I saw a lot of chatter on Twitter this morning about how Bezos “came from nothing,” and it really got me thinking.
We have a lot of ink spilled, in our society, over the idea of “meritocracy” and such. The idea is that if you work hard, you can have anything you want. “We don’t provide equality of outcome; just equality of opportunity.”
But even that platitude isn’t really true. People who say he “came from nothing” are talking about his working-class parents who worked hard, saved up money, believed in him, and helped him grow his business into a world-consuming empire. And here’s the thing: all those facts are true. They did work hard, all three of them, and they *did* make good decisions. I’m not contesting that. But I think we need to delve a little deeper into the negative space surrounding our view of American Success, because there’s a lot of it.
For a little bit of background on me: My mother’s family has lived in Virginia since the 1700’s. (I won’t say “since time immemorial” because we do remember, thank you very much.) We are the “hey, colonizer” guy’s interlocutors. (I wonder a lot about how our early family interacted with the locals. Allegedly it was friendly. But then, that’s the story we would tell, isn’t it?) For folks who know the difference between hillbilly and redneck, we’d probably be the latter (although I think only a couple of my cousins ID that way).
By contrast, my father’s family came to America from Eastern Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s. His maternal grandfather stayed in Jersey City and scrubbed toilets during the Great Depression (part of our founding mythos), but his paternal grandfather was a coal miner.
I’ve recently started going through a bit of a Mining Song Phase, and I kept feeling like a poseur because my mom’s family never had coal miners – we just weren’t that far west. We’re lowland farmers, and honestly we had it pretty damn easy compared to the folks in the mountains. My mom’s family was less fucked by the Great Depression than my dad’s family was, because at least they always had enough food to eat, because they grew it themselves. (My paternal grandfather had to stuff himself with bananas and drink a gallon of water in order to make weight for the CCC’s, in the same Founding Mythos that we have. He would have starved if he’d stayed at home, but his mom budgeted him some constipating food for that weigh-in.)
But then I remember: We were coal miners. It’s just that I don’t think about the “we” in the Northeast nearly so much as I think about the “we” in the southwest of Virginia.
And then I think about how damn lucky I am that my great-grandfather did, in fact, leave Harlan alive. Even when Harlan was McAdoo. If he’d died in the mines, his family would have been in even more dire straits.
We made good decisions. I’m not going to deny that. But we also had a healthy serving of luck, and I don’t want us to deny that either.
There’s a concept in psychology called the Just World Hypothesis. The idea is that if we make good decisions, then bad things won’t happen to us. I’m sure you can see the appeal of this idea already. But it is also called the Just World Fallacy, because as anyone over the age of 5 is aware, bad things still happen to good people. Believing otherwise is fallacious.
I think it’s natural to over-credit our own efforts, and under-credit the role of luck, in looking at our life outcomes. It makes us feel better. When we’re confronted with people who made good decisions but still had bad things happen to them, we feel bad and try to retcon the situation to convince ourselves that actually, those people made bad decisions. (This is separate from the philosophical tenant that even people who make bad decisions deserve to, e.g., have food to eat; I’m not addressing that idea in this post.) Retconning in this way restores our own sense of security and makes us feel safe again. But that doesn’t make it true.
Who am I trying to reach with this post? I don’t know. Maybe my own psyche. Maybe the world writ large. Maybe my dead ancestors. But for whatever reason, I needed to put it out there. Thank you for reading.
Emilybook 