Many talented people have dreams, strive for their dreams, and fall short of realizing those dreams. Yet they immediately search for excuses and eventually deny dreaming in the first place, only to convince their peers that failure represents a lack of interest on their part, or represents the efforts of others to restrain their ambition, rather than being a sign of personal deficiency. Poor grades are attributed to an educational establishment biased in its standards, and job rejection is attributed to an organization ignorant in the art of human assessment and not worth our talents or time anyway. Such judgments lessen the pain of and rationalize failure. If you subscribe to a paradigm of absolute individual responsibility, failure is devastating.
Human beings are a highly imperfect species.
Upon the founding of America, all humans were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The advent of political correctness has wrongly endowed people with an additional right to happiness itself, a right to a positive sense of self-worth. And in order to relieve humans of the pain of failure so as to preserve their self-esteem, the locus of control has been relocated, stripped from the individual and deposited in the environment. Political correctness did more than relocate the responsibility for human accomplishment and failure. It waged all-out war on the very concept of accomplishment and the associated standards themselves, redefining both in a relativistic fashion just to make all feel accomplished in their own way.