Posted on 08/17/2005 8:58:21 AM PDT by markderian
“We might say that success is a hideous thing. Its false similarity to merit deceives men. To the masses, success has almost the same appearance as supremacy. Success, that pretender to talent . . .”
This quotation, said by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, tells us that the good and the popular may not always be one in the same.
I am sure that we have all heard messages such as this from half-baked after school specials and the like. But the fundamental principles of this issue run much deeper than is commonly thought.
The good life requires that we set goals for ourselves and achieve them; short range and long range. But not all goals are inherently noble, and the dichotomy Hugo makes between success and merit gives us insight into why this is so. We must differentiate between those aspects of our lives which are essential, and those aspects which are nonessential.
The essential are the aspects of our life which we can control, such as our merit. The nonessential are the aspects of our life which we cannot control, such as our success. This is because our success ultimately depends on what people think about our work and whether they accept it or not. Since we cannot control what people think and what they will accept, we cannot control our own success.
A common goal we hear is: “I want to make a lot of money.” What this person is actually saying is: “I want others to like my work.” This person’s main prerogative is to produce work or make a product that others will accept, but not necessarily have merit.
This may not be the person’s full, explicit intention when he expresses such a goal. He may really want to do something genuinely good with his life, and simply make a lot of money doing it, but if the dichotomy between success and merit is not clear in his mind, he will sooner relinquish the good than live a life of poverty.
There can be an overlap of merit and success, of course. Many successful people of our world have more merit than most of us can imagine, such as Bill Gates. But this doesn’t make it any less important to distinguish between the two in our minds.
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The human spirit is everything about man which is nonmaterial, such as our hopes, desires, passions, and thoughts. I firmly believe that this is the greatest entity on earth. It is the source of every great achievement of man, from the tallest skyscraper to the most brilliant novel.
But once a man dedicates his life to the pursuit of success instead of merit, his path in life revolves around the minds of others, and he has abdicated his self, and he becomes nothing more than a slave to the goals and ambitions of others. At this point, a man is spiritually dead.
This is why the above quotation must be accepted in full. Anything else will lead to the loss of our spirit, and the loss of the best within.
I would like to question, if I may, the direction of causality in the following statement:
But once a man dedicates his life to the pursuit of success instead of merit, his path in life revolves around the minds of others, and he has abdicated his self, and he becomes nothing more than a slave to the goals and ambitions of others. At this point, a man is spiritually dead.
I think it should be reversed: it is when man's spirituality declines that he dedicates himself to success and centers his actions on the perceptions of others.
At all times in our history, Americans said that they wanted to make a lot money. There was nothing wrong with that because it was tacitly UNDERSTOOD that making money was within limits of morality, spirituality and, yes, religiosity. This has become recently a problem --- even more so in Europe than here --- only because "G-d is dead," to quote Nietzsche. It is when spirituality declines that the pursuit of money and success, rather than merit, becomes unbalance and thus problematic.
the point isn't whether making money is good or bad, it's that when all attention is focused on making money, we may lose sight of what's important. But maybe i should have made that clearer.
Sounds good, this is one of the implicit themes in most of Hugo's novels as well.
No, you made THAT clear. I am not sure you have clarity about what comes first and what comes second.
And another thing: the breakdown in morality has nothing to do with the decline in religion, as if we need to be religious in order to be moral. I'm an atheist, and I enjoy Nietzsche. In fact, Nietzsche hints at this topic in Beyond Good and Evil when he says that a superman needs to have "reverence for his own soul."
I'm not done with this essay yet, because i think it's important to bring up the fact that while everyone recognizes the popular isn't necessarily the best, we are constantly imbued with the idea that it's important to be successful, from an early age.
well, i do gloss over a lot in this piece, i can admit that. Some don't have a self to begin with, and have always been a compilation of others, so when they strive for success, instead of merit they don't 'lose' anything because nothing was there in the first place. All they're really doing is living the way a person without a self lives--fulfilling a natural progression.
This is the most blatant peace of LEftist garbage I've seen on FT for quite some time.
One could easily argue that it is success, not merit, that is a social construct, and that merit is a value inherent in nature and independent of social construction.
It hinges upon what, exactly, is meant by the terms 'merit' and 'success'.
I would posit that, in the present, there exists no such means. Because the ability to objectively evaluate the quality of a person's character there will always be contention between opposing views as to the quality of any particular person's character. I have no reconciling answer for you, or rather, I should say that an adequate response and a reconciling answer is beyond the relatively limited scope of this forum, or at least beyond my present ability to concisely provide an answer.
My personal recommendation in this matter is to become acquainted with the views expressed by John G. Bennett in the four volume series 'Dramatic Universe' and/or the small booklet by same 'How We Do Things' which touch upon the notion of a universal quality of Fact, Being and Will, as the question of a person's quality of character is a question of Being and is inadequately addressed by a science which can only touch on matters of Fact while having nothing to say on matters of Being nor Will.
My apologise if this is an inadequate response.
Pretty good; thanks for the smile. However, you omitted to draw the distinctions between merited success and successful merit, stemming from the fact that nothing succeeds like success and nothing merits like merit, too...
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