The Myth of the Self-Made Millionaire

There is a pervasive myth in our culture that is hurting many people. The story goes something like this.

Our protagonist

Meet Tim. He was raised in a lower-middle-class family of four and dropped out of high school in eleventh grade. You see, Tim was never just an ordinary kid who disliked being called Timothy. He was a young man with a very bright future.

Growing up, Tim had all the calling cards of a future high-achiever. He excelled years beyond his peers in reading and mathematics and displayed an impressive amount of entrepreneurial spirit. At the ripe old age of ten, Tim had already started his own company with his dad, building his business acumen and turning a nifty profit while he was at it.

As Tim progressed into his teen years, he became particularly enamoured, like many his age, with technology. Tim, however, took it to another level. He was not just content with consuming, he wanted to create. He began teaching himself to code and before long he was developing rudimentary apps with his friends.

The long and short of it is: the years went by and Tim’s abilities and resources only grew exponentially. His parents who had both struggled their whole lives now never have to work again. And Tim, if he was the retiring type, could retire now at the age of 30 without a care in the world.

The meritocracy

Tim’s story is a familiar one. He is a champion of our meritocratic society. And, not just a champion, he is a real success story — he pulled his family and himself off the teetering edge of poverty, creating value for the world in the process.

What I wish to discuss here are the fruits of Tim’s labours. Not his financial recompense, but the moral desert that comes with attaining, or failing to attain, this type of success. By moral desert, I mean the idea that Tim morally deserves his achievements and all their attendant laurels.

At this point, I imagine many will not see any issue with the picture laid out. After all, this is how our society runs. Things will become a little clearer as we take a look at the anti-Tim.

The anti-Tim

Meet Freddy. Freddy, like his brilliant counterpart, Tim, grew up in a lower-middle-class family. Growing up, Freddie exhibited nothing out of the ordinary. Like many of his friends, he had a slightly morose sense of humour and was more apathetic to school than both his parents and teachers would have liked.

Freddy, unlike Tim, completed high school. However, he did not pursue higher education. Even if he had wanted to, his grades barely scraped him through graduating so he was bound to go to a community college. The truth was, even when he tried in school, he just found academics tough. Freddy thought this was for the best since even if he had wanted to go to school, it was too expensive for his family to make work.

Instead, Freddy went right into an entry-level sales job where he worked his ass off. He picked up all the shifts he could get and found real pleasure in putting in a hard day’s work and making connections with customers.

Unsurprisingly, Freddy will not retire early. He has no concrete plans for the future and is just focused on making ends meet. Knowing one day his parents will have to rely on him weighs heavily on his mind.

The ugly asymmetry

Take any iteration of these stories you want: turn the dials up or down to your heart’s content, toss in or take away all sorts of variables — the fact remains, neither of these two men made themselves.

Tim was not responsible for the fact he was born with such a remarkable brain. He was also not responsible for being born into a time or a place where his strengths could be utilized. Had he been born in a war-torn country, or born in most of the rest of human history, he might not have excelled so fantastically. And then, would it be his fault he didn’t excel? Tim was also not responsible for having parents who cared to foster his precocity. The list goes on.

We are products of our genome and our environments. We choose and create neither of those. Any instance where it seems like we do choose to overcome these is an illusion. If you overcame a massive depression, you cannot account for the variables that aligned for you to do so. Why did these interventions work for you when they didn't for so many others? You can’t know. They just did.

You worked your ass off and built a life for yourself out of next to nothing? Why are you able to have the brain of a conscientious person? How can you account for the fact that you have the brain of a person who responded well to this type of adversity? When these variables would have pushed so many others to break, how can you account for them sparking the right thing in you?

The point is not to guilt those who are fortunate. If you are reading this you are fortunate in one way or another — we all are. Even just having the spare time and internet access to read this makes you lucky. The point is that none of us quite earned our successes or failures in the way we commonly think.

Neither Tim nor Freddy crafted their lives. Tim does not morally deserve his successes, he got lucky. Likewise, Freddy does not morally his tougher road, he got unlucky.

The implications

The implications of this realization are vast.

Tim can keep his financial resources, at the end of the day his productive activities added value to the world and he should be rewarded proportionally. What happens after, though, should change.

It is becoming more and more the standard for the rich to be philanthropic and it should continue this way. To be successful is to realize your life could have played out differently, and all those who were not so lucky did not deserve to be unlucky. As someone with means, it is your responsibility to give back and help correct the inherent disparities dealt by life. And it is the responsibility of us all individually and collectively to stop shunning those who are uneducated, those who feel displaced in a world dominated by the STEM fields.

The corollary to thinking that someone morally deserves their success is that someone else deserves their misfortune. If Tim could pull himself up by the bootstraps, why couldn’t you? So much resentment and anger fester at the educated populace because of this implication. Many people simply don’t have the bootstraps to get where they might want to go. Life is unfair.

In the end, it is more comfortable to think a homeless drug addict got what was coming to them; it is less comfortable to realize they were merely profoundly unlucky and it is our responsibility to pull them out of their hell.

It seems to me that thinking this way should be a large door to compassion and understanding for our fellow man.

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