2/2: But there's also a danger to society as a whole, that when you delegitimize the success of people who work, you also remove the idea of having wealth and success as an aspiration. And without that as an aspiration, people think, well, I can get that too. People will not feel inspired. And people, if they don't feel, well, it's within their control to achieve something more, or to achieve something great, then they won't be motivated to try. And if they're not motivated to try, they're not going to be productive, and they're going to be disempowering themselves because they could be doing better if they believed they can have a chance of doing it. But if they don't believe they even have a chance, if they've decided they're simply unlucky, and that success is mostly about luck and stuff they can't control rather than stuff they can and their choices, then society is going to be pretty fucked up. It's going to have a lot of people who, when they suffer, they fall into that kind of belief and they just give up. They give up and they don't try anymore. And so they stay poor. They stay without power. And you have an increasing wealth gap and increasing inequality. And so under the idea of, well, we're trying to reduce these things with this awareness of luck and privilege. And we're trying to pinpoint and highlight that life is not fair. And we're trying to care for people who are not fortunate. So under this idea that we're trying to help those people, we're actually disempowering them and increasing the likelihood that they're going to stay down and stay poor.

So this idea of a fortuneocracy has truth to it in that luck plays a role in success. But it's also a very powerful and compelling and dangerous idea that most people are simply not emotionally equipped to handle. And so it's their kryptonite. So when they start playing with it, it fucks up their lives. But they don't realize it. Like a drug, they get addicted to it and it weakens them. But they don't see that. And it's very dangerous. So the idea that luck plays a role in success is very powerful and something that should be handled with great care and respect and not just applied liberally. Because it's so ready to be abused because of its addictive nature. Just like a drug. Fortunocracy can certainly be said to be a major component of the woke mind virus. Not the only component, maybe not the major component, but certainly a component, a major one.

Anyway, so it's important to realize that it's not actually a binary opposite distinction between a thesis of meritocracy and an antithesis of fortuneocracy. It's actually a more nuanced connection. The distinction is more sophisticated than a binary opposite. But I think people who believe fortuneocracy, they don't want to think about that because it may challenge their comforting belief. But if you think about it rationally, I think you'll see that luck plays a role in success. Of course, luck is not something that you have no control over. Your ability to recognize and engage with and make choices that bring you greater amounts of luck. All of those things are merit-based skills that you can control with your choices. So you can get better at harnessing luck and making luck work for you. So it's not this binary distinction between, well you got hard work on one side and luck on the other side, and there's no connection between the two things. And they're opposites. There is a connection. The connection is that you can get good at handling luck. Like what if your skill is that you're lucky? What does that really mean? Now maybe you are actually fortunately lucky in the world in that you get more of the random stuff that's kind of parceled out that's beneficial. But what if you're simply better at utilizing the luck that you get? That's a skill that you can get good at, right? That's something you can work at and become better at. Because it doesn't matter what you get given. It matters what you choose to do with that. So there's actually an important realization is that making luck valuable for you is a merit-based skill. So you're maybe the people who are most successful. It's not just about, oh they got all this lucky stuff, right? Maybe it's about they were just simply really skill at making that luck valuable for them. Because if you take your you know successful people, famous successful people, their backgrounds may be full of luck and privilege from some point of view. But are those lucky privileged backgrounds unique and special? Surely there are lots of people in the same category who have similar backgrounds and experiences. So I think it's not that that stuff is so special. It's that those people had a special skill for working with what they had to get to what they want, using what they had to get what they want. So that ability to be resourceful, to use your resources, I think matters a lot more than what resources you have. Because if you have a lot of resources but you don't know how to make that really work for you, you know, respecting your goals, it's not going to matter.

And the other thing is these people saying, oh these successful people really have no claim to being responsible for their success. To those people saying that, I say to them, are you a fucking omnipotent god that you were present at every moment of that person's life and understood the choices they were making at every little moment? And not only that, could you observe all of the inputs to their life, all of the things which may be categorized as luck or providence or privilege. Are you privy to all of that stuff? And not only that, are you so expert at what it takes to make success that you're qualified to assess all of that information that you are so omnipotently in possession of. Really, you, who so desperately wants success, yet so obviously has not achieved it, that you cover up that bitterness and pain with this delusion of having no responsibility for your failure. You expect us to believe you're an expert at success, so expert that you're qualified to judge other people's success, and so omnipotent and omniscient that you have access to all the information of their life that you can make such assessments. I mean, this kind of arrogance that is necessary for fortuneocracy contrasts wildly with the sort of the humbleness of a meritocratic system where you just think, well, I just know what I can do, what I can focus on, I know what I did, what I can do, what I can learn, I own my mistakes, and I get back to work. It's a very humble, practical kind of salt of the earth, down to earth way of being. And you contrast that with this fortuneocratic belief where this person is basically standing there in possession of nothing, in experience of nothing, in possession of no great success, but they're standing there going, I see that successful man and I judge him because, or I see that successful woman and I judge her because I was there at every moment of their life, I saw everything that ever happened and every choice they ever made, and I understand it completely and fully, and yet even though I do so, I'm still not able to create success for myself. I mean, that person is clearly deluded. They're clearly out of their fucking heads. So they've clearly adopted this as simply a balm for their pain, right? And I think that's incredibly sad because people so driven to adopt such a twisted delusion to cover their pain, must be experiencing so much pain that it must be so important to them to win. And yet rather than creating for themselves the circumstances and improvements to yield that importance for them, they've given up, taken this drug to give them the feeling, the fake payoff of having been successful, but it's only in their mind. It's a success through a mental reframing of the reality of the world to fit a twisted belief system that will neither yield them success nor bring them satisfaction. It will simply keep them disempowered. And that's incredibly sad.

And so it's not just for me and my own fear of the people who believe that stuff that I argue this. It's for compassion for those people. Because I feel it's a choice that every one of us has. Like, I could choose to believe those things. I just feel it so desperately and sadly and disgustingly in some ways, dangerous to do so. And I feel incredibly sad for the people who choose that. Because at the end of the day, that's what they're doing. They're making a choice to believe that's the way things are. And whether they want to throw away all their other pretenses at having responsibility or having no accountability or whatever, the bottom line is they're making a choice to believe that meritocracy is false and bad and fortuneocracy is the way to go. And that attitude, that belief system is their choice to put themselves within. So whatever you want to believe about the world, the world. That person is responsible for what they think about it.