Been reflecting on wealth and success (in conventional sense, which may involve some combination of wealth, fame, accomplishment, historic impact, etc) lately.

Both are things I am not personally very motivated by. But they are not things I have a problem with either.

The US is a society that fetishizes wealth and success. It takes its societal organization cues almost entirely from the dynamics of wealth and success. Much can be explained by people either idolizing or demonizing wealth and success.

There’s no such thing as a centrist in the US when it comes to wealth/success. Believing that wealth/success are neither essentially good/evil, or virtuous/sinful, is not an option. You must construct a totalizing view of society as an extension of wealth/success views.

This is something I cannot grok deeply. I can only run American “wealth/success calculus” in emulation mode. I know many wealthy and/or successful people as well as many destitute and/or unsuccessful people. W/S has low correlation with whether I’ll find someone interesting.

To me wealthy or successful people are simply people who set out to solve for wealth or success in some sense, and succeed. Others who try, fail. It is what it is.

Their stories reveal very little about the nature of the human condition beyond the nature of wealth/success.

This is a thought many Americans seem incapable of thinking, but it is possible to live a life based on solving for other things: service, happiness, spirituality, adventure, thrills, family, etc. Most societies in history have had people solving for all of these.

What makes the US unique is the extent to which wealth/success monopolizes life scripts and contaminates even other scripts. You can’t just set out to be a nurse or a monk, you must set out to be a rich and successful nurse or monk. Even if that’s an incoherent thing to want.

Wealth/success monoculture has specific effects . On valorization side:

1. Horatio Algerism (assuming the wealth/success = wisdom, integrity, enlightenment

2. Fascination with half-assed Big Man theories

3. Crippling phobia of anything that even has a hint of socialism

On the demonization side:

1. Conspiracist fever dreams about the Bond-villainy of wealthy/successful

2. Socialist leanings oriented to a true north of ressentiment rather than compassion

3. Delusional recoding of mediocre prole lives as “wealthy and successful”

Second-order effects:

1. “I’m not a billionaire... yet” life scripts
2. A “waiting to arrive” life posture
3. Desperate insecurity around differentiation of individual identity
4. Distortion of justice into identity politics
5. Aestheticization over mitigation of poverty/misery

6. Treating of poverty or lack of success as a character flaw rather than just “it is what it is”

7. Systematic downplaying of the role of chance (even by the demonizers who overweight determinate structural oppression by the wealthy/successful in social explanations)

The structural/institutional effects are all over the place.

Drug war, ridiculous incarceration rates, casting of any social cost problem as a “you’re trying to shill for/punish wealth/success”...

Signaling oriented consumerism, premium mediocrity...

The darkest effects are around things the US expends vast amounts of energy and capital in but barely talks about in anything like an appropriate proportion: healthcare, military adventurism, etc.

Why? Because attitudes to wealth/success imply very little of use on these issues

If you try to derive a sound view on healthcare, military adventures, or climate action from whether you love or hate billionaires or movie stars, you will end up with ridiculous cartoon views because these problems are fundamentally not even about wealth/success.

Note that obsessive focus on wealth/success is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. More individuals will be wealthy and/or successful as a fraction of the population and the society in aggregate will also be more wealthy and successful. But median is not the same as maximum.

You’ll have more billionaires and rockstars per capital and higher GDP and growth perhaps. But you’ll also be more cruel to your poor, sick, dying than societies with less individual/collective wealth/success. You’ll have bigger social costs, snowballing faster.

You will de facto criminalize lack of success or wealth. Your ability to solve for anything else (wisdom, compassion) will atrophy, because those are skills too.

Privilege literally means private law. That will become the only kind of law. Public law will become prison yard law.

Solving for wealth/success will look like breaking out of prison. If you’re not born to privilege, you’ll be born into increasingly prison-like situations, designed to contain, coerce, punish, tame. What I call breaking smart in more optimistic writing will become breaking out.

All countries have their share of transient problems, acute crises, chronic structural problems, and existential paradoxes. But the US probably has the most severe collective mental health problem among countries I think I grok. And the root cause is a wealth/success monoculture.

All this just makes me sad.

The hard part is that America is highly attached to its wealth/success orientation as both a great national strength and the root of its exceptionalism narrative.

It is hard to accept that your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness.

Arrested development is *always* rooted in a sense of one’s strength. It is hard to move past this condition because it’s hard to notice when a strength stops being a strength and turns into a limiting self-perception.

I have no suggestions. America will either grow or die.

Btw, inequality, wealth concentration, cronyism, financialization of everything: all these are not “problems”. The are natural consequences of W/S values and enjoy basic moral sanction. If wealth+success = good, anything that favors it can at worst be inefficient, not bad.

The “problem” America has with these things is that they let “undeserving” people get wealthy and successful, and prevent greater peaks being reached by bigger Big Men, not because they make the poor more miserable or prisons more terrible.

America has more compassion for Bezos being harassed by Trump than people scammed by Trump University. More compassion for a well-funded startup being blocked from a market by a protectionist crony sector than people being actively hurt by the social costs of that sector.