Anyone who’s done a fair bit of gaming will recognize the term “victory conditions.” They’re the way a game designer programatically defines what success is. Victory conditions can be simple, e.g.: “eliminate all hostile forces” or complex, “before turn 20, must have a unit under command control occupying any of the hexes between A-14 and A-20, inclusive.” When you do the thing that fulfills the conditions, you are a success.
I would like to muse informally (and with a bit of hyperbole) on the topic of “success.” Success is something that I think we don’t spend enough time considering, for reasons that will become obvious.
One of the great things about evolution is that it embeds a form of a definition of success. There is no other value proposition to it, other than “you were able to pass your genes on and there will be more of your genes than there were before.” The term “fitness” is used in a highly specific way: your fitness is how well and effectively you reproduce, it has nothing to do with crushing your enemies, having great cardio, owning a Lamborghini, having a nice hair-piece, or a big house. In social terms, that might equate to: the mighty warrior who goes forth and spends the best years of their life smiting foes may not be as “fit” (or “successful”) in reproducing than their competitor who stays away from the battlefield, learns the art of seduction, and leaves behind dozens of children. That dynamic is actually enshrined in the warriors’ pantheon; it’s “Jody” the hippy who dodges the draft, steals your prospective girl/boyfriend, and marries them while you’re off bombing Medcins Sans Frontieres hospitals or whatever your job in the military happens to be.
Jody’s a cuckoo, or, “a sneaky fucker” (as my college biology teacher referred to the octopi who intercept semen packets aimed at a female they are trying to inseminate) – it’s a strategy that crops up frequently in nature because it’s a successful strategy. Evolution doesn’t make any value judgements about success other than its simple victory condition: breed effectively. (Whatever that means) But perhaps you’ll notice I am flirting with linguistic nihilism [stderr] – defining a word circularly is dangerous; what does “effective” mean except “good” in this context? What does “fitness” mean except “good” in this context? What am I even talking about, trying to define goodness as being good? Never mind that I’m dangerously close to defining being a “sneaky fucker” as “good” (or successful) it turns out to be difficult to specify criteria without making it circular and, therefore, arguably undefined.
Figuring what “success” is is hard, but necessary because we do want to be able to casually group things or people in terms of success/failure. Or, some of us do.
Nietzsche would probably say that it’s slave morality, but in the example of the guy with the fancy car, the employee might consider themselves more successful, in that they are creative and talented and can write software (or whatever) and the capitalist overlord has nothing going for them except the situation in which they are able to extort work out of brilliant software engineers. The employee might bicycle to/from work instead of riding in a Lamborghini stuck in Silicon Valley rush hour – they’ve got good cardio and the boss is going to die of a heart attack and they’re going to still be bicycling and coding in to their 70d. The guy with the car might consider themselves to be a huge success: they are rich and have a car that is a much better car than they are a driver. A professional race-driver might look at that guy and think he’s a loser: he can’t wring all the performance out of the car that a professional could, and would lose an even race against the professional. A bacterium wouldn’t think, because they don’t waste their time doing that kind of stuff, but if one could think they might think, “I and my zillions of descendants are going to eat you.” The problem, here, is undefined “success” – who is successful is totally dependent on the situation and whatever external values the value-er brings to judgement.
Many humans naturally judge success in purely human terms: having a nice house is better than having a bacteria-style horde of descendants. But we only think that because we can think, and that is how we think. It is, however, impossible to deny that – for example – ants are highly successful. The ants will probably survive the apocalypse humans are bringing upon themselves; the Lamborginis will not have any value, nor the houses, or the cute kids the humans are raising. This understanding began to gnaw at me right after I graduated from high school, got accepted at the university I applied to, and suddenly I realized that all of the time I spent cutting study hall and learning to program computers might actually serve me better than the time some of my classmates invested in getting good grades. What is success, again?
Our collective attitude toward the question of success is incredibly inconsistent: Elon Musk is a success in terms of dollars and rockets launched, but in popular culture he’s probably not as successful as Kanye West in terms of name recognition and artistic reach. Again, neither of those guys are as successful as a well-situated ant colony which will outlive both of them.
[source]
So, I wanted to inject uncertainty into the concept of “success” and to deconstruct it as a post-modernist would, by pointing out that everything depends on perspective. That’s important when it comes to a modern plague: racism.
