G.K. Chesterton: The fallacy of success (1909)

http://mustapha.svbtle.com/tfs

by mustapha • 13 years ago

206 96 13 years ago

mustapha.svbtle.com

EdwCoady• 13 years ago

Perfection

Pitarou• 13 years ago

G. K. Chesterton nails it every time.

skidoo2• 13 years ago

I think I have been silently screaming to read something like this for ages and ages. Capitalism, the godless religion. Thank you for that link.

mustapha4• 13 years ago

You're welcome. :)

notdonspaulding• 13 years ago

I'm not sure I understand your remark about Capitalism. Are you saying you think the article draws some sort of parallel between the success books of the time and Capitalism? Are you now drawing that parallel in today's world? I can't tell what you're getting at.

skidoo2• 13 years ago

I think parallels are blatant. Such money-worship is exactly what most persons today equate with success, and that same religious fervency is precisely what is destroying the world at large. I think real success entails principles that Capitalism will always be oblivious to. The pursuit of money is not at all what life is about.

bgilroy26• 13 years ago

For anyone who might be interested, the greater part of Chesterton's work is available for free online.

The essay quoted in the blog post above is from this collection: http://archive.org/details/allthings00chesuoft

Many volunteers have shared recordings of themsevles reading Chesterton's writings aloud

http://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22G%20K%20Che...

mustapha4• 13 years ago

This is excellent. I'll add this to the article so everyone can read it all. Thanks for taking the time out to search for and put it up.

aaronem• 13 years ago

If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: “The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL.”

Yeah, that Chesterton, what an anti-capitalist.

aspensmonster3• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but I took that as Chesterton taking a jab at the "Success" books and their authors.

jholman2• 13 years ago

I don't know what Chesterton thought of capitalism, or wealth, or success, but that piece doesn't condemn any of them, as I understood it.

That piece is about bad writing, and vapid self-help books.

Chesterton appears, in this essay, to be fully in favour of getting ahead in the world (though he does take time to suggest that Mr Vanderbilt might not be a deity, so we may conclude that he thinks that getting ahead in the world is not the only valuable thing).

Notice the bits about "if you want to be succeed at whist, great; either learn to be good at whist, or learn to cheat".

jawns• 13 years ago

Chesterton was a fan of distributism, a "third way" economic system that is neither capitalism (which favors Big Business) nor socialism (which favors Big Government).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

zt• 13 years ago

There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat. Now I don't cheat. And although I like to think that we have some pretty smart people in this building...it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.

phreanix• 13 years ago

What happened to "be better"?

aspensmonster3• 13 years ago

It's a quote from the movie Margin Call, IIRC.

jdmitch• 13 years ago

A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors. This was fallacious, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth...The Industrious Apprentice rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues. But what shall we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious Apprentice; the Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices?

So who are the new new Industrious Apprentices? Growth Hackers? ;)

nikatwork• 13 years ago

Graduate nerds being exploited in web dev sweatshops.

jcromartie• 13 years ago

The kids who are told that if you just go to college and stick with the education system, doing all your homework, you'll get a high-paying job and be a CEO or president some day.

informatimago2• 13 years ago

Success is in the eyes of the beholder. Take two millionaires. On that had the objective of having by now one million bucks, has them, reached his objective, success! The other had the objective of having by now two million bucks, has only one million: failure. Not even close.

Now what if the later changes his objective after the fact? IMO still a failure :-)

So success is not defined by what you have are or archive, but by the goals you set for yourself.

I am a big failure: I'm not 500 light years from here exploring the stars. :-(

bostonpete• 13 years ago

So your advice to kids who want to succeed in life would be to aim low?

singlow• 13 years ago

Set your goals such that their ends will be fulfilling to you. Do not set out with success as your end, else it is meaningless. If success only means to accomplish what you have set out to do, then set out to do something worthwhile, that in success you will have achieved something greater than success itself.

dalek_cannes2• 13 years ago

"Low" by whose standards and compared to what? Those who mistake success for happiness usually end up losing both. We recently had a wealthy corporate CFO in these parts who had pretty much everything everybody else wants jump off a bridge because... I don't even know why.

