A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson
historynewsnetwork.org42 points by Petiver 7 days ago
42 points by Petiver 7 days ago
This is an interesting historical article but the thread so far is too shallow (i.e. reacting only to one controversial phrase in the title), generic (i.e. disengaged from any of the interesting details in the article), and ideological. Generic ideological tangents make for lame and repetitive threads (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
I've replaced the title with the subtitle in the hope that this may help.
In the debate between self made and team effort my opinion is “both.”
Nobody starts from zero. Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.
At the same time, individuals can make unique contributions and are not just interchangeable parts. You see this over and over again in art, music, engineering, science, literature, etc., or really anything requiring skill. People aren’t interchangeable.
I think both positions, when argued exclusively, lead to a false devaluing of most human life. The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats. The “it takes a village” theory leads to the view that everything is a collective product and nobody is unique or special in any way. So you get the idea that 100% of humans are an undifferentiated mass of aggregate labor. That makes people just as disposable as if we are mere peons existing to serve the greats.
I think the reality is that we are an interdependent network of unique contributors.
It's just a restatement of 'nature vs nurture' isn't it? And as you say, both of those things are necessary. Broadly, greatness without circumstances likely leads to obscurity; circumstances without greatness likely leads to indolence. The latter being what often seems to happen in families with generational wealth - some family member makes the fortune, and some later generation, lacking the earlier drive, squanders it.
> Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.
In game theory a coalition is a group where the group's utility is greater than the sum of each member's utility. In other words: "we're stronger together".
The problem with the self-made man myth is that it frames things as if it is shameful to have help. Having had help does not diminish your accomplishments. Having had help just means you're human.
The same goes for luck. Just because you got lucky doesn't mean you didn't work hard nor deserve the rewards. There's a saying I like
The harder I work, the luckier I get.
Being able to recognize these things helps us do better and help more people do better. But if we pretend we just did it all on our own then we can't actually recognize how things came to be. Which means we're going to have a hard time replicating that success. By pretending that everything is all on us and nothing else then we'll fail while trying to repeat the successful strategy, we'll fail when offering advice to others, and we'll just be blind to the world around us. We'll never recognize that we have to make the iron hot! Even the best blacksmith in the world can't hammer frozen iron into shape.
Again, having had luck or help doesn't mean you didn't work hard or that you don't deserve what you have. Things aren't binary. There's not a single causal factor to any complex phenomena. The problem is seeing things in black and white. There's a million things that go into success and while most of that will be on you, you can't ignore things like the environment and those that helped you along the way. After all, we're all in this together.
> The problem with the self-made man myth
Is that it's a complete straw man. It's not about not having help - every great achiever has had a figurative (sometimes literal) army of supporters behind them. Including those in history.
What the "theory" actually posits seems trivially true - that the people who do super extraordinary things are extraordinary themselves. Whether it's talent, hard work, both, insanity, etc. The idea that these people are just normal and very lucky or whatever is absurd.
> people who do super extraordinary things are extraordinary themselves
The problem is the inverse. You imply that people who do not do extraordinary things are not themselves extraordinary.
You can be extraordinary but shit out of luck. You can't rise to the top by just being the best, you also need and the right support. Take for example any startup. Good luck getting to scale without that. Eventually someone needs to take a chance on you.
This is something VCs even know. They invest broadly because a small percentage will be big hits. It's because things fall along a power distribution rather than a normal. The upside is unbounded. Most will lose, for many reasons, including just bad luck.
Or I'll let Picard say it
> It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life
Hindsight is useful but it's also easy to ignore subtle but critical variables
Yes, facts make it necessarily both.
But what does that mean? What is attribution? What is ownership? How does our legal framework work? How does the media speak about reality?
The reason for "great men" isn't that its true, it's that that's how our society is structured. These ideas come from how our property is structured.
If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.
Like kings. Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land and could chop your head off or let you rot in jail for saying otherwise.
The reality of which you speak is not compatible with the implications of the world we live in. This truth about the world cannot exist practically, materially.
> Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land
That depends on the society. The king in Achaemenid Persia owned all the land. His successors the Seleucid Greek kings didn't. A medieval European king didn't even come close.
I read something to the effect that (in one very early Mesopotamian city) the king owned about 1/3 of the land, another ~1/3 was owned by large landholders who numbered maybe a couple dozen (this group included the queen), and the final ~1/3 was owned by a very large number of small landholders.
> If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.
Consider the alternatives to this.
The first is that great works are being accomplished without anyone being in charge of them. People invent alternating current and land on the moon in a completely decentralized manner with no one leading the effort and no one making a larger contribution than anyone else. Not the thing where everyone gets to try but only one out of a million succeeds but rather some other thing where everyone is a fungible cog and you can't identify anyone as being the lynchpin or anyone else as not pulling their weight, and yet the great works still happen.
The second is that great works are not being accomplished.
The first one seems implausible. The second one seems bad.
What are you talking about?
I don't think authority is bad. What we're talking about isn't purely organizational, its economical. Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.
Hierarchy can be an abstraction of group decision making and not a relationship to the products of labor (as it is now).
Or do you think people will only do things if others own the products of their labor? Would it be impossible to exist as a society without a small group of people owning the products of millions of peoples labor?