Racists and white supremacists seem to think that there is a metric of success out there that points unfailingly toward them. But, there isn’t. I had a tangy email exchange a few years ago with a genuine aristocrat who believed that there are superior people in the herd, who ought to be elevated to something something I actually don’t know, what. I remember in our exchange that I pointed out that it’s very hard to tell what is success or failure until the dust has settled and the bodies are buried and we can assess that success or failure through the lens of history. Was Napoleon Bonaparte a great commander, or not? Well, if the only battle he had commended was Austerlitz, he was amazing. Borodino, Waterloo? Not so hot. Today’s white supremacists are like Bonaparte if, after Austerlitz, he had declared himself the greatest of all time. White Americans feel that they are on top of the heap because they are supposed to be on top of the heap, but they leave completely unexamined the questions:
- What does being on top of the heap mean?
- What heap?
- Who gives a fuck about heaps anyway?
They actually created the heap, so they could be on top of it. Then, they claim that being on top of the heap is a virtue demonstrating their superiority. Needless to say, they also appear to be comfortable with whatever violence and oppression they have to deploy in order to maintain that position. You know who else did that? King George III. Monarchs are the quintessential expression of this self-justifying definition of success.
Consider Richard Spencer, in a recent article in The Daily Beast [beast]
Clearly, Spencer is not superior in … well, much of anything except being white. He’s really good at that, but if you recall, he didn’t have any say in it. If being white was something Spencer had to work at, he probably would have fucked up even that.
Spencer pushes the same tired, debunked, institutionalized race science that—from the 3/5ths Compromise to The Bell Curve to the current anti-history effort—has always justified white American power and the racial caste system that supports it. “We build, we produce, we go upward,” he said in 2016. “We don’t exploit other groups. We don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around.”
Speaking of success, I wonder what Spencer has actually built. Is making stuff the criterion for success? Production? Did he just say that farmers are inherently superior to white wankers who live in their mom’s house? Because he may not know this but most of the people who produce, you know, Produce, are brown. If success was picking strawberries, then Spencer is not a success; there are old hispanic women who are 10x as successful at picking strawberries.
I really don’t want to talk about Spencer but it seems to be that his fate is to serve endlessly as a foil for people who are discussing dumbassery. But the article mentioned “race science” and, immediately, I am captivated. Race science is, first and foremost, an oxymoron, because scientists have already concluded that there is no “race” really. But racists use the tools and techniques of science to try to find ways that they can find a position from which they can feel superior. Let’s come up with a metric we’ll call “IQ” and then observe that our kind of people have more IQ than the other kind of people and therefore we are better. But what if being better means “working your ass off”? I’m not saying that all of the Mensa members I’ve met are pasty, flabby dweebs, but – as a racist would say – “there are stereotypes for a reason.” I find it amusing, for example, that some scientific racists try to justify their idea that black people are inferior because they’re better at basketball or boxing than white people. Wait a minute, cracker, didn’t you just say “they are better at X than white people” for a given X? What is the criterion for superiority that is at play here?
But Spencer’s own wealth comes in part from government handouts and racial exploitation. Back in 2017, the Center for Investigative Reporting found that Spencer’s family owns 5,200 acres of Louisiana cotton and cornfields, farmland that was “subsidized heavily by the federal government,” collecting $2 million in federal payments between 2008 and 2015. Since that report ran, it appears the family has continued to accept funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dickenhorst Farms, owned jointly by Spencer, his mother and his sister, received payments of $50,000 and $94,147 in 2018 and 2019, respectively; since 1994 it’s taken $1,245,118 in government support.
Ohhhh…. So is it that Spencer’s family is superior at “getting government hand-outs” than black people? It sure looks that way. Is he a “federal cotton subsidy Queen”? Is that what he considers “building” and “producing”? I’m just picking on Spencer because he invites it by shining a searchlight on himself, but he’s useful if only as a foil.
So let’s flip it around and talk about criteria for success, shall we?
