In the wake of every origin story that makes its way into the popular imagination—be it in athletics or academics, politics or entertainment—there is the same tendency to elevate someone who has attained a measure of success above their prior conditions. Human beings, as has often been said, love the story of the underdog, and no doubt the opinion of the majority would see injustice in considering those who were previously impoverished as anything but the sovereign architects of their own destiny. This is the narrative most appealing to the media and the one usually tolerated by the general public, especially in view of the hardships probably endured by the person who journeyed from rags to riches (before being at last graced by the gaudy limelight). What right do we have to invalidate a person’s struggle, hard work, and just reward? And yet the truth is messier and less palatable.
This kind of perception presupposes that we as human beings are the makers of ourselves—that our birthright is a tabula rasa for the self-creation to follow. We exist, then happen to make ourselves into whatever we can contrive; we are existentialists, from this perspective, followers of the gruel made edible by French intellectuals who propounded responsibility and self-assertion as a way out of the aftermath of mid-twentieth-century atrocity.
Fed more by instinct than by reason, the wish to see ourselves as infinitely malleable and enhance our prospects of success, whether that be reproductive or existential, this innate and unconscious tendency toward existentialism in order to explain ourselves to ourselves is easily refuted, since it lacks rational support. Let us ask: how can something exist before it is in reality? How can something at once be and not be? That is the whole rigamarole presupposed by existentialist thinking: that we can somehow fathom ourselves out of nothing after coming into existence, demigods gracing the Earth of our design.
Look around, dig deeper than the facile explanations provided by those whose bread and butter is heroizing the successful and the famous and you should discover the absurdity: behind every story of success out of poverty is a person privileged by a genetic inheritance who abandoned all the men, women, and children that have to continue living without such luck in undignified conditions; behind every case of financial success, a propitious set of connections, a fortuitous date of birth, or an intellect developed into a talent conferred on an individual by genetics and only thereafter enhanced by so-called toil and industry; behind every triumph, some kind of advantage, whether it be material or genetic.
Based on the counterpoise of essentialism expressed by the Latin phrase “operari sequitur esse” (the act of doing follows that of being), this line of rhetoric is antithetical to our human instinct, which prefers the old flattery that we are capable of creating ourselves. Attributing the cause of a person’s success to anything but the person is in appearance an injustice, but denying the truth can be even more unjust. Falling into the trap of self-validation on the basis of success, moreover, leads to the fallacy of the just-world phenomenon, which is the natural extension of that egoistic self-validation to an entire worldview that is noxious, condescending to the less fortunate, and inaccurate. We do not deserve anything any more than others deserve nothing; there is no deserving as such, which we should consider an inviolable law: deserving presupposes an ownership of actions and their preconditions that does not actually exist. Deserving, at bottom, is an illusion. (It is only one of many, alas—but we humans have to pace ourselves.)
The world is not a just place, if that were ever in doubt; success and failure alike come from conditions that are determined unequally and arbitrarily before being assigned to us before our birth, a priori. And while hard work is undoubtedly an important part of any given success, it is nonetheless true that the hard work itself only ever exists within a set of conditions that are predetermined. The hard work is never really ours—not ours, at least, in a way gratifying to the ego, whereby we would love to attribute to ourselves all our efforts and virtues.
The preconditions of our lives determine our destinies far more than whatever someone happened to do by their own volition (itself taken with a grain of salt) under a set of already-established, a priori conditions. We are, and then we exist; whatever happens after that is nothing more than the result of an inscrutable chain of preconditions. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a modern absurdity as old as humanity itself. And like organized religion, it is likely to die when humanity dies and not a moment sooner. As a more rational and systematic philosophy would have it, we cannot change ourselves beyond what is already changeable. We can only work within limits that have already been established, both within and without ourselves, in both our material and our non-material and genetic conditions, which are the stuff of eternity: space, time, and causality—the trifecta of our inner nature.