Like I said with my original comment our current notion of great men is mostly a political fabrication by the rich. The rich being the people who own the media outlets we consume, the publishing houses, the internet, the people who own the vast majority of the things we need. They have the power to influence our morality through information culling, exposure and/or volume. Thus they have birthed the modern idea of "great men". "Great men" as they exist today are not great by us, they are great by them.
Do you think these forms that currently exist are the end form of human organization? These forms breed too many ills to be able to last forever, monetary corruption IS the real manifestation of these forms of human organization.
Hierarchy is someone being at the top. Who really freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln or all the people who elected him and then fought as solders to win the ensuing war?
> Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.
These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.
The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions, which is to say competitive markets rather than oligopolies or government central planning. And that is going to result in large companies and big personalities -- it's only a problem when they become so large that they no longer have adequate competition, which is something that happens well after the point that they have leaders whose names people know.
Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy. Both of them freed the slaves.
> These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.
Nah, this is a very wrong take. If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen? Thats just a tiny little example.
There are millions of other examples where trust is employed without theft because the consequences matter.
> The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions...
Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us? Capitalism REALLY is just oligopoly with extra steps. They know this and count on it.
> Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy.
This is sort of like saying that an oligopoly isn't a monopoly. Technically true but not a solution to the problem.
The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.
> Both of them freed the slaves.
But only one of them ever gets credit for it.
> If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen?
There are two ways to frame this.
The first is, you're in charge of your portfolio and the manager is just your employee, so the one at the top is you, but then you're only in charge of your own money and not anyone else's.
The second is, retail investors are unsophisticated and lack the understanding necessary to hold portfolio managers to account, so the managers engage in shell games to steal from the investors and buy themselves yachts and otherwise act against the investors' interests. In which case they're at the top and they're autocrats.
> Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us?
Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?
The inherent problem here is that if you have centralized power structures of any kind, Machiavellian opportunists will try to capture them for their own ends. What you need is a structure of government that prevents that from happening. It's nominally supposed to look like a government constrained in what it can do (checks and balances and enumerated powers) to prevent it from having the authority to issue competition-destroying regulations in the event it gets captured, and therefore reduce the incentive to capture it. But still having the authority to enforce antitrust rules, to prevent the same thing from happening in private markets.
We don't actually have that. A lot of the original checks and balances were removed by populists in the early 20th century so now the US federal government is thoroughly captured and in turn issues thousands of competition-destroying regulations and doesn't meaningfully enforce antitrust laws. But the only thing to do is fix that, because what else is there?
> The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.
Why not? Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.
Most direct decisions don't even need to go all the way up. There could be a period of determination and direct voting, followed by a final plan that will be enacted and this is what is spread throughout the whole govt.
It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.
> Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?
I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government. So no capitalism, because like I said, and has been evidenced, capitalism is just oligopoly with extra steps.
So, yes to actual people ownership, but no to individual ownership. As individual or small group ownership leads to having interests that go against your society, incentivizing corruption for profits.
This way we can all benefit from the goods of production, we can all have an interest in keeping production going and making it better, as it increases our pay, and the corruption incentives are subdued by our collective vested interest.
This is logically the only way to solve this power imbalance which stems from the organization of production and not any mental faculties like morality or ideological leanings. This, of course, requires a culture of collective ownership if you want to keep your society free. This is also socialism.
> Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.
The reason direct democracy doesn't work at national scale is that once you've diluted someone's vote by enough (i.e. there are 100 million voters instead of 100 voters), everyone knows their vote has a negligible effect on the outcome and therefore lacks the incentive to spend time researching every individual issue. And at the same time, a larger government is in charge of a wider jurisdiction, and then people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.
The attempt to paper over this is to get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite afflicted with the principal-agent problem and you get a corrupt/captured government.
> It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.
None of that is going to fix the problem that most people don't have time to read about all the details of fisheries rules or the economics of operating a power grid, and then the people who show up are the people with the goal of corrupting the process for their own interests.
Notice that this has nothing to do with capitalism. If the head of the computer science division -- a government department -- wants to do AI stuff, and the most expedient way to generate the power to do it right away is to bring decommissioned coal power plants back online, whether that happens depends on whether the bureau in charge of that has more political power than the one in charge of protecting the environment. There is no magic that makes the trade off go away or requires the alternative you would have preferred to be chosen when people who are better at political games want something else.
> I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government.
That isn't a thing.
Suppose you have a piece of property, like a house or a phone. If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's. You come home and there is a stranger sleeping in your daughter's bed and you can't even object to it. If you have naked pictures of you and your spouse on your phone, those belong to everybody. Obviously this isn't the thing that anybody wants.
But as soon as you put anyone in charge of deciding who gets to use what, those people are the privileged elite. They go gerrymander the districts so they can stay in office even after doing things you don't like, or use their existing control over media outlets to convince people to vote for their continued control over media outlets etc.
"Socialism" does nothing against that. It makes it worse; it's why the USSR was a dystopia.
For markets to work you need them to be competitive, which requires you to limit government corruption, and the best way we know how to do that is limited government so that the government doesn't have the power to do the things most strongly associated with corruption, like imposing fixed mandatory fees/costs or onerous regulatory barriers to entry. And that mostly works when you actually do it.
For a command economy to work you need some way to limit government corruption even while the government is fully enmeshed in every aspect of the economy, which no one has ever managed to pull off and there is not even any apparent means to do it.