Now, I want to be careful. Let’s talk about the stereotypical Hopi native american tribespeople. And let’s talk about some stereotypical white Europeans. I’m playing this game racist-style, and trading in broad cultural stereotypes that I know are wrong but I’m going to deal anyway, for the sake of argument. From stuff I’ve read, Hopi culture was family-oriented, agrarian, not particularly violent, “in touch with the land” and all that new agey stuff. On the flip side, white Europeans were imperialists, colonialist, highly militarized after fighting thousands of years of christian-on-christian wars, incredibly violent and possessed of technology of violence that had grown and evolved in the crucible of European nastiness. What’s success, here? I have had exchanges with white supremacists in which they have insisted that the fact that white European culture spread rapidly across the world in the 15th century and that was an indication of its superiority. To which I reply, “doesn’t that indicate that white europeans are nasty?” I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens’ “England built an empire so vast that the sun never set on it because god didn’t trust the English in the dark.” What’s a successful civilization, then? Is it one that tries to live a low-impact low-tech peaceful agrarian lifestyle, or is it the one that tries to militarize everything it touches to the point that it discovers fossil fuels are great portable energy for war machines, and – oops. Remember, white supremacists, it was white european culture that invented arms races, cold wars, capitalism, and christianity. Memo to white supremacists: christianity is a bug not a feature – the fact that white europeans exported christianity around the world is proof positive that they are cowardly failures who cannot confront death with dignity and self-medicate with some bullshit afterlife. If I may just point out, it was a bunch of Asians who invented Zen Buddhism, white european culture certainly coughed up its share of sophisticated and interesting philosophy, but what the hell is wrong with white people that they prefer capitalism over, I don’t know – sharing?
Of course I trust you know I think these are all learned behaviors and circumstance, none of which have anything to do with a person’s skin color. To me, the answer regarding cultural superiority was embedded a couple sentences ago: Europe, being a contiguous landmass with trade-routes became a war-zone, and weapons, strategy, and tactics evolved rapidly under Europe’s endless wars of empire and religion. The fact that Julius Caesar was (kind of) white had nothing to do with his military genius; that was sparked by his birth as an influential, powerful, supremely ambitious individual who was raised in a military state that valued the manly virtues of being a vicious, ruthless, motherfucker. I’m not trying to deride Caesar; he was a complex person, but was he born superior? But for his social circumstances he might have been born a farmer, taking agricultural subsidies from the government, and living in his mothers’ house until adulthood. (Which was a virtue in Caesar’s time, but it’s not in Spencer’s)
So, what the hell is wrong with white people? Why are they so greedy and murderous? Why are they so stupid that they fall for capitalism’s endless promise (see “car guy” above) that if you work really hard someday your boss will have a whole fleet of Lamborghinis? Why are white people so stupid that they can’t see the problems with IQ tests? Believe me, problems with testing regimes are really obvious to anyone with an education. What is wrong with white people? They think Kid Rock is talented. They think Bill Maher is incisive social commentary. They take Richard Spencer seriously, and they think that whatever Britney Spears is doing right now is news. And, somehow, they strut about thinking they are superior? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.
“When you accomplish something and you’re struggling, when you accomplish something and people aren’t just giving you something, it feels all the better,” Spencer said in another interview. “I mean, it really feels joyous.”
Nietzsche would call that “slave morality” but he wouldn’t mean it in the worst possible sense. I’ll go there, though. Spencer sounds like he really wants a job picking cotton in the hot Alabama sun.
Well, you can “succeed” with anything that you can do. It’s a word that puts emphasis on the accomplishment (or that the action is “effective,” meaning having the specified effect). When you succeed at murdering someone, it means you didn’t fail to murder them. It doesn’t mean anyone has to like it that you murdered someone. A game provides you with a clear reward system, perhaps even for murdering characters in it, but life is not really like that.
When we’re talking about what’s morally important/significant to do, we shouldn’t generally measure that by counting masses of carbon atoms or the groups/individuals who have them. Instead, it pretty much boils down to eudaimonia, although I don’t think you need to buy much of Aristotle’s ethics to appreciate the core idea of that.
For the most part, the conquistadors were not living lives which promoted and enhanced that, and the Hopi were. That’s very clear. Leave the pomo/nihilism bullshitting to the side here: it’s just a true statement, and you don’t have a good reason to be skeptical about it.
There is something else to say, beyond talking about the qualities of an individual’s life in a society. You want that good society to continue and flourish as well, for other people in the future. But what lengths should you go to, in order to try to make that happen? That’s a harder question….
