In America, it almost doesn't seem to matter what you do to succeed: as long as you do succeed, people will praise you and, if necessary, make excuses for you. Failure, on the other hand, causes you to be condemned - even if your failure is arguably due to factors outside your control. Why is this?

In The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, David Callahan writes:

Americans tend to make moral judgments about people based upon their level of economic success. Everybody loves a winner, the saying goes, and nowhere is that more true than in America. Winners are seen as virtuous, as people to admire and emulate. Losers get the opposite treatment — for their own good, mind you. As Marvin Olasky, an adviser to President George W. Bush, has said: “An emphasis on freedom should also include a willingness to step away for a time and let those who have dug their own hole ‘suffer the consequences of their misconduct’.”

Isn’t the question of who has “dug their own hole” and who is the victim of circumstances beyond their control the central question? If we assume that those in trouble are to blame, then perhaps they do need to accept the consequences — but how do we know this to be the case?

Part of the problem may be the fact that if we accept that people fall into trouble because of circumstances beyond their control, we also have to accept that people succeed because of circumstances beyond their control. The more likely and often the former happens, the more likely and often the latter will be true — and this means that we can’t take the same amount of pride and self-satisfaction in our own accomplishments.

Helping those in trouble because they don’t deserve to suffer for something that isn’t their fault would indicate, on some level, that we also don’t “deserve” what we have. There is something very Calvinistic about such an attitude — Protestant theologian Calvin taught that success or failure in the world was indicative of God’s favor or disfavor. If people did well, it suggested that they were among the elect who would go to heaven. Today, America is far more Calvinistic than any nation in Europe:

The prevalence of a sink-or-swim mentality in the United States is unique among Western democracies, as is the belief that individuals have so much control over their destiny. Elsewhere people are more apt to believe that success or failure is determined by circumstances beyond individual control. Scholars attribute the difference in outlook to the “exceptionalism” of America and, especially, to the American Deram ethos that dominates U.S. culture — an ethos at once intensely optimistic and brutally unforgiving.

The belief that you can achieve something great if only you try can be very empowering — it’s certainly better than a fatalistic attitude that you can’t change or improve anything. Very often, a positive and winning attitude will indeed carry a person very far, becoming a more important factor in success than raw talent.

At the same time, though, this belief is as brutally unforgiving as Callahan says. If success really is determined by simply wanting it badly enough and working hard for it, then it follows that a person’s failure to achieve their goals — or even to be just moderately successful — necessarily means that they must not have wanted it badly enough and/or didn’t try hard enough.

Just a few moments of reflection will reveal that this can’t possibly be true. It’s a simple fact that not everyone can equally succeed. Even if we were to assume that everyone had the same natural talents, the same drive to succeed, and worked just as hard, there is no escaping the fact that not everyone will be admitted to the same colleges, not everyone will win the same awards, and not everyone will get the same jobs. Not everyone can become president. It’s not logically possible.

Thus, even if someone does want something badly enough and does work hard enough, there are many things well outside their control which may prevent them from achieving their goals. When we add in the fact that not everyone has the same talents and not everyone can be expected to, or are able to, work equally hard, then it’s easy to see why some will fall well short of lofty goals.

Given all of this, how can we possibly ascribe moral qualities to such failure? To what extent can we reasonably insist that such people deserve, in either a moral or epistemological sense, what they are experiencing?

All of this has troubling implications for our society’s ethics. Americans reflexively cut slack for those who are successful. We may admire winners whatever their sins. As sociologist Robert Merton wrote fifty years ago, the “sacrosanct goal” of wealth “virtually consecrates the means” — any means. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby is an iconic figure in this regard — he was irresistibly appealing despite the sordid origins of his fortune.

Real-life America as been filled with similar characters, ranging from Joseph P. Kennedy, who made much of his fortune illegally, to Michael Milken, who easily rehabilitated his image following his conviction for insider trading in the late 1980s. Even very nasty people who prevail in ugly mudslinging or backstabbing contests can win grudging respect — as Richard Hatch did when he triumphed on the reality television show Survivor.

Callahan’s point here should cause some serious and sober reflection on American cultural attitudes. The traditional “American Dream” ethos has a lot of positive aspects to it, but if it leads people to value success as an end in and of itself, as something good regardless of the means used to achieve it, then that’s a pretty serious negative.

The connection is indirect, obviously, but the connection is there nonetheless. If it’s not a necessary connection, then there is hope of preserving the ethos while eliminating (or at least greatly reducing) the problems. If the connection is necessary, however, then we have to wonder what to make of the American Dream. Is it still a dream worth having?

 

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