001sky• 13 years ago

It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation.

dalek_cannes2• 13 years ago

Bertrand Russell once said that all work falls into one of two basic categories: moving objects on or near the surface of the Earth, and telling other people to do so.

nrmilstein2• 13 years ago

That's a great quote. Do you have a source? I can't find it online from him.

invalidOrTaken• 13 years ago

We've progressed! Now we tell computers to do so.

numeromancer3• 13 years ago

Which is an extremely facile categorization.

Bertrand Russel was a deep thinker who often drew from a deep well of thought and understanding. When he wrote about politics, he seems to have covered the well and sucked his thoughts from a puddle.

Debugreality• 13 years ago

Success is easy to sell as it is most often what someone believes they need. Perhaps it masks a flaw in their character.

The example in the article relates to money but success to a lonely man may be love. Perhaps success means only that which we most feel we need to be complete.

devgutt2• 13 years ago

The days of idealism and superstition are over. We live in a time of science and hard common sense...

Unfortunately, it wasn't true in 1909, and still not true at all today

bitserf• 13 years ago

Did you miss the quotes?

hyperpape• 13 years ago

I don't know if it's a browser issue or something else, but I actually don't see any quotation marks, or italics, or anything else. I spent a good while figuring out where one of the quotes ended.

a3voices• 13 years ago

"The world has become an idolator of this god called money." - Pope Francis

Camillo• 13 years ago

Chesterton is a great writer that ought to be better known.

bloaf• 13 years ago

Not only are his works worth reading, he is endlessly quotable.

mustapha4• 13 years ago

Endlessly.

ableal• 13 years ago

And, as usual, he's quoted for what he did not quite say (but the meaning is accurate): http://www.chesterton.org/discover-chesterton/frequently-ask...

nrmilstein2• 13 years ago

Wow, what fantastic writing. I often find tech entrepreneurs and HN readers are too obsessed with success and wealth, often explaining away any accusations of greed by claiming it's their "passion" and talking in mystic terms of the tech revolution they're a part of.

The biggest thing I would call a "success" in my life is the joy I've received from good friends and family, and the experiences I've had with them. Things that take a long time to cultivate and over which I often have little control.

mustapha4• 13 years ago

You're lucky.

ekanes• 13 years ago

Value is created when both sides want what the other side is offering more than what they have. There is a case to be made that your wealth is a reflection of the value you have created in the world. Do Big Things in the world, and you may find yourself wealthy. It's not necessarily greed. When you speak of success, and friends and family, most people on HN would agree, but put them on a parallel track to wealth. They are more to do with happiness imho. Rock on.

_delirium2• 13 years ago

There is a case to be made that your wealth is a reflection of the value you have created in the world.

Not a good case, though.

jholman2• 13 years ago

Value is created when both sides want what the other side is offering more than what they have.

Value is created when, by your action, you change the world to a state that you, or another person, find preferable to the previous state.

On the other hand, trade is profitable when both sides want what the other side is offering more than they have (with some caveats involving deceit).

That was a quibble with a minor stumble you made, now for a reply of substance:

As for wealth being a reflection of the value that you have created, it might be. It might be that you inherited it. It might be that you stole it. It might be that you tricked someone into believing you had something they wanted, and traded for it. Maybe you extracted rent (in the study-of-economics sense), without creating value. Maybe your wealth comes of virtuous value-generation, but you earned more wealth per value than another person, by virtue of skin colour or gender or whatever. There are many many ways to acquire wealth, and scant few of them require creating value, and even fewer reflect virtue in a linear and straightforward way.

And similarly, value that you create may not convert to wealth. Who created more value, Torvalds or Zuckerberg? Not that Linus is poor, but he's not a billionaire, afaik. I propose for consideration that it may be far easier to create value when wealth is not a priority (though I concede that in some circumstances, vehicles like corporations help with scaling your value-creation).

Now, all that said, you might amend your position thus: "Wealth earned in certain ways, with certain restrictions, is roughly proportionate to value created, perhaps modulo a scaling factor beyond anyone's control." Okay, I sort of agree. BUT! If you believe this, it follows that spending your wealth on yourself is destroying (consuming) value. I make a sandwich, wealth is generated. I eat the sandwich, wealth is destroyed. I make $1000 of software and get paid accordingly, wealth is created. I spend it on plane tickets, I consume/destroy the wealth. Only the money you give away (including via taxes) is wealth created-and-not-consumed. Bill Gates was a leech on society (rent-seeking friction-inducing market manipulation)... until he decided not to be, and redeemed himself twice over.

