This is an interesting historical article but the thread so far is too shallow (i.e. reacting only to one controversial phrase in the title), generic (i.e. disengaged from any of the interesting details in the article), and ideological. Generic ideological tangents make for lame and repetitive threads (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
I've replaced the title with the subtitle in the hope that this may help.
In the debate between self made and team effort my opinion is “both.”
Nobody starts from zero. Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.
At the same time, individuals can make unique contributions and are not just interchangeable parts. You see this over and over again in art, music, engineering, science, literature, etc., or really anything requiring skill. People aren’t interchangeable.
I think both positions, when argued exclusively, lead to a false devaluing of most human life. The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats. The “it takes a village” theory leads to the view that everything is a collective product and nobody is unique or special in any way. So you get the idea that 100% of humans are an undifferentiated mass of aggregate labor. That makes people just as disposable as if we are mere peons existing to serve the greats.
I think the reality is that we are an interdependent network of unique contributors.
Blurb points to the author's other book
Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin
Suggesting that she indeed thinks of the self-made myth itself as a product of many cooks.
I'm more skeptical of her framing this mythmaking as an early but enduring model for populist strategy that was (initially) opposed by the elites of the time.
For context, a review of hers of antitax historiography asks:
How do the privileged rule a democracy without triggering a populist revolt? Scholars Steve Fraser, Gary Gerstle, and their colleagues in Ruling America (2005) see historical continuity in the exercise of the founts of riches and power at elites' disposal. The Power to Destroy astutely addresses this question without asking it directly. Even so, a longer historical perspective would have enriched Graetz's approach to analyzing a populist revolt and its destructiveness. The revolt he tracks was not triggered against the rich and powerful, but on their behalf against the progressive state. His analysis provides an invaluable and distressing new twist on the long-standing question of how the privileged rule in a democracy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955278
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691225562/th...
My own derived question is whether there are historical examples of directed-myth-making (fully adopting your balanced perspective on "individual VS communal values") servicing political goals _orthogonal_ to the populism/elitism axis
It's just a restatement of 'nature vs nurture' isn't it? And as you say, both of those things are necessary. Broadly, greatness without circumstances likely leads to obscurity; circumstances without greatness likely leads to indolence. The latter being what often seems to happen in families with generational wealth - some family member makes the fortune, and some later generation, lacking the earlier drive, squanders it.
Yes, facts make it necessarily both.
But what does that mean? What is attribution? What is ownership? How does our legal framework work? How does the media speak about reality?
The reason for "great men" isn't that its true, it's that that's how our society is structured. These ideas come from how our property is structured.
If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.
Like kings. Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land and could chop your head off or let you rot in jail for saying otherwise.
The reality of which you speak is not compatible with the implications of the world we live in. This truth about the world cannot exist practically, materially.
Is that the traditional meaning of 'great' in "great men theory"?
If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?
> Is that the traditional meaning of 'great' in "great men theory"?
It isn't, though I may be tangentially speaking about Great Man Theory, I wasn't focusing on it.
> If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?
I thought using "great men" gives space for virtue and a spiritual/intellectual worth, not just a morally ambiguous "power".
> Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land
That depends on the society. The king in Achaemenid Persia owned all the land. His successors the Seleucid Greek kings didn't. A medieval European king didn't even come close.
I read something to the effect that (in one very early Mesopotamian city) the king owned about 1/3 of the land, another ~1/3 was owned by large landholders who numbered maybe a couple dozen (this group included the queen), and the final ~1/3 was owned by a very large number of small landholders.
Many kings were strong and admirable. Not sure why you are so down on individual kings even if monarchy is not a great system of governance and prone to tyranny.
Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.
Ascribing only vices (chopping heads off) to monarchs is wrong.
To be clear, I am a staunch republican and believe king Charles and other European monarchs need to step down. However you are engaging in revisionism
You know, I am not a historian. And I'm not gonna talk as if I know anything about how kings were viewed by the people.
But in my mind kings can be "good" in the same way slave owners can be "good". Not that much, if any at all, contextually.
The only "good kings" are:
1. The ones that are long dead.
2. The ones that have their head chopped off.
3. The ones that don't actually have a lot of power.
> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.
"Good kings" did not "provide protection". The army did. They also did not provide "protection" to everybody, regular peasants usually couldn't care less about their current king.
