The Lucky Ones

To the many ways repugs and conservatards deny reality, you can add their refusal to acknowledge the role of dumb luck.

Digby:

Here's Lance Mannion, talking about what these people really have. (It's not freedom.)

[A]t their wake some Republican friend looks down into their coffin and says, “Your own fault, pal.”

“You should have planned better. You should have made smarter decisions. You should have managed your money more wisely. You should have taken better care of yourself, and don’t give me any crap about genetics. You should have lived your life the way I lived mine. You should have arranged things so that you were as lucky as I’ve been.”

Well, no they don’t.

At least not that very last bit.

You’d never hear one say, “I’ve been lucky.”

They haven’t been lucky.

They’ve been deserving.

They’ve deserved everything they have because they’ve earned it.

They earned having the parents they had. They earned being born in the richest, freest country in the world. They earned having no genetic predispositions to high blood pressure, arthritis, depression, schizophrenia, cancer. They earned not being hit by a bus when they were in grade school. They earned having a roommate in college who was able to explain general relativity or Hamlet to them the night before that midterm. They earned not having the plus sign turn blue. They earned that the company they went to work for didn’t go belly up when the market crashed or let them go in the round of mass layoffs that followed. They earned having children who didn’t get deathly sick or have disabilities or develop emotional problems or drug habits that required them to take their focus off their jobs, take time off work, and cause their bosses to say, “We feel your pain, but we can’t afford to carry you anymore if you’re not here to pull your weight. Here’s your hat, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Make sure you give your cell phone to security. And, no, we don’t have any idea what you’re going to do about insurance now and we don’t care and we don’t have to care and anyway you should have planned better. You should have saved more. You should have worked harder. You should have been luck…You should have deserved not to have what’s happened to you happen to you.”

They deserve it. They earned it. You? You didn’t. If you had, you’d have it. QED. And what you didn’t earn and don’t deserve, you don’t get. Simple as that. You suff.

It's even more egregious among the parasites of the one percent, where they get away with it because liberals refuse to call them out on it.

David Atkins:

.... what has been missing from much of leftist discourse isn't just economic inequality or the struggles of working families. What's missing is discussion of luck.

After all, what could be more iconoclastic to the edifice of the neoliberal and conservative systems? Declaring the Masters of the Universe incompetent is a given. Calling them evil is commonplace and mostly worth a chuckle. Using words such as heartless, bumbling, uncaring, greedy, inept, callous, and self-serving barely makes a dent.

But to call Lloyd Blankfein "lucky", or to say that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were simply "fortunate"--that's something altogether different. That's revolutionary. It cuts against the dominant discourse of the institutional left and right to reorient the entire social contract. It challenges not only the ethic of equality of opportunity, but also the legitimacy of much of the inequality of outcomes.

Hard work is still a key to success, of course. But what has been lost in modern culture is that many fail to achieve traditional measures of success despite high intelligence and hard work, while many "succeed" despite constant failure. Social connections are a huge factor. Most of our governing elites come from Ivy League universities, despite the fact that a huge number of very bright and highly competent people never attended an Ivy League institution. And then there's just being in the right place at the right time: how many Internet millionaires would have succeeded just as well had they been born in a pre-Internet world? How successful would Michael Jordan have been, had he been born in a country where soccer was the dominant sport?

Hard work is one factor in success, but it pales in comparison to good connections, family privilege, and dumb luck.

How have you been lucky?