Quoting Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” There is plenty of sense in that, but as the allusion suggests, it’s not without problems. It’s especially problematic when the supposedly good society that you think you want to maintain isn’t even good anyway, yet you still go to great lengths to maintain it. You should be ready to change things for the better as often as necessary. just not tightly hold onto whatever it happens to be. And even when it is something worth holding onto, if you think every war is a crime, you simply have to find other ways to do that and not forget that those are even options.
For people who (unlike Spencer) actually do useful work on a regular basis, it feels like an ordinary day. It only seems so wonderful and miraculous to him because he wastes so much of his life spewing shit out of his mouth.
You know Marcus, it’s probably the Manhattan speaking, but before I can really make a reply to this post I’ll need to think about it. I suspect I’m not alone.
So, understand that your sermon was heard, and is being considered, probably by a lot of people. But if you don’t get responses it’s not because it was too long, or boring. It’s because it does make people think, and consider, and ponder. And that doesn’t happen immediately.
Then, by the time most people have reflected on this thought, other blog posts will have moved this one into the past. So you will not get responses. Don’t let a lack of responses discourage you from continuing to write on these topics. It’s not really how many responses you get, it’s how much you make other people think. Regrettably, there really is no way to measure that.
But even if I don’t generally respond, be aware that I read them and because they are so well written they do cause reflection and changes to the way I view the world. Since I’m no one special, I’m probably not alone.
But, like I said in the opening line, this may be double Manhattan’s talking. And this comment is in no way a reflection on the comment made by Consciousness Razor who has clearly already considered your point.
I think a lot of the confusion around the idea of ‘success’ generally comes from people misusing the term. If we take the phrase “I am a success”, on its own, it is meaningless. Success requires a referent. There must be something that someone is successful AT. You can be a success on a math test, and a failure at a pull-up test on the same day. Neither result can possibly define the person as ‘a success’ or ‘a failure’ in a general sense.
But society doesn’t use the term the way it should be used. We talk about people as ‘successful’, and if pressed, we’d probably say something like ‘successful in life’. Neither description is meaningful or informative, except insofar as it indicates that the person has managed to do, have, or be something that the society broadly wants them to do, have, or be – but non-specifically and in such a fuzzy way that it can apply, or not apply, to virtually anyone at all.Virtually any person could be described as a ‘success’, depending on the values of the person doing the describing or the audience hearing it.
People who seem to be chasing success are often not aware of what their actual desired goal is. Leading to a dog-chasing-its-own-tail kind of circularity, where someone desires to succeed at success.
None of this is made clearer by the vast hordes of people, lost and without direction, who seek ‘abundance’, ‘success’ ‘wellness’ ‘fulfillment’ or whatever the current aspirational buzzwords happen to be. There’s a whole army of grifters pandering to those folks.
For myself, as a nihilist, I prefer to set my own victory conditions. I do this in the light of my own proclivities and don’t worry to much about the source of those. I enjoy building and creating things, so if my life allows me to do that, I consider it successful. I enjoy security and financial independence, so work towards succeeding in that regard. I enjoy the company of my partner and friends and some of my family, so I will succeed if I manage to spend time with them. If I, at the end of my life, were asked if I had been a success or a failure, I would judge it on those categories. There are also some fuzzier moral values: hurting as few people as possible, helping as many – within reason – as I can.
Overall though, outside of pre-specified end goals, the term is just meaningless fluff the way most people use it.
Also: Fuck Richard Spencer – what a useless waste of hydrocarbons that guy is. Just listened to the latest IDSG on him, and while I’m happy to know that his life isn’t going well by his own standards, I’d be happier if he just stopped existing.
There is no other value proposition to it, other than “you were able to pass your genes on and there will be more of your genes than there were before.”
Worker bees don’t pass on their own personal genes, and natural selection made that happen. If we’re going to derive a metric of success from nature, it’s that “you were able to facilitate the continuation of your population’s genes…”
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On a personal level, the only definition of success that makes sense to me is “I am comfortable in my own skin”. On a societal level, well, that’s where the philosophers (armchair and otherwise) come in.
Bit of a category error there; we’re organisms, not genes.
I’ll take the Vulcan salutation: “live long and prosper”.
fuck victory conditions, i’m still struggling with basic survival…
Anyways, I don’t think I’ll ever stop laughing at .gifs, vids, or even stills of that nazi getting punched out on tv. :)
And just to get it in before any potential “concerned” types, I don’t consider advocating genocide a peaceful act, and while I am not terribly likely to go brawling with proudboys and assorted other nazi subtypes, I will not criticize the actions of those who do take it upon themselves to make that violence a little more concrete and personal for the nazis.
lochaber@#7:
I will not criticize the actions of those who do take it upon themselves to make that violence a little more concrete and personal for the nazis.
