Hating Success

EDITOR'S NOTE: A follow-up to Don't You Dare Succeed!, originally published at The Roots of Liberty April 2019 and recently shared here.

Judah Ben-Hur, a rich Jewish prince living around the beginning of the first century, got sentenced to galley slavery and ignominious de-naming after his childhood friend, seemingly in a fit of envy, levied a false accusation that he attacked a Roman governor. On the galley, he was flogged by Roman military commander Quintus Arrius, who subsequently admired both his spirit and his restraint, then observed:

Your eyes are full of hate, Forty-One. That's good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength.

Arrius is correct… in context. Ben-Hur was unjustly accused and unjustly (and severely) punished, as was his family. His hate was righteous, and it both sustained him and opened a path to escape from slavery.

That context - a foundation of righteousness - is, lamentably, not always legitimate. The genuinely wronged and unjustly accused can lay claim to that foundation. Many others, though, hate for unfounded or petty or selfish or deceitful reasons, but try to veneer that hate with virtue.

A lot of that sort of hate is born of our natural suspicion of "other," no matter that, especially in a modern civilization, "other" is no danger to the person, the family, or the tribe. A lot of hate is born of personal failings. Envy drives some of it, as does deflection.

Deflection is today's bit. It explains today's title. The hatred of success is a metastasizing infection in our culture, and that hatred is in too many cases a shifting of blame away from one's self and one's tribe.

Start with education. We've had over half a century of progressive policies in primary and secondary public education, including a tripling of per-student expenditures (in real, inflation adjusted terms), with no measurable improvement in overall results. However, some kids do thrive, and some approaches do produce improvement. The most obvious example of the former are Asian students, and one good example of the latter are charter schools.

What's the response from those running the show? Figure out what's producing that success and emulate it?

Hardly.

In fact, quite the opposite.

Asian students, disproportionately filling elite school and gifted/talented seats, are subjected to higher standards, in order to reduce their numbers. Charter schools are resisted mightily by the educational and political machines, and actively limited in number.

Consider next, economic success. We already have one of the most progressive tax structures in the world - the US government soaks wealthy Americans far harder compared to the middle and working classes than the rest of the first world does. But, to listen to both the prominent voices on the Left and the social media rank-and-file, that's not nearly enough. "No one needs more than [fill in the blank] dollars" is a refrain heard from the sorriest Twitter troglodyte to President Obama himself. A constant refrain of how capitalism is evil assaults our senses, even though capitalism is by far and without a doubt the greatest wealth-producing and success-rewarding system known to man.

Economic hate fixates on many more than the 1%. Consider the message of the Democratic Socialists of America, who want to do away with the corporate form entirely and replace it with employee (really: state) ownership. Small business owners apparently have no place in their society. There is no reward therein for taking entrepreneurial risk - for daring to invest in one's self and one's potential prosperity. They tell us that a boss who pays a worker only a fraction of what he sells a good or service for is stealing from that worker. That the worker isn't exposed to down-side risk (if the business loses money, does the worker participate in that loss by ceding wages earned?) is of little interest.

This hate has produced several sociopathic offspring.

There is the zero-sum fallacy, wherein we are told success is only derived by imposing failure on others - that there is a loser for every winner.

There is the oppressor-oppressed narrative, wherein every human interaction can be distilled down to this coercive duality.

There is the exaltation of victimhood, wherein people are told to claim oppressed status wherever possible, and that they should be elevated, admired, and (the real end-goal of all this: Other People's Money) supported by redistributive taxation.

Ponder this statement by Leonard Peikoff, excerpted from the 1984 debate "Capitalism Versus Socialism, Which is the Moral Social System?"

[T]he successful at living are to be penalized because they are successful, in the name of rewarding the failures, who get rewarded because they are failures. You could not invent a more anti-life code of morality, and the only practical effect it can have is to strike down all who succeed at life, and thereby drag down the whole human race, as you now see happening all over the world.

That was nearly 40 years ago, and it rings even truer today than it did then. Peikoff, an Objectivist and Ayn Rand acolyte, will be dismissed and derided even by many conservatives who've been lulled into a "nobility in self-sacrifice" notion. Yet, who serves his fellow humans better - the person who gives away the fruits of his success, or the person who uses them to create more wealth and more fruits? Is it better to give a man a fish, or to pay him to catch fish? Yet we are told to distrust and dislike the fisherman's boss by the success-haters, ignoring that such hate will impoverish both the boss and the fisherman.

The illiberal Left would have us believe that the successful are equivalents of Quintus Arrius, flogging their wealth from the backs of the many Judah Ben-Hurs that they subjugate as wage-slaves. Therein lies the justification for forcibly taking others' wealth - if you're successful, 'you didn't earn that.' Success, we are told, creates an endless forward-looking obligation to society, no matter that you paid your dues and your taxes and your fees along the way, no matter that you created jobs and trained people and improved others' lives and offered a "better mousetrap" good or service to your fellows.

Peikoff pointed out that wealth was and is created by human thought, not by labor. Labor has always existed in great quantities, but it took the innovations of the Industrial Revolution - itself a product of capitalism - to produce real improvements in living standards. Today, sadly, the titans of that era are derided and besmirched - often (dare I say usually?) unjustly, with many negative assertions distorted, contorted, or simply false. Were they angels? Of course not. But hating their success, and by extension the benefits born of the Industrial Revolution, is a sad manifestation of the broader hatred that those of a socialistic bent have used to successfully to poison our society.

Some who succeed do get admired by today's Left, but they are almost never admired for the success itself. That admiration is only granted to those who use the product of their success to do the Left's work and/or the giving away of that product to the favored. Success is a sin that can only be forgiven by buying indulgences. Therein lies another great achievement of the illiberal Left - teaching the successful to feel guilty about their success.

Michael Corleone advised his niece's fiancé not to be embarrassed by his wealth. He then went on to suggest that:

This contempt for money is just a trick of the rich to keep the poor without it.

He was wrong, at least in today's context, because the contempt for money is actually a trick of the socialists to guilt the rich to hand more of it over to them.

The contempt for success goes hand-in-hand. It masks the countless failures of progressive policy. It encourages dependence. It fosters an air of entitlement to the fruit of others labor. It sows societal divisiveness, and furthers a burn-it-down agenda. It discourages those who'd break free of this hatred, who'd seek the American Dream, who'd pursue their happiness.

Shelby Steele noted that:

[T]he Promised Land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.

The haters of success hate those who see opportunity and quest after it. They tell those seekers of certain skin colors that success is forever out of their reach, and tell those of other skin colors that their success properly belongs to others.

A genuinely wronged person may legitimately hate those who wronged him, but even then, the hate can be channeled for good or for bad. Ben-Hur used that hate to lift himself out of injustice, but ultimately chose not to use it to destroy.

Unjust hate offers no righteous way out. It only corrupts. A society filled with hate is not a society that can survive, let alone thrive. Teaching that sort of hate is contemptible; hatred of such teaching is just.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.