Entrepreneurism and the Failure Society

To succeed, you must fail.

It is almost a mantra now, an assumed truth of our scattered, struggling culture.  Our goal, and the highest value, is entrepreneurism.  Because entrepreneurs?  They are the great heroes of global capitalism, the ones worth emulating, the ones we all strive to be.  They have this amazing idea, this striking insight, one that changes the dynamic of a particular industry.  They win, and win big, and upon them are lavished fame and acclaim and billions.

And yes, this does happen.

To make this happen, we are told, you must be willing to fail.  Success does not come right away.  It comes after you fail, and you fail, and you fail, and then you fail again.  You must keep failing, until finally that magic moment occurs, the stars align, and you go viral, and you nail it.

Success means failure.

That's the goal, the ground of countless TED talks and gurupreneurial books and blog posts and seminars.  It's such a baseline value now that we do not even question it.  And without question, there is truth in it.  I know this, quite inescapably so, as a writer.  Writing, like all creative endeavor, is nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine parts failure, and one part success.  Or maybe a half-part.  I'll let you know when I find out.

Or, at least, the acclaim is.  The writing itself, the actual activity, is more often a joy.   It's inherently good.  The "getting your novel published and made into a major motion picture that wins an Oscar, at which time Jennifer Lawrence tearily thanks you for a book that like totally changed her life?"  That happens rather less often, to the point of being functionally never.

And even though I love to write, some of it ain't exactly Tolstoy.  There are plenty of blog posts that never see the light of day.  Oh, Lord, I'll say.  That's really lousy.  Delete, and out it goes.

So as we strive, we have come to accept failure as a necessary part of the creative endeavor.  If you do not risk failure, you cannot achieve.

This is all well and good.  It is a truth we accept.  And I do, too, up to a point.  Perseverence is a worthy value, as is patience.  A willingness to strive and risk is a necessary part of a vibrant existence.

But I wonder, in the way that I do about things, whether or not mixed into the reality being shaped by this saying is more darkness than we'd care to admit.  Every saying has its shadow, after all.

Because "To succeed, you must fail" can sound like a Zen koan.  It can also sound Orwellian.

If we have been taught that we must be willing to fail most of the time, in most of our efforts, then we will be more willing to look at a society in which most people are failing most of the time and shrug it off.  We will have our efforts crash and burn and be frustrated over and over again, and just assume that's the way it must be.

Of course I'm struggling, we say.  I'm failing, because I have to, because that's what entrepreneurs do.

Yet I can remember a time when it was not so.  I can remember working as a stock clerk in a little shop, and bringing home enough income so that my fiancé and I could pay the rent, eat out, and have some left over to save.  I did not "fail" at that.  I did not expect to.  Work did not involve endless struggle and failure.  It was work.  It paid the bills, and life wasn't flashy, but neither were we anxious.

If most of us are failing, then perhaps a failure-embracing society is a sign that we aren't doing it right.

Who does this saying serve?  If the world around us feels creative and joyous, it serves us well.  It teaches the value of work, and of patience, and of stick-to-itiveness in the face of inevitable adversity.  It reminds us not to be entitled.

But if most of us are failing, then this saying only serves the interests of those who hold power and wealth.

Pretending to be a Hero

We all want to be the hero.  We do.  There's a deep yearning, grounded in human nature and our competitive culture, to be the one who is the most amazing and astonishing person ever.   We want to be the one who is recognized and celebrated, whose story will be told by the firelight for a thousand generations, or at least be the trending hashtag on twitter for a week or so.

The problem we encounter, though, is that most of us won't be.  Yeah, I know, Warhol said we'd get our fifteen minutes, but that's hooey.  There are just too many of us.  Our culture does elevate a few A-listers up there, spinning out their stories to all of us and forming a false sense of communal intimacy in our society.   But the reality of American life is that there are over three hundred million of us.  Most of us, in the entirety of our lives and relationships, will just be part of the background hum.

In the face of that daunting reality, there is always that temptation to misrepresent the actuality of who we are.  In that yearning for public recognition, we tell lies about ourselves and our gifts, sweet bright lies that illuminate us with their synthetic shine.

We are the greatest naturally gifted bicyclist in the history of the world, with a heroic backstory of recovery.  We are a figure woven of the stuff of epic and noble tragedy, motivated by our love for that girl who showed her faith in us with her last breaths.