I agree.
To me, it’s simply self-defense. People who advocate fascism are never satisfied with just a bit – a rational fascist, if there were such a thing, would realize that eventually they’re going to wind up on the wrong side of the fascist agenda and by then it’ll be too late.
John Morales@#6:
Bit of a category error there; we’re organisms, not genes.
Are you trying to be irritating?
Rob Grigjanis@#5:
On a personal level, the only definition of success that makes sense to me is “I am comfortable in my own skin”. On a societal level, well, that’s where the philosophers (armchair and otherwise) come in.
Epicurus would agree with you, and so do I. I used to pull my hair out when ancient philosophers talked about virtues without defining them (I don’t think that they can) and I finally realized that they were reifying their own opinion. But sometimes it’s a good opinion. I’m a pretty critical person, and if I can be comfortable with what I do, I’m probably OK.
consciousness razor@#1:
First off, argumentum ad Anton Chigurh is courageous philosophy! I’m impressed.
Well, you can “succeed” with anything that you can do. It’s a word that puts emphasis on the accomplishment (or that the action is “effective,” meaning having the specified effect). When you succeed at murdering someone, it means you didn’t fail to murder them. It doesn’t mean anyone has to like it that you murdered someone.
If you can succeed at anything you can do (I agree with you about that) then none of this “supremacy” stuff is about being superior at anything except power. Which is the point behind the posting, of course. I don’t think that white supremacists think things through enough to understand that, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone at all. They are just pawns in a power game and, as usual, nobody bothers to make sure the pawns understand what’s going on; they just go forward.
Instead, it pretty much boils down to eudaimonia, although I don’t think you need to buy much of Aristotle’s ethics to appreciate the core idea of that.
I agree with that. If we substitute “success” for “satisfaction” we’re on the Epicurean/Aristotelian track. The object of the exercise, for a rational person, is to find satisfaction – but there are people like Mick Jagger that are never satisfied – that’s the problem, right? Spencer could probably live a good life off his parents’ wealth and maybe pick up a drug habit or drink away his life in insignificance – but his unfillable desire to feel superior to someone makes him incapable of just living, he has to concern himself with others’ lives as well.
Some people are content with bettering themselves, but others interpret bettering themselves as pulling down the people surrounding them.
For the most part, the conquistadors were not living lives which promoted and enhanced that, and the Hopi were. That’s very clear. Leave the pomo/nihilism bullshitting to the side here: it’s just a true statement, and you don’t have a good reason to be skeptical about it.
Yes, I am comfortable saying that the Hopi lived better lives than the conquistadors – the only flaw in the scenario, for them, was the conquistadors. The conquistadors desire for dominance and specie was insatiable and they were willing to destroy anything for it.
For people who (unlike Spencer) actually do useful work on a regular basis, it feels like an ordinary day.
Yet so many of the people who do useful work never get a chance to realize it’s useful. It seems to me that a lot of the people who think they are on top of the situation, simply don’t reflect very much on themselves.
flex@#2:
So, understand that your sermon was heard, and is being considered, probably by a lot of people. But if you don’t get responses it’s not because it was too long, or boring. It’s because it does make people think, and consider, and ponder. And that doesn’t happen immediately.
Thank you, and I hope the manhattans were great!
For me leaving biological descendants always seemed like a terrible metric for success. What’s the end goal there? Someday the last descendant will die and fail to breed more descendants. And someday the planet itself will become uninhabitable for humans. So the purpose of living beings is to continue having miserable existence until the last descendant has such miserable existence that they fail to reproduce?
Accumulating money and material goods seems just as pointless. What purpose do they serve? Making your neighbors envious? Who really cares about other people’s opinions that much anyway?
At the end, at least for me, all that is left is embracing hedonism. As long as I am happy and enjoying myself, that’s a success.
Like Marcus in comment 11, I was struck by the end of consciousness razor’s comment:
Yes!
The example I usually give is a server in a restaurant. They have a job at which I would be a total failure, mostly because I have no patience with assholes.
