Searching for the 'best'

Basically, the very "Best" is elusive.  Best for whom?  Best for what?  Best for when?

Take cars.  I guess for comfort and style, best is a Lamborghini or a Mercedes Benz.  I put "World's best car" in Google and found that the 1931 Bugatti something or other sold for 8.7 million dollars in 1987.  You can bet I would not spend 8.7 million dollars on a car, 1931 or this year's.  Do I want a fast car?  For what?  I can only drive about 72 or 73 without getting stopped.  Nearly any car can do that. Do I want a stylish car?  What is stylish in Stevens Point or for a man my age is not going to be what many people consider stylish.

Same deal with most things.  Best chocolate.  I like dark chocolate so my best will be dark.  You don't like dark chocolate and are willing to settle for something not the best but you stubbornly cling to the idea that you know what you like.

Aside from the matters of taste, purpose and availability, the "best" is still unstable.  Two straight lines will diverge more and more unless they are absolutely parallel.  That means that any correlate with quality or bestness has to be exactly, totally equal to the bestness scale, or some reading on the correlate (speed or reliability or stylish good looks or convenience or versatility or something) will not equal the truly best.  It is only in the middle range of a variable that we have much of a chance of finding a general scale that actually fits the other variables.  We can probably find a car that has middling economy, middling reliability.  The difficulty of collapsing multiple important variables into a single scale so we can pick the 'best' is well-known. 

The handsomest prince is not the bravest and not the richest.  None of them is the most intelligent, and the best father of children is a still different guy.  You can see why much of the world's wisdom literature counsels acceptance of the trials and tribulations of life.  There really is no best, even though we think we imagine it.