As the concept of a calling became unmoored from its historically religious roots it gradually gave way to the secular concept of success.1 Over time, success effectively became the end-goal or purpose of everyday life and existence.2 This is the framework in which the modern culture of achievement was born. It is not a coincidence that this culture originated, developed, and matured to the greatest extent in America–a country wedded more than any other to the economic system of capitalism. The dream of success became the preoccupation of many and was reinforced in what I have called the “mainline thought” of self-help or success literature as it existed in the early to mid-twentieth century.3 It is within the overlap of the Social and Economic spheres, as well as the particulars of success literature itself that the image of the modern culture of achievement finally comes into view.
In a previous essay I alluded that, as a hegemonic concept, success emerged both within and from the concept of a calling. It is a secular by-product of a historically religious idea: one’s task as given by God. To (again) invoke Max Weber, “[a]s the paroxysms of the search for God’s kingdom gradually dissolved into the dispassionate virtues of the vocational calling and the religious roots of the movement slowly withered, a utilitarian orientation to the world took hold.”4 This utilitarian orientation to the world–what I have called the instrumental stance–eventually transformed the outlook of the average person until the end-goal of fulfilling one’s duty in a vocational calling slowly gave way to the end-goal of success.5 This amounted to nothing less than yet another reorientation of human life: just as the (modern) notion of a calling displaced the (medieval) traditional economic ethic, the (secularized) notion of success displaced the (religious) concept of a vocation or calling.6 A paradigm shift; largely silent, yet no less revolutionary.7
One element of this transformation is the sense in which success became detached, or abstracted, from concrete circumstances. It became an idea, as well as an ideal. I have noted before that throughout history the rich and powerful have always enjoyed a certain amount of idealization in the psyche of the common man or woman. In the past wealth was largely fixed. What one owned depended for the most part on one’s place in society. The fluidity of wealth did not become widespread until capitalism reared its monetary crown. With capitalism came the increased ability to acquire a fortune–unconnected to one’s birth or inheritance. The hegemony of wealth, for the first time in history, became a reality. Such wealth began to develop on a widespread basis independently of the ruling class, ushering in the emergence of not only greater upper- but also middle-class wealth. The sight of the affluent became increasingly common, and nowhere was this more the case than in America, the “land of opportunity”. The newly created millionaire class served both as a touchstone and a concretization of the abstraction; wealthy individuals and millionaires were success personified. As such, they became the ideal of the American imagination.
Idealizations, such as the rich businessman or industrialist, can be found in success literature at least as far back as Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859) and also feature prominently in the work of Orison Swett Marden. The writings of Napoleon Hill were ultimately a distillation of the thinking that came before him, but more importantly, they served to further project and popularize the ideal beyond that of other writers. While previous writers were content to tell stories and offer practical advice with the end-goal of success in view, Hill took the end-goal of success and concretized it in the form of an ideal person: the millionaire.8 Thus, the telos of Hill’s writing is not merely success (as an abstraction), but the realization of a certain kind of person. And becoming such a person will allow you to achieve whatever you desire–especially money. Where common idealizations were concerned with what rich people possessed or (in prior success literature) how they got it, Hill’s idealization was concerned with the traits of who they are, and how to become like them. Who are such people? They are what I have previously described as a “person fully wielding the powers of the universe, achieving success on their own terms”.9 They possess what Hill called the “Carnegie secret”.10
If you get your hands on a copy of The Law of Success (1928) or Think and Grow Rich (1937), you won’t get very far into either of them before encountering a long list of names. These are people Hill claimed to interview, analyze, and study the life work of, over the course of no less than twenty years. “These names represent but a small fraction of the hundreds of well-known Americans whose achievements, financial and otherwise, prove that those who understand and apply the Carnegie secret reach high stations in life.”11 “The author is grateful for having enjoyed the privilege of enlisting the services of the most powerful men on earth, in the building of the Law of Success course. […] These men have been the back-bone and the foundation and the skeleton of American business, finance, industry and statesmanship. The Law of Success course epitomizes the philosophy and the rules of procedure which made each of these men a great power in his chosen field of endeavor.”12 In other words, each of these men is the embodiment of the idealization of success, i.e., they are instantiations of the ideal person. They comprise a pantheon of gods in the religion of American capitalism.