+1 to Andreas Avester @13; but I think I understand at least why the point-one-percenters treat economics as a zero-sum game and generally behave as they do: they’re not interested in absolute wealth; they’re interested in relative wealth. They want to be richer than you and me. It’s their only source of self-esteem since they lack marketable skills.
But seriously … you “gotta hand it to him.” Right?
(Better yet, let’s just say the Coen brothers are great. Much easier to get agreement on that, I bet.)
One of the running gags from Liam Bright, who I only really know as an agent of fun/chaos on twitter, is that philosophers fall into two categories: sexy murder poet or basically pleasant bureaucrat. Sounds about right to me.
I think what I was really going for is the latter, but obviously, I made it sound exactly like the former. I’ve got no problem if it just seems extra spicy, as long as it’s pretty boring under the surface. And if it turns out to be sexy murder poet after all, then you can’t say that I didn’t warn you. The people who really worry me are the ones who try to do it the other way around.
There is a lot to unpack here.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about “success” as it applies to nations, and I think you’re a bit harsh on Europeans here, Marcus. Every society seems to make war on its neighbors, fairly consistently. Colonialism is hardly a European invention. The Aztecs did an efficient job of dominating all their neighbors — part of the reason the Spanish were so successful was that everybody else thought “We don’t know who these people are, but they can’t be worse than the Aztecs!” (Arguable.) Part of the reason that the British were so successful in India was that it had already been so thoroughly colonized by the Mughals. Native North American tribes waged wars against one another (albeit with lower casualty ratings than the Europeans brought.) The Middle East, Japan, Australia — any place on earth that had humans also had fairly consistent warfare. Europe just happened to have the most recent surge.
Most people throughout history have known that there are people within a few days walk who would be all too happy to destroy their culture and kill or enslave them. That knowledge must have shaped everyone’s culture in ways we can’t really appreciate today. Cultures would evolve to be fully based around winning battles — because the cultures that weren’t would be absorbed by the ones that were. “Success” was easily definable as “keeping those damned Assyrians (or whomever) from wiping us out this year.”
But the thing is, we’re now stuck with behavior that evolved to let us win the kinds of wars that were fought a hundred years ago. Take all of our inherited attitudes about sex, for instance. All other things being equal, (and in multi-generational conflicts between nations, tactics and technology will tend to even out pretty quickly), the country with the highest birthrate / most cannon fodder is likely to win out in the end. So societal morals that emphasize a child-bearing role for women and discourage non-procreative and gay sex are reasonable survival attributes for those types of societies. It’s just since around the 1950s or so that wars started being winnable by a handful of guys pushing buttons, not thousands of kids running around with guns. Is there a connection between the womens’ and gay liberation movements of the 60s and the technological advances that made “wars of numbers” obsolete? I think so. Likewise, kings and nobles worked great for the military system of feudalism — any nation that didn’t have them would be quickly absorbed by one that did. It wasn’t until gunpowder completely upended military tactics and replaced feudal levies with standing armies that intellectuals began to wonder if the kings and nobles had outlived their usefulness.
Lots of liberals believe that the problem with conservatism is that it’s immoral, and it’s always been immoral. I believe that conservative values used to be well adapted for the world we used to live in a century or two ago — it’s just that they’re slow to recognize that that world doesn’t exist any more.
Marcus @9:
No.
That was an unexpected response; I was expecting something like “yes, but …”.
There are no amphibians, reptiles, basal chordates, or sponges on that chart.
@19 But fish are included several times
Okay, I’ve tried twice to put some of my thoughts about this down, and ended up with enormous screeds (which occurs often when I put my thoughts into writing) which I felt really didn’t clearly illustrate my thoughts on this. Let me try again, and I’ll try to summarize rather than explain my meanings as I go. The audience here is quite thoughtful and well-read, so maybe a summary will be enough to avoid any confusion.
Let’s start with victory conditions. They only exist in games, as a way to tell the players when the game is over. There is no point in a war where one side can proclaim victory without resentment smoldering at least among some participants on the side which lost. In a case like WWII, I suspect that the majority of German/Italians civilians were not resentful of the defeat of their respective fascist states. But I am certain resentment, and even a continued willingness to fight, occurred among some of the German/Italian citizens. In the recent US invasion of Afghanistan, or the previous US involvement in Vietnam, the US could never proclaim anything more than a transient victory because the opposing sides would not admit defeat. And the opposing sides did not admit defeat for good reasons, the US was the occupier. There are only a few ways an occupying force can remain indefinitely: kill off all the indigenous residents, or continue to fight for as many generations as necessary until the occupiers become indigenous. Both have occurred throughout history at various times. But the almost 50 year occupation of the Philippines by the US (1898-1946) showed that even with millions of indigenous people slaughtered and over 2 generations of occupation, the Philippine population still didn’t want to be ruled by the US.