So, in summary: while there is a relationship, in some limited circumstances, between wealth and value-creation, taking wealth as a proxy for virtue is spectacularly mistaken.

digitalengineer• 13 years ago

We've come a long way indeed. This sounds familiar:

"A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors."

Now the boys all want to become zillionairs like Zuckerburg or Jobs.

npalli2• 13 years ago

Wowza, that was some Inception style mind bender out there.

At the top you have a rookie author using an early 21st century platform (svbtle) to dispense bon mots about life and ingratiate himself with his readers who are turned off by current social mores by

--- Aligning himself with the words of a rookie author in the early 20th century platform (books) who dispensed bon mots about life at the turn of the 20th century who in turn ingratiates himself with his readers who are turned off by then current social mores by

--- Invoking the words of puritans of the early 19th century who in turn … well the trail ends since we don’t know what they thought. Plus we live in a puritan culture so I suppose we are stuck with whatever they thought and that is foundational.

Three level inception. Nice.

“Medium” guys take note, svtble is using a three level inception to gain readership. The game is on. You need a four level inception to convince me. Otherwise, I ain’t clicking on your ads.

Seriously though, I’m reminded of the foreword of another early 20th century book as noted by Oscar Wilde

In old days books were written

by men of letters and read by the

public. Nowadays books are written

by the public and read by nobody.

mistermcgruff• 13 years ago

G. K. Chesterton was a great mind and certainly not a "rookie author." I hope I'm reading you wrong there. You may not agree with him, but that doesn't mean he's a rookie.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton American Chesterton Society: http://www.chesterton.org/

npalli2• 13 years ago

Sure, he was a great mind. However he was getting started by the time of All things considered, published 1908. Let's put it this way, he published far more after this essay than before, so on a relative level he was rookie author when he wrote the essay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton_bibliography

markost• 13 years ago

In a chat with one of my older friends who I respect very much, he lent this advice: Mark, the first thing you need to do to be successful is make a decision on what you want to accomplish, and then commit all your resources to that goal.

F_J_H• 13 years ago

Not on topic as far as the article is concerned, but in regards to G.K. Chesterton, my favorite quote of his is:

"Never take down a fence until you understand why it was put up."

I used to use that one a lot with developers trying to improve on a predecessor's code...

arethuza• 13 years ago

I remember just such an occasion a few years back where someone working for me did exactly that. When asked why he hadn't noticed the associated unit tests were failing the reply was "those weren't compiling so I commented them out".

norswap• 13 years ago

What do you do if the man that put up the fence does not know why he put it up himself, or if he put it up for all the wrong reasons but is not there to explain them to you?

rahoulb• 13 years ago

The point is not to do it blind.

"I don't know why this is here and I've tried to find out but hit a dead end so I'm getting rid anyway" is better than "I don't know why this is here so I'm just getting rid".

ctdonath3• 13 years ago

Hence the proper usage of "question authority": with all due respect[1], investigate the reasoning behind the authority's action and either be enlightened as to the reasons or confirm that the decision makers were, in fact, ignorant/idiots. Alas, the term got misconstrued to validating "ignore those who likely know better, and act confidently in your own impulsive ignorance."

[1] - "all due respect" has also been stripped of proper meaning, relegated to a barely-veiled insult.

ctdonath3• 13 years ago

That's the basis for "conservatism": recognize that many processes, rules, barriers, morals, norms, etc. have been hard-won and hard-learned at great cost (money, lives, time), that we may not remember/understand quite why they're in place but they're there for good reason nonetheless, and abandoning/destroying them out of ignorance may doom generations to suffer until they re-discover why those were enacted in the first place.

That's also why rebuilding systems from scratch (the old "just rip it all out and do it again") usually doesn't work: there is a great deal of wisdom, however poorly implemented or documented, buried within that system. Starting over abandons those minute but critical bits, and must be re-discovered the hard way.