Much, if not all of Hill’s work, can be understood as an attempt to standardize the process of becoming such a person.13 By clearing the way for the average person to become the ideal—no less through a method purported to be an “exact science” sure to result in success—Hill had a dramatic affect on the direction of subsequent self-help and success literature. The idealization of the millionaire had transformed into an aspiration.14 And it is in such aspirations that we discover what I have called the “mainline thought” of self-help or success literature, i.e., the idealization of a peculiar kind of person supported by a method intended to help the reader become such a person.15 This brings me to the modern culture of achievement.
The modern culture of achievement can be considered in at least two ways. First, from a perspective of the wider culture itself, consisting primarily of socioeconomic factors. Second, from the perspective of the literature it produced, and its development over time.
What I have in mind when considering the first way is explained in part by my recent essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations In Context, as well my prior essay, A Sketch of the Workaday World. The former is a somewhat loose historical account, while the latter is concerned with some of the after-effects, or results. There is the general phenomenon that money is necessary to survive, and that the acquisition, use, and consumption of money structures our day to day activity in the form of an end-goal or purpose. The widespread idealization of success takes this a step further, even to the point of becoming an abstraction.16 Idealization becomes aspiration; the motivation to succeed yields a strong force in the contemporary world. Perhaps even to the point that some of us live to work, instead of working to live. This is closely connected with the endless search for improvement, innovation, efficiency, and economic growth.17 Despite the mass of accumulated success literature, it is worth noting that many people succeed without ever having read a self-help or success-related book. This is a testament to the power of the wider culture of modern achievement–its rational structures exert a kind of gravitational force, acting both on and through us without our acknowledgment or comprehension. While speaking of the modern economic order, Max Weber wrote “[t]his cosmos today determines the style of life of all individuals born into this grinding mechanism, and not only those directly engaged in economically productive activity. It does so with overwhelming force–and perhaps it will continue to do so until the last ton of fossil fuel has burnt to ashes.”18
The second way concerns the literature produced by the modern culture of achievement, the early stages of which I have partially chronicled.19 As noted above, the idealization of success existed independently of self-help or success literature; existing in the wider culture that provided an ideal environment for such literature to appear. We have seen that Napoleon Hill took the common idealization of success a step further, concentrating the abstraction into the image of the ideal person. The so-called ideal person is the structuring idea of the literature produced by the modern culture of achievement, especially what I have called its “mainline thought”. The ideal can take on many forms, such as the millionaire, the rich businessman, the master salesman, the positive thinker, the entrepreneur, the leader, the winner, and so forth. Accompanying the ideal are methods for helping–sometimes guaranteeing–the reader to become such a person.
The publication of The Law of Success and especially Think and Grow Rich ushered in a new age of success publishing. The decades that followed witness the largest growth the genre had ever seen up to that point. Writers such as Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking [1952], et al.), Earl Nightingale (The Strangest Secret [1957], et al.), W. Clement Stone (Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude [1959], et al.), Robert Schuller (Way to the Good Life [1963], et al.), Og Mandino (The Greatest Salesman in the World [1968], et al.), and Charlie “T” Jones (Life is Tremendous [1968]) together form a direct line of descent in the mainline thought that began with Napoleon Hill.20 The environment was prime for writers unconnected with the mainline to throw their hats in the ring. Examples include David J. Swartz (The Magic of Thinking Big [1959], et al.) and Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics [1960], et al.). Dale Carnegie’s writing continued (How to Stop Worrying and Start Living [1948], et al.), helping create the modern genre of human relations or people skills, which steadily grew (Les Giblin, How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People [1956], et al.). And this was only the beginning.
At some point, the hitherto economic impetus of endless improvement, innovation, and growth, becomes internalized or turned inward by individuals. The self becomes intelligible within the calculus of improvement; efficiency and effectiveness come to replace virtue. Although this phenomenon is not the sole result of the growing hegemony of self-help literature, it is closely connected to it. It was perhaps inevitable that over time self-help or success literature produced a subculture of sorts consisting of a group of people characterized by their consumption of self-help and success literature.21 It does not appear relevant that most of them do not become outstanding successes, or fabulously rich–the reading of such literature has, for this group, become an end in itself. That one of the most practical, utilitarian, and instrumental bodies of thought has for some become an end in itself is not, it seems, without a sense of irony.
