“Any educational system aiming at a complete adjustment between education and society will tend both to restrict education to what will lead to success in the world, and to restrict success in the world to those persons who have been good pupils of the system.”
-T.S. Eliot, 1962: Notes towards the Definition Culture (2nd edition), 101.
Success! Everybody wants to be a success. “He is very successful.” “The production was a great success.” But what does it mean? We use this word so often that we unquestioningly presume an understanding of its significance. What if we have only misunderstood what it means?
In this post, I will lay out briefly the false presuppositions about what “success” means and suggested, instead, a better way of thinking about how to evaluate the actions by which we constitute our lives.
The Mechanization of Work
The first and principal deception concerning “success” comes from the contemporary structure of work. As can be seen readily, with just a little reflection, many of us weave our professions into our identities. Among the first questions we ask others (or are asked ourselves) upon first meeting is, “What do you do (for a living)?” The prestige accorded follows, often, from the expected earnings that follow one’s title. Lawyers, doctors, CEOs, investors—they can afford nice cars, homes, may wear nice suits, have nice offices, work in high-rise buildings with views. Teachers, janitors, garbage collectors, machinists—their earnings will not be so high, their possessions so nice, and their work seldom so clean or fancy.
To excel at many of today’s high-paying, white-collar jobs requires a strong memory and, perhaps most of all, an ability to detect and analyze patterns (on which we will say more in a moment). These demands often emphasize efficiency: spending as little time, energy, or capital while maximizing the returns. It is by a similar standard that we judge our machines: how little does it take for them to produce as much as possible.
Attaining such efficiency, however, comes through working according to a system. Today, in the tech world in particular, a certain value is placed upon being “disruptive”: that is, introducing a product or service that is so good at providing something wanted that the entire industry has to change in order to adapt. But even this disruption presumes a system, such as capitalism, the internet, 5G networks, and the like. One might succeed by disrupting, but this disrupting is itself simply a reworking of one system within another.
Artificial Worlds and Fragile Patterns
This brings me to my second point: the systemic worlds within which such successes (and failures) occur are almost entirely socially constituted. Put in other words, they are far removed from mind-independent realities. Finance would doubtless be the most obvious example of this; but even much of what today passes for technology (say, in the realm of social media or gaming app development, or the training of LLM GPTs) stands at a great distance from what is, independently of what we make it to be.
Being immersed in these worlds, we tend not to notice their artificiality. And being unaware of this artificiality, we tend to become impressed with those who succeed at understanding and manipulating the patterns by which such worlds are shaped. But these patterns are shallow. Success at their discernment and manipulation is, as in the quoted words of T.S. Eliot above, merely success at what the system has determined to be a success. We mechanicize ourselves in attempting to succeed at them.
Unmechanical Minds
For what, indeed, does it mean to succeed? Look for advice on the internet and the doubtless dissatisfying and ironic answer most commonly propounded is: you have to define your own success. But that is nonsense. If “success” were purely “subjective”, then the biggest failure would be to not set for yourself easily achievable goals.
Is success purely subjective? Or might we say that it is relative, but not subjective? In other words, completing a marathon may be a success for someone in good physical condition, whereas merely attempting one might be a success for someone who struggles with both conditioning and motivation. Similarly, a bodybuilder might succeed by failing to get another repetition (having pushed his muscles to their limits) while a novice succeeds by picking up the weights at all.
To put this otherwise, success is always success at something: a striving to achieve a certain goal determined beforehand. In order truly to succeed at anything, we must know with some clarity aforethought what that goal is. All too often, however, we accept the goals without having thought as to whether they are important, or in what way they might have importance.
Can our endeavors be successful, if they are not “efficient”? If they are not “productive”?
Are these questions we ask ourselves—are they questions we ought to ask?
Continuum Philosophical Insight 