JoeAltmaier• 13 years ago

It is the blessing, and the curse, of culture that generations have suffered to find a balanced set of behaviors and rules. Change them at your peril! Its kind of like a system of natural selection - societies must be conservative to survive long-term. Rules change over generations, variations are few since the survival of the collective depends on (some of )them.

However, the world and the society we live in is changing so quickly (technology, cultural mixing, global warming, you name it) that the new norm for changing the rules is not generations but years or months. Using Facebook? Change your settings today or lose your entire life history to strangers! and so on.

smacktoward2• 13 years ago

And yet the crowning achievement of conservatism in the last thirty years has been tearing down the processes, rules, barriers, morals, norms, etc. that were put in place during the Great Depression to prevent capitalism from tearing itself apart again.

foobarian• 13 years ago

My favorite is when there is a fence with a sign saying, "Erected to prevent buffalo from stampeding our corn fields. It is OK to remove after 1850." Meanwhile there is now a neighboring cattle ranch and the fence is still actively performing a blocking function :)

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

That can also lead to a hell of a lot of analysis paralysis, however.

I know because I share your approach. Having worked with a great many legacy / inherited systems, most with little or no documentation, and rarely with much in the way of contact with the system designer, it's a bit of an occupational hazard.

Sometimes you've just got to blow down the fences to see what happens. Sometimes it's nothing, sometimes it's the end of the world.

Fortunately, in technology, resurrecting fences is generally fairly straightforward, but not always.

That said, the worst fences are the ones you take down without realizing they were there ... which turn out to be critical.

EGreg• 13 years ago

I wonder if Chesterton ever read Dale Carnegie :)

josephjrobison2• 13 years ago

Haha well put, I've read both and Chesterton is good for having a deep understanding of how humans behave and I come away feeling smarter and more interested in the world. I enjoy Carnegie at the same time and get a rush of optimism after reading, but they are more general tactics.

What's even more amazing is that writing from these authors from the early 1900s and 1930s is clearer and stronger writing than a lot of stuff today - well at least compared to blogs.

Ygg2• 13 years ago

That's not strange/amazing/weird. They passed through filter of time. For every Chesterton/Carnegie there are thousand really bad contemporary writers, prostitutes aspiring to be writers etc.

If you lived in their time, you'd probably say same about people from 1850. And saying all those news articles are pretty mundane and bad. And that the thing people scribble on walls are very rude.

Technology changes, people don't.

rajivtiru• 13 years ago

For those interested, you don't have to flip through the images to read. All Things Considered is free on the kindle store.

Or download ebook here: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL13992463M/All_things_consider...

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

I loved this article - anything which dismantles an ideology (especially one as ancient and terrible as money-worship) always gives me a smile.

SeanDav• 13 years ago

Although the author is trying to make some good points, he succeeds only in attempting to tear down. He does not appear to offer any reasonable alternatives.

I came away from this article feeling slightly unclean, as if wanting to improve myself is both pointless and somehow wrong. It appears that I should have no goals, aiming only for mediocrity.

huxley• 13 years ago

I think you may be misreading him, Chesterton isn't saying you should stop improving yourself, but that you can't hope to find that improvement in a book detailing the supposed habits of the wealthy and successful (or the one weird trick that makes everyone a millionaire).

Your goal shouldn't be to become Cornelius Vanderbilt, it should be to take advantage of your abilities and circumstances to find your own path to success.

chernevik• 13 years ago

Friend, if something so well written and argued leaves you feeling out of place, perhaps you'd do better to examine yourself for faults, rather than the essay.

sp3322• 13 years ago

It's not about actual advice, but books (or maybe TED talks) full of "advice" like this: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=206

hownottowrite• 13 years ago

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11505

tokenadult• 13 years ago

A website post, "Saint Chesterton?" commenting on recent discussion of proposals for canonization of G.K. Chesterton (declaring him to be a saint):

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/saint-che...

slurry• 13 years ago

Really a charitable understatement of the case against.

BigChiefSmokem• 13 years ago

It's like Chesterton is describing every other marketing post on HN.

Fascinating!

rogerthis• 13 years ago

Wow. The good old fat catholic Chesterton (though not fully catholic in 1909, but 95%).

G.K. Chesterton: The fallacy of success (1909)

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