Come around tomorrow and I’ll take you again

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy” (1926)

There’s a rich tradition in American culture of celebrating wealth and the possibility of achieving it. This tradition is built upon something of a paradox: the belief that, on the one hand, rich people deserve their economic and social status because they have always had the rare personal qualities that led to their acquisition of wealth uncountable, and on the other, that you — the purchaser of this book, or lecture series, or self-improvement DVDs etc. — can now acquire these rare personal qualities, through sheer discipline and effort (and with the help of a few, very reasonably priced, authorial tips).

The whole power of positive thinking racket is based on ignoring the latent tension between these beliefs. The Gospel of Prosperity, The Millionaire Next Door, The Secret — it’s all the same grift in the end, and yet we the people never seem to tire of it. Consider this delightful specimen of the genre from Steve Siebold, author of, among other works, Problems in Kierkegaard and How Rich People Think.

The truth is successful people are confident because they repeatedly bet on themselves and are rarely disappointed. Even when they fail, they’re confident in their ability to learn from the loss and come back stronger and richer than ever.

This is not arrogance, but self-assuredness in its finest form.The wealthy have an elevated and fearless consciousness that keeps them moving toward what they want, as opposed to moving away from what they don’t want. This often doubles or triples their net worth quickly because of the new efficiency in their thinking. Eventually they begin to believe they can accomplish anything, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As they move from success to success, they create a psychological tidal wave of momentum that gets stronger every day, catapulting their confidence to a level so high it is often interpreted as arrogance.

The ideological function of this sort of hokum is fairly clear. What’s less clear, perhaps, is what continues to make it so attractive, in a culture in which the increasingly vast differences in life circumstances between people born into different classes ought to make the concept of some sort of pseudo-Darwinian meritocracy increasingly implausible.