Notes:
1. See my essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations in Context.
2. Work was once a means to living, it is now the purpose of living. See also my essay, A Sketch of the Workaday World.
3. The success literature of the mid-twentieth century has not yet been introduced. See also my essay, The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part III.
4. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 5.
5. How this happened is not entirely obvious, but I suspect it to be closely bound up with both the metaphysical nature and the growing necessity of money. A topic to be explored in the future.
6. What appears to have changed is the notion of duty as it was connected to one’s calling. The religious idea was clearly informed by the desire to add to the glory of God through one’s daily work. In this way we can understand success as a necessary consequence, but the end-goal of fulfilling one’s duty in a vocational calling remains the glory of God. The shift that takes place is such that the end-goal of fulfilling one’s duty comes to be replaced by the end-goal of material prosperity–success. The religious impetus has been shed. To be sure, the notion of a vocation or calling is still with us. But although it exists in a way that is for the most part stripped of its formerly religious significance, the religious idea of a God-given task is still present in some areas.
7. The concept of a “paradigm shift” is discussed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
8. We can easily substitute various other terms: inventor, industrialist, executive, sales professional, doctor, lawyer, businessman, politician, entrepreneur, leader, winner, etc. But regardless of the particulars, we are first and foremost to understand such people in terms of attaining the ideal of success by becoming rich.
9. See my essay, The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part III.
10. It is well-known that Napoleon Hill claimed his entire life work was set in motion at the suggestion of the industrialist, Andrew Carnegie. At the beginning of Think and Grow Rich, Hill writes “In every chapter of this book, mention has been made of the money-making secret which has made fortunes for hundreds of exceedingly wealthy men whom I have carefully analyzed over a long period of years. The secret was brought to my attention by Andrew Carnegie, more than a half century ago. […] [H]e asked if I would be willing to spend twenty years or more preparing myself to take it to the world, to men and women who, without the secret, might go through life as failures. I said I would, and with Mr. Carnegie’s cooperation, I have kept my promise.” See Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, A Word from the Author.
11. See Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, A Word from the Author.
12. See Napoleon Hill, The Law of Success, The Author’s Acknowledgment of Help Rendered Him in the Writing of This Course.
13. This idea has evolved over time. Some more contemporary writers speak of becoming “the best version of yourself”. Hill’s purportedly objective criterion, the “fifteen laws of success”, have in many ways been co-opted by subjective interpretations and preferences.
14. In the first chapter or lesson of The Law of Success, Hill provides a table in which he ranks a group of famous people according to the extent to which they epitomize, in his estimation, what he calls “the fifteen laws of success”. At the top of the list is Henry Ford (91/100), followed closely by Benjamin Franklin (90/100), who is less-closely followed by George Washington (86/100), et al. Hill recommends “grading yourself”, against the criterion established in each lesson–both before and after completing The Law of Success. He also suggests the “interesting experiment” of replacing the names listed with the names of people “whom you know”, half of which are successful, and the other half failures, and grading “each of them.” See Napoleon Hill, The Law of Success, The Master Mind.
15. The content of this thought varies and becomes more diverse over time. Initially embodied in the image of the millionaire or rich businessman in the early 20th century, over time the ideal shifts and broadens, and the means diversify, but the fundamental structure remains constant.
16. Consider the young adult who aspires to be a doctor or a lawyer, not because of an interest in health or medicine, or justice or law–but because of the apparent prestige and financial benefits popularly associated with those professions. In a sense, such a person is seeking success in the abstract; they have disregarded the particular circumstances connected to it.
17. On this subject, I recommend the excellent recent work of Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon.
18. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was published in 1905. Emphasis in original.
19. See my essays, The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part I; Part II; and Part III.
20. It may be worth noting that this group was merely the first wave of writers following Hill. The 1970s and 1980s saw massive growth as well, which has in fact continued to the present day.
21. If I decide to take up exploring this in the future I will refer to it as “the cult of self-improvement”. It appears to be a phenomenon associated with the second half of the twentieth century, continuing into the twenty-first.