The Greatest Composer of All Time!!!

There's no such person.  Let me explain.

Suppose we have a collection of points on a line, and we had a direction on that line that corresponded to "better", and the opposite direction corresponded to "worse".  Then it's possible that one of the points might be The Best point of all. 

But composers can't be put on a line that way.  It is impossible to compare two composers and say, this composer is better than that composer.  It is just not possible.  We say that the set of composers is not linearly ordered.  The subject that we're getting into is topology.  Given two points on the XY plane, can we say which point is more?  Given two books, can we say which book is better?  There is usually a matter of judgement involved; any comparison involving a matter of judgement cannot yield a 'best' that cannot be questioned.

I don't mind confessing that, in my personal view, Bach is the best musician.  But there are really great pieces that Haydn wrote, pieces that Mozart wrote, Beethoven wrote, Mendelssohn wrote, Brahms wrote, Schumann wrote, Wagner wrote, and so on, which Bach may not have been capable of writing!

Even beauty pageants, in which they compare the beauty of women, really make no sense; women can't be ordered linearly either.  Deciding a "greatest" in these sorts of cases is always arbitrary.  There is a lot of 'celebrating the best' in American society, but in my humble opinion, it is not the best feature of it. 

There's always some joker who wants to establish that Paul McCartney was the greatest bass player in history, or that the Beatles were the greatest group, or that Barack Obama was the greatest president.  We must just smile, and think to ourselves that the fellows who set up these rankings are idiots. 

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