~H. Westchop

There have been many days, dear reader, when I have felt the world has crushed my spirit. “A vague statement filled with overblown rhetoric” you may say with a loud sniff, and I would not blame you, yet I implore you to suspend your belief for but a brief moment and try and ignore how typical and overwrought my prose must sound.  Instead, bring yourself back to the times when the world has seemingly destroyed your will, whether through ill luck or doubt and regret.  There are those dark times in the middle of the night when you lie awake, eyes staring at some spot on the ceiling, and, in a vision, a failed moment or a poor choice you once made looms before your eyes and you curse aloud at the fool you once were, and your eyes brim with regret, and you clutch your covers, trembling with a mixture of rage and fear as well as a distinct feeling that the past is both gone and omnipresent, conditioning your life and your thoughts even now, to the point where you yourself as an independent entity don’t even exist.

I question if you, dear reader, oh tomfool in the dark, can possibly understand my words, yet I hope you do, because these regrets are the concern of this post and, in some ways, all my posts.  This concern stems from Malcolm Gladwell and his self-congratulatory exercise Outliers, the “story of success.”   Those floating moments, those days when the darkness has seemed to sink into every cranny of my being and I can do nothing but claw at the walls of my modern prison in frustrated anguish, occur because I still cling to an antiquated definition of success, a definition I believe Gladwell implicitly believes to be true (one of the great failures of his work is that he never properly defines “success” through words, instead only bringing forth examples as varied as Bill Gates to Jewish lawyers to entire Asian populations): success is built through the eyes of one’s peers.  In Gladwell, this manifests itself in both a general pop-cultural assumption (a lawyer or computer expert is automatically successful) or in some kind of measurement, almost always money (the exception being the Asians with their math test scores, although, as we saw with the IQ tests, testing does not lead to success in Gladwell’s mind (any confusion you may have over this definition is just a greater argument against the intellectual rigor of Gladwell’s work)).  These two manifestations are closely linked, as, in America, money is generally assumed to equal success. The ironically idiotic movie “Idiocracy” uses all of its lack of cleverness and blunt force trauma to drive this point home, all the while making the entirely nonsensical assumption that the rich are somehow smarter than the poor; I have met both groups in equal measure, and I can say with confidence that there are similar(ly small) numbers of those that see the light and similar(ly large) numbers of those filled with the dank stench of mental incompetence and overall lack of intelligence.  I will not dally with the witless barbarian in these matters, for if you believe that the rich are smarter than the poor I suggest (no, I command!) you leave this webpage and never return again.  I always remember that I try to shepherd the weak tomfool from intellectual decay, not the foaming savage who has had the misfortune to be born in some sweltering filthy hovel.

I have gotten away from the point, so let us assume in the manner of a thought experiment that Gladwell’s suppositions are true, that his definition of success relies more on whimsy chance and fate and less on pure talent or intelligence. I believe there is a clear metaphor here which can part the heady clouds that threaten to unravel my mind even at this moment: the effect of determinism on moral responsibility for action.  Quite simply, if everything we do is determined for us beforehand, we, by definition, have no control over our actions.  If we have no control, and my person were to commit some moral travesty, well, how could you hold me responsible?  I had no control; I was fated by the gods, or by science, whatever you wish, they accomplish the same thing.  There is no moral responsibility in a deterministic universe.  Similarly, if Gladwell’s success stories owe much of their success (again, Gladwell’s terms)  to chance and fate, then how can we consider them a success?  Perhaps they made some important choices, but more often then not they were lucky, and that luck translated into a series of slight advantages that built over time. There success is illusory; it was, as Gladwell put it, a “gift”!  Yes! And there we reach a problem with Gladwell’s definition of success, or any definition of success involving some external factor, including your peers.  A definition of success must be based on your choices.  And any “peers” are external factors outside of your control.  Perhaps you are a painter that has produced the most exquisite painting in the world,  but, for whatever reason, your work is not recognized.  Were you unsuccessful? What if your peers are all much worse than you? Or jealous? Or incompetent?  What if you were poor, and the painting was never seen?  What if it was burned in a fire?  Doesn’t it still matter? Aren’t you still a success!?  Wasn’t what you accomplished, as fleeting as it may be, still beautiful and heartfelt and meaningful!?? Wouldn’t it have mattered more, been better, than some painting by a lesser painter who, through his birth and luck, was internationally recognized?  What of the nurse who touches souls left and right with his or her soft words of encouragement and hope?  Who brings more happiness with a touch of kindness or smile than the mealy doctor with his hooked nose and pompous attitude who prolongs life with all of the arrogance and disrespect that only ego and fortune can furbish?  If she is not recognized, don’t her actions still matter?  

Remember as a younger pre-adolescent, arguing foolish philosophical concepts, some friend bringing up that hated topic: the tree that falls and the sound that no one hears.  Was there a sound?  Did it exist?  Infuriating, I know; simplistic, I know;  naive, ignorant, overblown, inconsequential, so you say.  But there are trees falling left and right, all around us, and no one hears, and I cry a sad song because they matter, goddamnit, I know somewhere they have to matter.