Many of the long dead ones did good things. In a manner of speaking there shouldn't have been kings in the past, but we can extend that statement to say that the past should have been modern times, which it couldn't be. Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected. Charlemagne, then, who (at least in his capacity as a cultural focal point) standardized Latin and founded schools and reformed the illegible script into miniscule, was reasonably good, for a king. The Persian, Roman, and Indian emperors, who started postal services, were doing it for espionage and warfare, but as it happens, they were also doing some good.
> which it couldn't be.
And why? Perhaps a good king could have worked at creating institutions rather than "uniting Europe" or other such nonsense?
If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better. With kings and other nobles, the "good things" also tend to be historical accidents. Something that was typically done to gain more power and influence but accidentally ended up being a positive influence.
Regarding Charlemagne, right in the Wikipedia:
> Charlemagne's reign was one of near-constant warfare, participating in annual campaigns, many led personally.
> Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected.
Then why do we worry about slavery, colonialism, racism, and so on?
Fair point, it would have been physically possible to suddenly implement the electronic age in the 800s. So it could have been, technically, but this is a lot to expect from people steeped in their times.
I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents. If the idea is "I should have been born into better circumstances" - well, the meaning of "should" there is very complicated, in how it relates to blame and justice. More generally, we worry about the past bad deeds by modern standards just to assert what our standards are.
> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.
Are you having some concrete historical personalities in mind or are you actually just making up imaginary kings who simultaneously created a common legal framework, fought against invaders while not invading others, eased commers and also enhanced "human flourishing"? And did all that while other people in kingdom and surrounding kingdoms were basically unimportant to all that and the king was the center person to all of that?
Cause I am going to argue that whatever benefits and disadvantages of monarchy, your king is imaginary. Despite being powerful, kings were very much limited by what went on around them and what they could not control.
There is no country which matches your requirements for good king. This is not a serious question. Yes there have been many just kings throughout history.
> The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats
I feel this take says more about the person saying it then it does about the great men theorists.
Believing that revolutions often happen due to a few individuals does not mean that you believe most people are there to serve anyone. That's a non sequitur
"Andrew Jackson is the US's best president and it's not even close" - MZ
It's obviously true that nobody achieves things in a vacuum, since we all have some level of "privilege" given to us by our economic circumstances, the level of education available to us, our luckier heritable traits, etc. But for every successful person, there are countless others born to a similar level of privilege who squandered it. The claim that everyone owes their successes to the group ignores this.
The degree to which an individual is responsible for his own success, and the degree to which fortune enables it, is as old as time. In ancient Greek philosophy (and poetry), a person's life is divided into soul, body, and fortune: one exerts control over one's soul and body, but not over one's fortune, the sum total of things external to him, such as his family and friends and money. Virtues reside in the soul, and external blessings like wealth and the support of others outside the body, and the ancient Greeks were clear in this distinction, of which both halves are necessary but insufficient to achieve great benefits for one's people. Hence the idea that happiness is the exercise of vital powers along lines of virtue within a life affording them scope: the "lines of virtue" are internal elements of character, but "a life affording them scope" is the external support necessary. A virtuous hermit living in poverty alone on an island and a ruinously depraved criminal in the midst of civilization, the one virtuous but lacking fortune and the other fortunate but lacking virtue, are equally ill-suited to achieving great benefits for mankind.
Owing your success to the group does not imply that the success itself is a guarantee. Just that without the group, the odds are many many times worse.
I would argue that the degree to which you owe something credit for your success is the degree to which it guarantees that success. If my society/group/family guarantees my success, no matter my actions, I owe it everything. If it makes no difference at all, I owe it nothing.
If it merely improves my odds, then I owe it something, but there must have been at least one other factor at play, and that factor is also owed credit. I presume you would call that factor something like "luck". No doubt that that plays a role, but credit for luck belongs neither to the society nor the individual. All that is left, then, is individual choice, and so the rest of the credit belongs to the individual.
I agree, but many will say that the ones who didn't squander it were simply lucky.
> for every successful person, there are countless others born to a similar level of privilege who squandered it.
Indeed.
> The claim that everyone owes their successes to the group ignores this.
This doesn't follow. Can you elaborate?
By "owe" I mean that the credit for their success belongs to the group and not the individual, because the individual was merely a product of good circumstances provided by the group. I believe this is the sentiment intended by the "no such thing as a self made man" crowd--no individual is special, and anyone else would achieve similar things under similar circumstances. This ignores the fact that many others DO enjoy similar circumstances but achieve nothing.
