“America’s noisy worshiping of success, its mania for ratings and rankings, the compulsive celebration of perfection in everything served only as a facade. Behind the optimistic veneer there lies an extraordinary fear of failure: the horror of going down and going under, of losing face and respectability, of exclusion and marginalization. It’s not success, but failure — the savage fear of it — that lies at the heart of the American dream.”
It’s rare for me at this point in my life to read something that really stuns me.
When I was a journalist, one way I judged really good writing was if reading it gave me a feeling of wishing I had written it. Now that my primary activity is simply thinking, when I’m impressed I say that I never realized that.
I was reading an essay in the New York Times this morning by Costica Bradatan, a professor at Texas Tech whose new book is “In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.”
Bradatan came here from Romania, where the country devolved from a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship to a country run by gangsters.
For some fortunate ones, the American Dream is positive and a drive for success, For many others, the reason to keep putting one foot ahead of the other is a terror at the thought of falling behind. Anyone who has ever studied the life of Donald Trump knows his greatest driving force was his fear that his father would think he was a loser.
Read anything Trump “wrote” or listen to anything he said about his dad and you’ll see that Fred Trump told his sons that the only choice in life was whether to be a killer or a loser. Most of what Trump is, he learned from Fred. If you look at the ethos that guides him in business, through multiple bankruptcies and more than 3,000 lawsuits, you’ll see there really is no right or wrong to him.
It’s win or be a loser.
Savage fear is quite a motivator.