestal while pretending to stand on common ground.
There is something pathetic about an artist who travels thousands of miles just to find people they consider ordinary enough to validate their own sense of exceptionalism. It suggests that without a backdrop of simple village life to contrast themselves against, their own brilliance would quickly evaporate [4].
Notes
[1] I'm referring to a single by Pulp titled 'Common People', released from the album Different Class (Island Records, 1995).
But one might also recall this track by the Kinks, 'Ordinary People', which featured on the album Soap Opera (RCA, 1975). Or, indeed, this song by Flanagan & Allen (pictured above) - 'Two Very Ordinary People' - found on the album Songs from the Pavement (Decca Records, 1931).
[2] I'm referring to a poem by Auden titled 'The Unknown Citizen' (1939).
[3] Ibid.
[4] See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), particularly Chapter IX, 'What is Noble', where he details the self-sufficiency of the noble soul - they have no need to mingle or act the tourist.