I see - some attribute of themselves has set them apart from the ones who had similar circumstances but squandered the opportunity. I guess it depends on how fine you track those circumstances. Did they all have that super-supportive friend named Trey that always knew then correct supportive thing to say? Personally, I can point to many times in my life where a teacher, grandparent, pastor made overt attempts to derail me. Maybe I wasn't completely derailed, but it slowed my progress and may have taken me along a less successful track for awhile. Looking back, I'm surprised I've done what I have. But I do wonder what kind of success I might have had if those naysayers had actually provided support.
Owing your success to something is not the same as saying that having the something guarantees success. I owe my love of Korean food to my time spent living in South Korea; others may live there and come away hating it.
Disputing the notion of "self-made" is generally an attempt to deliberately misunderstand the point in order to derail the discussion, thus making discourse impossible.
No one who uses the term "self-made" literally believes that Howard Schultz never hired any employees at Starbucks, they mean to say that for someone who was born in the projects, he did very well for himself. Pointing out he hired employees adds no value to the discussion, so it's not why people point it out.
I have seen quite a few Americans saying "nobody ever gave me anything" while they were literally from upper class and their parents/families gave them a lot. And actually most people who are born rich stay rich. Some do squander it, but it takes a lot more effort to squander stuff for them then for someone who starts poor.
The "failing upwards" is an actual thing and who is around you massively influences whether you are failing upwards or downwards.
I only argued that legitimate cases of individual achievement exist. The fact that trust fund babies also exist does not contradict that.
If you were to truly do a science of people would you not take into account all of the circumstances that person was in, in order to understand them?
You say: "One achieved it, but the other person in similar circumstances didn't achieve it"
Well how do their circumstances differ? Don't you think it's important how they differ? Actually, couldn't how they differ be the key?
Why, then, do you draw the line at an incomplete analysis? Maybe because it is convenient? Maybe because we'd rather not destroy our illusions of ourselves? Maybe its convenient not to understand others?
What is real in regards to ones self and others? There shouldn't be a loss of pride with understanding.
A big hurdle to proper analysis is that people are unreliable narrators.
Let's take a person who made it rich betting big on bitcoin early on. Were they a savvy investor who made their own fortune, did they merely think it sounded cool and thought why not while bitcoin prices were so low that snatching them up was super cheap, did they rely on a tip or tips from friends/family, or was it some other reason?
If you come back and ask them years later after they've become worth 10^7 or better, how likely is the person who merely got lucky to admit it was dumb luck in an environment that lionizes the wealthy as self-made superhumans?
What level of analysis would you consider "complete"? Certainly if we accounted for every neuron in their brain we could reduce their achievements to whatever configuration of gray matter produced the thoughts and actions that led to their success, and whatever external events produced that configuration. But then we would be at a level of analysis that regards us all as automatons, where nobody, including the group, is accountable for anything at all. This may or may not be technically correct, but I would argue that it is not useful. The question of who gets "credit" for an achievement would be entirely moot, as would the achievement itself and everything else any human has ever done.
I would think the correct level of analysis for this conversation is the lowest one that still allows people to be accountable for their own actions. Lower than that, and the central question of this thread is irrelevant.
> could reduce their achievements to whatever configuration of gray matter
Even if we could do that it would not "reduce" any personal value. I think these are biases you may have. Accountability can be defined, even in that total view.
And right now, even in the incomplete view that we have, it is defined socially and politically. And that's what my real take is:
That the ideas that most people have of self, person-hood, achievement, merit and value, are political ideas.They are not necessarily true/accurate ideas. They serve a political purpose.
> What level of analysis would you consider "complete"?
We can go further than what we have now. In fact I think we MUST go further in order to make the world a better place.
Our current analysis is really just a cheap political tool that serves to preserve a sort of caste-system, most employed for classism and racism. That vague notion that "some people are just different" is the base for many political violations.
If anything the ideal, final form of what I am saying is this: Real Incorruptible Democracy.
So we don't need a scientific model describing of a persons thoughts in real, chemical, atomic detail, we need a world that can take peoples individual circumstance into real political consideration and action.
This could be what a real science of people is.
> They serve a political purpose.
Indeed.
> That vague notion that "some people are just different" is the base for many political violations.
As is the idea that everyone is an interchangeable unit of labor, all producing the same outputs if only they were given the same inputs.
> If anything the ideal, final form of what I am saying is this: Real Incorruptible Democracy.
