backchannel: playing the success game
from this reddit thread
then you are scum and deserve to suffer… Drink your flavor aid, like good boys and girls, and you to can be one of the chosen ones. Eventually.
It’s darker than that. There’s a deep vein of Calvinist predestination in American religious thought. In this model the fact that one is “scum” is evidence that one is not and can not be one of the Elect. God has already chosen your fate and there’s nothing to be done about it. You can be discarded by society because you have already been discarded by god.
On the flipside the successful see their success as evidence that they are the Elect. And Good Guys can do whatever they want because, you know, whatever the Good Guys has to be Good. This leads to all kinds of fuckery as we see today in politics, approaches to homelessness, policing, treatment of ex-cons, etc.
My take is that there are basically two major factors at play. To use a sailing metaphor:
- how the wind is blowing (the situation)
- and how we set our sails (our choices within that situation)
Yes, there will always be people who fail upwards and people who self-sabotage like it’s an Olympic sport. But in the broad middle we have some influence on how things turn out.