Victory conditions signal the end of a game; outside of games there is no end, time continues to march on.
On to the topic of success, and what it means.
This is a far more difficult topic, because the single word covers so much territory. In fact, it would be possible to create a metaphor for success as a map, with the woods of despair, the mountains of conceit, the river of parenting, etc. If that was done, you would see that any specific society measures each person against that map. And if that individual explores each area without disaster, or was pre-eminent in one area (say at Lucre Lake), society would consider them successful.
What is even more interesting is that each culture has it’s own map. A Hopi Indian map is different than the Modern US map. What we call Western Civilization is a broad category which includes many maps of success, and the US Republican Party map is different than the English Labor map, for example. But they are both more similar to each other than the Hopi Indian map.
Is this metaphor useful? Only to illustrate what we already knew, cultures are different and so what cultures see as successful is also different. But I think the metaphor does clarify the differences somewhat.
Within a culture, the measure of success is usually based on the mythologies of that culture. An easy illustration of this is the myth of the American Dream. The myth says that hard work leads to wealth. This is clearly a myth, and always has been. But what other cultures may call greed, citizens of the US have been taught that the US is the greatest nation on earth because of the American Dream. The last couple generations have gone some why in shattering that myth, but the older generations of US citizens, including my generation, still strongly believes in this myth.
The myth of the American Dream is only part of a larger mythological cycle, or should I say cultural cycle. I first started noticing this cycle when I was in high school, but it became apparent to me later in life. The US culture has a pattern they expect their citizens to conform to, and this can be seen in the life-stages the US mythology propagates. The basis stages are as follows:
Birth
First Day of School
High School Graduation
College Graduation (optional but desirable, higher status accrues if this step is taken)
Leave home
First Job
Marriage (to the opposite sex because of the next stage requirement)
Children
Purchase house (may occur before children)
Children leave home
Retire
Die
Each of these stages are expected to be completed at certain ages, or within a range of ages. When these stages are reached they are often celebrated. There will be parties, friends and family will gather, it’s not uncommon that gifts are exchanged. These are the general stages which current US culture (and many other Western cultures) look for to measure success, and these are embedded in the mythology of our culture.
They don’t have to be.
But because they are, people who don’t follow that pathway are not usually seen as successful unless they excel at the path they do take. A person who eschews marriage and parenting to be an author has reach a higher level of wealth or fame before they will be considered successful, as compared to an author who does marry and raise children. It’s not fair, but that’s how our mythology and thus our society sees it.
Then, there is another problem. While the above list is what the US culture expects, there are a large number of people who do not tick the boxes. They will find it harder to live in the US culture because they are not living up to the cultural expectations. Again, this is not fair, but it is how cultures work.
So that’s my general thoughts on how cultures define and measure success. Now a final note on individual cases, because there are again a couple things to consider.
First, and quickest, once the life-stages expected by US culture are understood, the mid-life crisis is also understandable. When a person has ticked off all the things they unconsciously feel their culture requires of them to call them a success, and it doesn’t bring contentment (and the mythology of every culture I’ve studied says success should bring contentment), that person feels an existential crisis. I think this would be easier for people to accept if they consciously knew they were following a pattern their culture has taught them, but I’m not a psychologist so I’ll stop at that comment.
Second, because the word success covers so much territory, it also is used for individual goals. In this case, all the word means is that a defined goal has been met or exceeded. So a newspaper headline can say, “Invasion of Afghanistan is a success!” without meaning that the population if Afghanistan is rejoicing that they were invaded by an occupying army. But because the word success is used in so many contexts, some people may get the wrong message.
Using the term success for individual goals is fine, as long as these goals are already well defined, like victory conditions in a war game. I can successfully convince a customer that a change needs limited testing. Marcus can successfully put doors on his workshop. If we measured success strictly against these personal goals, I think we would be a lot more content as a society.
flex@#21:
Okay, I’ve tried twice to put some of my thoughts about this down, and ended up with enormous screeds
Be careful, that can lead to blogging. But, joking aside, thank you for circling back and dropping a thoughtful and extended comment.