I don't know what you mean by this, but I am highly skeptical of anything that claims a title like "incorruptible". Such things are usually the exact opposite, sort of like countries with "Democratic Republic" in their name or ships billed as "unsinkable".
> As is the idea that everyone is an interchangeable unit of labor, all producing the same outputs if only they were given the same inputs.
Agreed. That's why I don't believe in that. And actually that's kind of what I'm criticizing: the fake science used to judge peoples behavior.
But I do know we're way WAY more similar than our cultures would have us believe.
> I don't know what you mean by this, but I am highly skeptical of anything that claims a title like "incorruptible". Such things are usually the exact opposite, sort of like countries with "Democratic Republic" in their name or ships billed as "unsinkable".
I'm saying we can devise a political system that is incorruptible. Just like we generate mathematical proofs that underpin technologies which handle our worlds economy. But the creation of an incorruptible democracy can ONLY be done by the people who benefit from it. As in, the rich would never help us do it, only the poor. In fact, the rich would probably view us as enemies if we seriously tried.
> I'm saying we can devise a political system that is incorruptible.
Please show your work. All human history says this can't be done.
Could cryptographic voting/blockchain, which is already a reality, be a part of this new system?
I believe it will, or something similar at least.
But I am a programmer, not a cryptographer. I'm not THE guy. I'm just some random bloke trying to think about something other than making money.
if this is a possibility then we as a people should start taking it seriously. Get open source standards, software and hardware (open chips) and put it to practice.
Though I'm sure the rich would hate this. So would anyone else who has a lot to gain from controlling public offices.
As if the enemies of any person wouldn’t have a less charitable account. He may have gone too far but it’s not new at all.
Excellent essay
Few myths in our society are as dangerous and as anti-social as the “self made man”. No one is self made and all achievements are the result of groups of people working together.
Go back a few generations for just about every wealthy family in the US, and it's nothing but slave (or highly exploitative) labor building on land and resources stolen from the indians. It's the uncomfortable answer behind the question of "Why do WASPs own everything?". The whole "self-made" myth is nothing but a byproduct of white guilt all the way down.
> It's the uncomfortable answer behind the question of "Why do WASPs own everything?"
The correct answer to that question is "they don't".
>The correct answer to that question is "they don't
Read the list and try to find a single non-WASP family: https://www.forbes.com/families/list/
Hang on, from a quick scan I see Koch is German in origin, Lauder is Hungarian Jewish, Pritzker is Ukranian. [edit] and DuPont is French … etc. I think you meant white, not WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant).
The very first example on your list is the Walton family. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, grew up in nowhere Oklahoma as the child of farmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton.
Show me where it says his wealth was built on your “WASP slavery money?”
Do you know anything about how Oklahoma was colonized by white farmers?
Do you know anything about it? Walton’s family wasn’t wealthy plantation owners. Whites who didn’t own slaves—which were the vast majority of them—were hurt by slavery.
Owning a lot of things and owning most of the things is a completely different thing . Obviously people who have more history in a place will be richer. This is hardly surprising.
Not all land was stolen. Much of it was bartered and sold. Tribes also vied for the pelt trade and would drive competing tribes out. The land we took from Mexico was only Spanish and Mexican on paper. Either one had as much control over the Apache/Comanche territory as Russia had over Alaska. Also the Apaches were driven out and nearly exterminated by the Comanche who remembered that they were nearly exterminated by the Apache when they got some stray horses and learned to ride them a century or so prior. The Mexican govt, wanting a buffer against Comanches, invited colonists from eastern states to colonize Texas in order prevent the raiding the Comanches were doing.
That is most of the territory was not under any tribe’s permanent control, nor was land in the west under control of Spain or Mexico before the Americans colonized it. Also lots of tribes were sworn enemies with each other and more than happy to collaborate with Europeans to drive out their enemy tribes with fewer losses to themselves.
Native Americans were here for tens of thousands of years. If it was so easy to use Indians’ resources to build a civilization, why didn’t the Indians do it?
Your attitude is illogical cope. How could “WASPs” have gotten rich from stealing from a group of people they vastly outnumbered and who were primitive in comparison?
Given all the raping, enslaving, pillaging, and general genociding europeans did upon arrival to North America I don’t think we can say it was the First Nations that were “primitive”
If you think those things didn't happen before the Europeans arrived, you need to think again.
