Fighting Fate To Get Rich
Tuesday, October 25th, 2005Dear [Mentat],
I appreciate the need to limit the estimate of the degree that one’s genetics and inter generational family history determine his level of ultimate success. If we blamed everything on what came before us, we’d have little reason to fight fate and strive to get rich. Without this striving overall health seems to decline. We must not dismiss that component of our wills which is free, just because the other part (fate) that is determined, highly influences our choices.
But nor should we underestimate the role of fate (here we have the ageless battle between determinism and free will). Modern psychology suggests that our minds are not blank slates when we emerge from the womb. True, the brains of newborns indeed contain little learned data. So in terms of memory, perhaps they are blank. However, equating the newborn’s mind to a blank slate implies that it has a high impartiality in accepting new information that current studies suggest to be exaggerated. That is, one can write anything on a slate and the slate will render it, whatever it is, equally well as compared to anything else he writes on it. No matter what was written, the slate retains and displays it with the same intelligibility and retention ability. Thus the belief was that the mind at birth has no predisposition to learn one task or subject more easily than another, and that fate as no influence over this.
The mind though, discriminates more, which would support that the influence of fate may drive what it learns. The brain exhibits well-documented innate predispositions for easily storing certain types of information while showing clear resistance to accepting others. Further, the mind’s learning propensities in large degree resemble those of the parents’. Musical parents frequently have musical children as do working class parents spawn working class children. Alcoholics have alcoholics, welfare parents raise welfare kids. Very much of a person’s behavioral tendencies are thus influenced less by free will and more by his parents (fate).
How young brains tend to learn and subsequently believe most readily what its parents know and believe, is irrelevant. For the purposes here, it’s only necessary to accept that this does in fact occur widely. Not only is knowledge passed from parent to child, but so too is the ability acquire it as well as the tendency to favor one type of it over another. Thus, this strong and fateful influence of the parents and the profound effect it has on what the child eventually accomplishes himself should not be underestimated. Fighting the parental influence part of fate is thus, often difficult, and many do not ever mange to totally break free of this fate.
It was this phenomenon I wished to highlight when I commented that your social difficulties likely originated outside your realms of influence. In so doing, I hoped you would see that your circumstances are less resultant of bad choices you made and more caused by factors you had nothing to do with (fate). The media glamorizes those few people who fight fate and manage to break out of the molds of their heritages and achieve successes that their ancestors thought impossible. The news inundates us with so many of these stories that we think it normal for a person to successfully defy his destiny and get rich, no matter the forces of fate with which he’s contending. Winning out against fate indeed happens sometimes, yes. But not so often as we’re lead to believe.
This over-glorification of success of the successful fate fighters harms society because it attributes too much responsibility, credit, and even worship to the successful person. The vast majority of people mimic the prevailing status of their heritages with, yes, perhaps modest improvements. But nothing drastic. Far more people want to improve than who actually do improve. Most, though they successfully fight fate and drastically improve, wish they could improve more.
Stratification in this country is more caste than one might infer just from examining our idealism of the free pursuit of happiness. Though people are free, they generally do what their parents did, believe as their parents believed, and show similar aptitude levels. They generally do not rise above their raising as Dr. Phil calls it, and end up having largely been consigned to fate.
Some do of course win when they fight fate by making significant social and economic gains over their parents. It’s indeed possible to elevate one’s station (Dolly Parton, Oprah Winfrey, et al). Further, it also happens enough that people disappoint their families by falling below their raisings, and achieving less than did the previous generation. But all in all, we achieve roughly the same as our parents. In fact, in future generations giving the economic issues in America today, future generations may achieve less than did their parents due to the falling standards of living.
In a society as free as ours, there appears thus, to be formidable forces (destiny and fate) in addition to the individual’s will, that influences so many people to behave as did their ancestors. If not, then how do you explain peoples’ uncanny resemblance to their parents, not only in physical appearance, but also in temperaments, mannerisms, prosperity, and accomplishments? This force appears difficult to resist as so few manage to break the molds in which they originated. That force is destiny, and while not unbeatable, it is nonetheless, quite powerful.
Affluence as well as hardship runs in families. Fate seems to favor the up-and-coming rich person whose parents themselves, are rich. Indeed most of today’s well-to-do people andthe European aristocrats of centuries past, could trace their prosperity back at least several generations. Rare are first generation wealthers(those paupers who start with absolutely no nest egg, no inherited businesses, no affluent parents, no preferential treatment, and no top-notch schooling) who then build in one generation a multimillion dollar empire. Yet so many of the rich claim sole responsibility for their good fortune, patting themselves on the back for successfully fighting fate, and they act as though they owe nothing to the world for it. They attribute their good life to their hard and relentless work, and mention nothing of fate, as though hard work is all one needs. They might be right if prosperity was just a matter of acquiring wealth. But it’s not. It’s more, and fate makes up a large part of that extra.
Prosperity and happiness in general are so much more in fact than sheer tenacity. These comprise an ideology, a whole belief system, a family subculture that often takes centuries to evolve. Without this mindset, wealth generally does not visit much less stay. Consider the people from poor, unprivileged backgrounds who win the lottery. Properly managed, a 50 million-dollar prize would last many lifetimes. Yet so many overspend and needlessly squander the pot, eventually winding up in more debt than they were before winning. While luck (fate) gave them the money, their lacking shrewdness took it away.
Without that prudence – that wisdom, skill, and cultural underpinning of getting and staying rich – the poor man made rich by a stroke of luck, will again be poor one day soon (a fool and his money are soon parted). So while modest backgrounds cannot guarantee modest futures, they, so much more often than not, do precede them. Thus, a man from a working class family must climb a bigger mountain to actually “rise above his raising” than a man for whom wealth is a birthright. Fighting fate for one is a far cry easier to emerge victorious, than it is for another.
So, given all that, while we have responsibility to strive to achieve the best we can, our maximum potential is surely not determined solely by the effort we throw at it. While we might laugh at the man who excuses himself from achievingmore by citing his modest family history, perhaps we shouldn’t. Perhaps he is the wiser. Perhaps he knows that it’s futile to fight fate too much, and realizes that those who do, end up aging and dying way too early due to chronic frustration, anger, and sadness.