Ep35 -- The Meanings of Success

 My friend Jonathan Blank, whom you met on this podcast when I talked to him about his documentary, "Sex, Drugs, and Bicycles", about the socialist hellscape that is the Netherlands, which somehow manages to destroy the US in every measure of happiness and wellbeing.  Well, I met up with Jonathan last week, right after he got back from burning man way out in the Nevada desert.   Now Jonathan loves Burning Man, but he's a little conflicted because it's a rather energy and carbon-intensive endeavor.  Attendees may leave the desert just as they found it, but the effects of the festival are definitely felt by the greater environment.  And Jonathan was noting how his fellow burners, the vast majority of whom would identify as committed environmentalists,  can rationalize away the impact of the festival. And I said sort of half joking,  "that it could just be humanity's ability to rationalize that has made us so successful as a species."  And he quickly objected.  I don't think we've been so successful, he said.  Our species has only been around for about 300,000 years and we're on the brink of driving ourselves to extinction for no other reason than, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, saving ourselves isn't cost-effective.  By comparison, the dinosaurs were around for 165 million years before they were wiped out by an event entirely out of their control.  Sharks have been around for 450 million years, and after all that time, the only thing threatening their continuing survival is us.  So the best you can honestly say about our species is we've had a good run so far.  But the jury is still out on whether or not we're actually successful in the long run.  

So this week I want to talk a little bit about us. Not necessarily as a species, but as individuals. And different ways that we can look at ourselves and how we define success compared to other people. And how to nurture the habit of looking at ourselves and defining success in counterintuitive ways.  

Stay tuned.  

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting a man-made culture that's out of sync with our human nature and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.  

But first a word about a sponsor.  

This week's episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you by US Steel, which has been in the news a lot lately because Japan's largest steel maker, Nippon Steel, has made an offer to buy the company and US Steel is determined to accept it.  Now that in and of itself it's not necessarily a problem. Foreign companies buy domestic ones all the time. The problem arose when the Biden administration threatened to block the deal on national security grounds, one of the very few, if not only conditions upon which the government can scuttle a deal between private entities.  And even that isn't really the problem, although clearly small government conservatives are outraged at this kind of what they consider government intrusion into the private sector.  

The real problem is US Steel CEO David Burritt's response to this threat to scuttle the deal.  Burritt said if the deal doesn't go through, he's going to move the company's last remaining steel mill in Pittsburgh, which is a union mill to non-union Arkansas, and also move the company's Pittsburgh headquarters down south as well.  Of course, Burritt isn't saying that he's moving the plant out of spite. He says he's doing it because it's not cost-effective to run a union shop and abide by the union contract's demands.  But there's a small problem with that argument. Since Burritt took over as CEO of US Steel until it received its first purchase offer in May of this year, its stock value was up about 8%.  The share value of America's largest steel producer, Cleveland-Cliffs, which was actually the company that made that first offer to buy US Steel,  over that same period of time, was up by 130%.  And here's the kicker. All of Cleveland-Cliffs steel mills are unionized under contracts similar to US Steel's.  

It's interesting to see how this story holds a mirror up to how corporate media portray these realities and also what they say about how our economics affects our society.  For example, The Wall Street Journal just the other day, ran an article about recent developments in this story, 

with the headline "Nippon Steel Finds Unlikely Ally in Pittsburgh Workers". Now that headline would lead one to believe that workers are aligning themselves with plant management's interests in the sale. What the headline should really say is, "Workers Desperate to Save Their Jobs, Yield to CEOs Threat".  And then there's the question of national security. It might seem like a stretch to think that the sale of a steel company to a foreign ally could threaten our national security.  But when you think about it, In ways other than those propagated by the dominant ideology, the threat begins to materialize before your eyes.  As Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect recently,  

"does rejecting Nippon's bid on the grounds of national security stand up to scrutiny? That depends, I suppose, on your definition of national security.  If national security ultimately depends on having a working class that is financially secure, that isn't at the mercy of globalized capitalism, that has a real stake in American prosperity, and that isn't reduced to a dangerous lump in status by Wall Street maneuvering, then yes, having a workforce whose interests and rights are secured by union contracts is actually a linchpin of longterm national security.  In its absence, as we've begun to see,  the internal threats to American security and American democracy can readily metastasize.  Remind you of anyone and any particular movement in the news of late?  

And we're back.  

There's a kind of mistake that researchers make called "selecting on the dependent variable". And what it means is that if you're trying to establish some correlation between two variables, Let's say the amount of coffee you drink and how much money you make.  You want to see how changes in the independent variable, coffee consumption, affect the levels of a dependent variable, earnings. If you only look at people who make a lot of money, thereby selecting your subjects on the dependent variable you're testing, earnings, you can't really know if the coffee is actually having any effect, because you don't know how much coffee lower earners drink.  It could be that they drink even more coffee. But you don't know that because you don't have any data from low earners.  

You see this kind of thing in business books all the time. The author will look at 20 different successful entrepreneurs and see what they all have in common. Now it's possible that those behaviors lead to, or at least related to, success as an entrepreneur. But you can't really say anything with any certainty because you know nothing about the behavior of unsuccessful entrepreneurs.  

When we want to define success. And particularly when we want to compare levels of success across countries or cultures, we make kind of the opposite mistake.  We look at only a select few criteria,  like how much money you have, do you own a home? What kind of car you drive. And we say, if you have an abundance of those criteria, your successful.  

Then we use our narrowly constructed definition of success as the yardstick with which we measure everybody else.  And of course, you'll find out in all likelihood, we are the most successful people on the planet. Well, of course we are. After all our definition of success was based on what makes us successful.  Now, if you went to another country, like say the Netherlands, which has quite a different definition of success you'll find that the United States ranks much lower.  Of course, people can argue which definition is better and that's actually what a lot of our political debate is all about in this country. 

What definition of success, of well-being, of happiness, do we want to use when we make decisions for the greater good?  

The key, I think, is just to understand that there is no one objective definition of success, whether you're looking across the globe or within a single home.  Obviously, within any given culture, the dominant definition within that culture appears to be the objectively correct definition for the whole universe. But it's a mirage. There are an infinite number of ways to define success. And therefore you can't really rank anyone above or below anyone else in any valid, confident way.  And the conclusion I would draw from that is simply that every human life is of equal value. Any attempt to rank or rate people is inherently invalid.  

So what's the use of looking at the world that way? Well, I think that just as journalist Lydia Polgreen suggested that we wear our genders a little bit more lightly, I think it would benefit all of us to wear our status, our level of success, a little bit more lately as well. Understand that our status is extremely culturally dependent and there are plenty of people in the world who would rank very low by our accounting, but would far outrank us by a very different, but equally valid accounting.  

And a bit ironically. I think that this kind of elimination of any single idea of success for us as individuals is what we need in order to, hopefully sometime in the far, far distant future be able to finally make a genuine claim of success for our entire species.  

Well, that's it for this week. If you like this episode, Please recommend The Great Ungaslighting to at least a couple of friends. And until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other some slack, and please I'm begging you, especially the dude in the Tesla who took the right turn into the school without signaling this morning and almost got rear-ended by the guy in front of me, use your damn turn signal.