No, You Didn’t Build That

The myth of the "self-made" man, and other male maladies of the mind.

I’ve rattled more than a few hornets’ nests over the years. That’s what happens when you write about topics like Israel, trans activism, populism, critical race theory (and its critics), and Trumpism. I penned a piece for Queer Majority last year arguing that cops should be allowed to march in Pride parades. It drew such ire that QM’s Facebook lost followers for several weeks and was shadow-banned due to a flood of users reporting the article. Some folks even made a podcast episode about it just to bash me. But of all the subjects I’ve written about, nothing has filled my own inbox with more sustained vitriol than my critique of meritocracy.

More than a month after publication, paroxysms over my discussion of the role that luck plays in success were still streaming in, complete with many an impassioned diatribe from readers who insisted that they have succeeded in life entirely on their own steam. Unlike my regular hate mail, these messages were personal. I hadn’t merely written something they found incorrect, foolish, or outrageous, but something that made these readers feel attacked. And I noticed something else. They were, as far as I could tell, all men. Indeed, there is something uniquely male about this disease of the mind that renders one incapable of accepting that they are not the sole author of their own success.

Busting the myth of the “self-made” man is often jumbled up with politics, philosophy, religion, or spirituality. At bottom, it’s a matter of simple cause and effect. As I wrote in my critique of meritocracy:

“Everything that leads to success or failure stems from causal factors outside any individual’s conscious control. You did not choose your parents, upbringing, environment, or economic conditions. You don’t choose your genes, your height, or your face. You cannot take credit for your natural talents, your raw intelligence, nor the ability to focus or work hard. You cannot even choose the thoughts that pop into your head. And you also cannot take credit for all the terrible things which might have befallen you, but didn’t. To say nothing of nepotism and cronyism.

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But you worked hard to get where you are? You were lucky to have been able to work hard! You were lucky to have been motivated and disciplined. You were lucky that you possessed the cognitive and physical wherewithal to persevere; that you were not stopped in your tracks by disease, injury, personal tragedy, or any of the countless calamities whose paths you avoided by sheer luck. Let’s not delude ourselves here — it’s luck all the way down.”

These observations verge on self-evident truths that should hardly constitute any kind of controversy, but man is not a rational animal. Sam Harris captures the comical absurdity of the resistance with which basic causality is met in his 2012 book Free Will:

“Consider the biography of any ‘self-made’ man, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make and of which he was merely the beneficiary. [...] And yet, living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren’t born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments.”

So often in life, hardship acts as a tax on the mind’s bandwidth, making it more difficult to reason, while the hardship-free are comparatively unencumbered. When it comes to admitting the role that luck plays in success, however, the opposite appears to be true. Those who suffer from congenital diseases, or who have been victimized by natural disaster, or who struggle with addiction, or who grieve the loss of a loved one, often have a greater appreciation for one of life’s central lessons: you are not in control. The Buddhists figured this out long ago. Other religions followed suit. It survives in bastardized form to this day in invocations such as the serenity prayer, used both by Christians and support groups alike: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. This notion of surrender to cosmic forces, whether a deity, or the universe, or chaos, or chance, is almost exclusively invoked in contexts of coping with loss or overcoming tribulations.

Just as acknowledging ignorance is an instrumental first step in the expansion of knowledge, relinquishing the illusion of control and loosening your white-knuckled grip on the imaginary helm of your life’s ship paradoxically grants you a bit of control. The game might be rigged, but you’re bound to have a better go of it if you at least recognize the rules.

Those for whom things have worked out well, however, seldom find occasion, in modern Western society, to contemplate the currents of life that have helplessly propelled them in every direction they’ve ever gone. Such people are instead prone to concocting a self-glorifying image of themselves as Nietzschean ubermenschen who will themselves to power with nothing but boot straps. This kind of thinking isn’t just intellectually laughable — it’s the most obnoxious form of arrogance.

Barack Obama was right, if perhaps impolitic, when he said, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable [system] that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that.” That day in 2012, the background thrum of the cosmos was joined by the collectively throbbing forehead veins of hundreds of millions of menfolk.

Men, most of all, don’t want to hear this, but you didn’t build that. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or how far you’ve come. I don’t care if you constructed a building with nothing but a hammer and your own two hands. I don’t care if you have video evidence of it. You didn’t build that. Not really. Zoom out from the kindergarten analysis of whose hand held the hammer, and a longer view unfurls, revealing the incredible matrix of moving parts, auspicious conditions, random chance, prior causes, upstream events, and coalescing factors.

Acknowledging this reality is not without its political implications, as I discuss in my previous piece. In the minds of many, it seems to open the door for left-wing economic policy, despite the fact that some of the public intellectuals most reviled by the political left have built plainly conservative agendas from similar starting points. Even if it were the case, however, that accepting the basic truth about causality led inevitably to the empowerment of some despised ideological adversary, it cannot be credibly denied on the basis of its political implications. The men who take this stance are often the same guys who revel in the ethos of “facing hard truths”, whose mantra is “facts don’t care about your feelings”, and who never miss an opportunity to slam their opponents for letting their emotions get in the way of logic. Fellas, there’s nothing manly about self-delusion.

As far as implications go, however, the political takes a backseat to the personal. The most fundamental shift that flows from accepting the role of luck is in how we think, act, and treat one another. Pridefulness gives way to appreciation. Haughtiness gives way to humility. Sneering superiority gives way to compassion and civic virtue. The cult of self is one helluva drug, but the world we see under its influence isn’t real, and the simulacrums of ourselves it creates are childish, egotistical ingrates. The release that comes with embracing the illusoriness of control should not be a gift reserved only for the downtrodden or grief-stricken. It’s a source of inspiration as much as it is of consolation. When we recognize the larger picture of what lies behind our successes, what follows first is gratitude, and then paying our good fortune forward. I think we could all use a little more of that.

See also: “Being a Man Is a Special Needs Condition”

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