The local tribes were mostly one of two types, the nomadic (ex. Comanche) and the agricultural (Apache). The former would often raid the latter, killing many of the men and taking the women and children --often, but not always, they'd end up being their slaves. So the behavior of the Europeans you describe of the time was not out of the ordinary for the locals.
They had own civilization. They lost war and were genocided out. And for the record, they had wars against themselves too, just like Europeans had wars against other Europeans.
Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders. Both took quite a lot of time too. Both were quite barbaric from our point of view, but cruelty and violence can be wealth builder. After all, Putin is super wealthy too. Stalin ended up wealthy too. Hitler same deal. There is not much difference in there.
> Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders.
It’s mathematically impossible for American settlers as a group to have become wealthy by expropriating wealth from Indians. Individual Indians had almost nothing—they were hunter gatherers with a small number of subsistence farmers. Nor did they have much wealth in the aggregate—their population was quite small even pre-contact. The America population in the first census was almost 4 million, which is higher than most estimates of even the pre-contact north america population. A more populous society can’t become rich by expropriating wealth from a poor, less populous society. That’s just math.
What actually happened is that the American settlers built a civilization that utilized the resources of the continent vastly more productively than the Indians had. That’s entirely different.
However, I think the Spanish can certainly be blamed
Some incredibly harrowing stories in Wade Davis's One River
There is also a chance some of the disease giving unto the native americans was by accident, not intentional
Wait, I thought it was the Jews that owned everything?
Or was it the Freemasons?
I can’t even keep track anymore.
I can’t think of a single WASP billionaire though - maybe that’s the mind control at work?
> I can’t think of a single WASP billionaire though
Gates, Buffett, Musk ... all spring to mind.
White certainly. Anglo-Saxon doesn't mean much more than "of western/northern european ancestry" any more. Protestant as much as any other non-Catholic Christian sect.
But WASP doesn't mean literally what it means any more, so maybe I'm missing the reason you overlooked the most famous modern American-citizen billionaires?
OP meant “WASP” in the conventional sense, otherwise his point about slavery wealth doesn’t make sense. There weren’t a lot of German or Italian immigrant slave plantation owners.
Surely Musk isn't a WASP. I think he's from Northern England (don't know why I know this.) You might as well call Paul McCartney a WASP billionaire.
So the only thing out of it they actually are is… white?
Hahahaha
I guess it depends on the original poster's intention.
If your point is that people have colloquialized "WASP", and that I fell into your trap, then OK you got me. :)
My point is that the only actual applicability I can see in its usage is just racism.
"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand." - Karl Marx
My last few comments on this site have been precisely about these ideas. These ideas, in my view, are inherent flaws of philosophical liberalism, of which modern liberalism and conservatism stem. This ideology places itself at the forefront of morality, but can't even seriously analyze the conditions of the individual.
A rich heir is self made, but a poor man is morally and spiritually bankrupt. This is how far this modern ideology goes. Totally unscientific and is also the birthplace of modern racism.
This is how far the equality goes, that is, not very far at all. The liberal revolutions of the last ~400 years must be called the aristocratic revolutions. One where the organized aristocracy came into power, and so did their morals.
One thing I noticed about marxists is that they themselves have a hierarchy surrounding the rich and poor which they imagine exists in everyone else.
In reality, hardly anyone thinks a poor man is 'spiritually bankrupt'. The main religion of the Western world says the poor man is in fact inherently better.
Read any thread in HN about the unhoused and it is very clear many many people think the poor deserve their condition and are lesser for being so.
Unfortunately one thing being homeless can do to you (or being a drug addict can do to you) is give you permanent brain injuries, at which point you are stuck that way.
So there's circularity.
IDK, man, I hear Christians talk about people being misguided (spiritually) all the time. In fact I think they're the ones who say it the most.
But I actually meant it as a sort of drive (spirit), not wholly about belief (spiritual).
But also, you must take into consideration all the ill effects of poverty. Such as crime, lack of education, lack of opportunities, the emotional faults of poverty, unchecked mental health problems, anger, frustration, ills with socialization, etc. All of the effects derived from poverty. All of these get bunched up into a single shallow view of the poor: "they're just like that" - kinda tone.
While the rich get the material wealth and the status-privilege of their families, the rich are assumed to be valuable.
This is literally what the article is talking about, albeit within a more aristocratic context.
Anyone who claims to be self made is dishonest to themselves. "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main" -John Donne