Does it matter to us that we're pumping ourselves full of chemicals, bullying and deceiving as part of a carefully fabricated reality?  Does it matter that our tragic dying girlfriend never actually existed, no matter how much the press about us runs with it?

Not at that moment.

Because we desperately don't want to be average.  We don't want to be mid-pack.  And so we misrepresent and deceive and spin, driven by that sense of hunger to be the most and the best and the one everyone talks about.  Our story of ourself becomes completely separate from the actuality of ourselves, and not just in that way we all spin it on Facebook.

We're spinning it so hard that the self we present has been torn away from the flesh and matter of our reality.

Churches do that too.  We have that vision of ourselves, of how dynamic we are, of how we're growing like a weed, of how passionate our worship is, of how remarkably welcoming we are, of how warm and loving our community is.  We say these things.  They are how we present ourselves to the world, part of the story we spin out to those we encounter.

But if they are not real, if we are not actually that thing we claim to be, then all that the world will encounter when they try to grasp us will be the cutting shards of that shattered mask in their hands.  That falseness is what shatters trust, what drives away the disenchanted and the disappointed.

It's better to be what you genuinely are.  If that's flawed, then being truthful about your intentional moving away from that flaw is essential.   Speak the hope.   Lean into the vision of that hope.  But be the truth, and don't hide the truth.

If that truth is that you're humble, then be humble.   It's OK to be a human being like every other human being.

That's kind of what it's all about. 

Attacking Success

One of the soundbites that's been pitched out this political silly season has been catching in my craw whenever I hear it.  Both political parties are responsible for some pretty egregious allegations...the "Romney hates dogs" one being particularly silly...but this one echoes interestingly in my pastorly ears.

This is the charge, leveled by Romney and the GOP, that Obama is "attacking success" when suggesting that perhaps some forms of profit-maximization aren't good for the country, or suggesting that those who have profited most in our society might just have to pony up a bit more so we can keep our collective [stuff] together.

The rich and the powerful are unquestionably materially successful.  Success is good.  In fact, their success is both evidence of and the key to our being successful as a nation.  To argue that the powerful have some larger responsibility for supporting the necessary infrastructure of the nation subverts something basic about America.

Or so that line of argumentation goes.

Herein should lie a problem for conservatives.  Some conservatives, at least.

The Ayn Rand folks'll get along just fine, but the Jesus folk?

It's a bit more difficult.

That's not to say that equating material success with goodness isn't done in certain quarters of the Christian world.  It's a staple of the Word Faith Prosperity Gospel movement, for example.  But "success" in financial dealings or in material well-being has never been and will never be a Christian measure of ethical well-being or national integrity.

You won't, for instance, get any more pungent attacks on wealth than you find in the prophets.   Isaiah rails against the Jerusalem elite who took the bulk of Judah's wealth and threw their culture out of balance.  So does Amos.  So does Jeremiah.   The concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a few has been a big deal since Samuel prophesied about the nature of royalty, or the writers of Torah put in all that debt-forgiveness year-of-Jubilee stuff in the name of preserving the integrity of the Covenant against permanent systemic imbalances.

And that's just the Judeo-part of the whole Judeo-Christian equation.

Then there's Jesus.  Lord have mercy, did he seem to have a problem with the implications of material success.   Oh, we do rationalize our way around those sayings, that "camel through the eye of a needle" and "gaining the world but losing your soul" stuff.  Not to mention the whole "you cannot serve God and mammon" bit.  Or the cross.

Pesky, pesky Jesus.

And then there's Paul.  Paul, well, he doesn't seem to buy into the whole shiny thing.  What matters is integrity in faith, which is proved not by evidence of material success, but by perseverance in the face of suffering and challenge.  That's the whole point of Paul's diatribe against the "super-apostles" in 2 Corinthians, who shone and sparkled and "succeeded" with all the high-gloss-buffed self-confidence of a Manhattan socialite.

In the Greco-Roman world, Christians were often attacked as "sapping the vitality" of the high-energy pagan imperial/commercial synergy.   I'm not sure they used the word "synergy," but they would have if they'd known it.

But what is clear is that the True Gospel challenge to material succeedification remains the stumbling block it has always been.