Let’s start with victory conditions. They only exist in games, as a way to tell the players when the game is over. There is no point in a war where one side can proclaim victory without resentment smoldering at least among some participants on the side which lost.
That is a very good and very important point. It fits right with what I was trying to do – destroy the “supremacy” idea of “white supremacy” by questioning our ability to say “I’m the best” when ultimately (as you say) it’s only temporary, if that. That’s basically what colonialists and imperialist dominants have been doing for thousands of years and it turns out that eventually they are forced to realize that they are not. In my opinion, that’s the problem white supremacy is facing, right now – they have been assuming they’re the best for the last 600 years or so, and maybe they’re realizing that “the best” doesn’t mean you just won a bunch of temporary cultural or military victories. From my perspective that’s what’s going on behind the “great replacement theory” – a bunch of white guys going “Uh oh. Maybe our run as top dog is coming to an end.” All runs as top dog do come to an end.
In fact, it would be possible to create a metaphor for success as a map, with the woods of despair, the mountains of conceit, the river of parenting, etc. If that was done, you would see that any specific society measures each person against that map.
That is really cool.
I encounter people all the time who (for one example) have kids and buy a house and car because that’s what you’re expected to do… They’re not sure if it was a good idea or not but there is social pressure in the form of desire to conform with a set of expectations. It seems that countries’ governments do the same kind of thing: you need a navy or you’re a nobody. If you have nuclear subs you’re a player; if you have nuclear weapons you’re a super-power. Note that “super-power” in that definition alone can also mean “big loser who is cratering the domestic economy in order to have nuclear weapons that hopefully will never be used.”
A Hopi Indian map is different than the Modern US map. What we call Western Civilization is a broad category which includes many maps of success, and the US Republican Party map is different than the English Labor map, for example. But they are both more similar to each other than the Hopi Indian map.
Yes!
Is this metaphor useful? Only to illustrate what we already knew, cultures are different and so what cultures see as successful is also different. But I think the metaphor does clarify the differences somewhat.
Yes. It also makes sense in the way that some “successful” cultures – i.e.: great art, happy people, good agriculture might be considered to be successful until the barbarians who were merely better horse-archers show up at the gates and stomp them flat. I am thinking, of course, of the Mongols’ dealings with the Jurchen (N. China) best described as “whups, there goes your civilization you worked so hard on.” In fact it is these trends that inspired this posting – the Jurchen felt they were successful until the Mongols came along. The Mongols felt they were successful and a supreme power until their leadership grew corrupt and lazy. Ditto the Romans, etc. Rome is a good example of a culture that was “supreme” for a while, but being on the top of the heap just means you fall farther when you’re pushed.
Each of these stages are expected to be completed at certain ages, or within a range of ages. When these stages are reached they are often celebrated. There will be parties, friends and family will gather, it’s not uncommon that gifts are exchanged. These are the general stages which current US culture (and many other Western cultures) look for to measure success, and these are embedded in the mythology of our culture.
Again, Yes! I have friends who say things like “I’m 30 and haven’t had kids yet…” and I want to ask, “Why ‘yet’? Is it a foreordained conclusion that you need to spend the rest of your life raising kids for/with some partner you haven’t even met yet?”
Second, because the word success covers so much territory, it also is used for individual goals. In this case, all the word means is that a defined goal has been met or exceeded. So a newspaper headline can say, “Invasion of Afghanistan is a success!” without meaning that the population if Afghanistan is rejoicing that they were invaded by an occupying army. But because the word success is used in so many contexts, some people may get the wrong message.
Exactly. I wanted to destroy the idea that anyone is “supreme” or “superior” except as a brief moment in the spotlight, and that they shouldn’t pat themselves on the back too much.
There’s also a role that I hadn’t explored for religion. It’s no surprise that the priesthood of a time all compete to chant praises of the Great Leader, whether it’s Hammurabi or Caesar – it’s one of the great social hacks: get a bunch of loud assholes in big hats to declare your supremacy and you’ll eventually start to believe it. That’s part of the problem with American white supremacy – I’d say it’s tightly coupled with America’s own exceptionalist ideology, which is heavily religious; “manifest destiny” is god-given after all.