Tom's Views

Dear [Mentat],

Yes you can have it both ways if you consider the nuances of what I was relating. I’m saying that the media glamorizes those few people with   many   stories each. How many stories over the past year would you say have been done on Anna Nicole Smith? I’d say at least several hundred. They inundate us with many, many stories about very few people. Spend some time watching the TV talk shows like Oprah, Montell, Larry King, and the in-depth scoop shows like Inside Edition, Hard Copy, Entertainment Tonight, The Insider, and so on. We could even throw in the news shows like Prime Time, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and Dateline, which often devote entire segments to successful celebrities. What the heck? Let’s even include the magazines and national newspapers that feature success stories. Now if you were to add up all the different people discussed in these venues over the past six months, I believe you’d be hard pressed to find more than ten thousand acclaimed souls covered with more than just a sentence or two, much less those whose pictures appear. The media tends to report on the same few people over and over.

The number of stories geared to reveal the success of people who have never been publicized before, discounting routine news stories, would seem very much lower than those that revisit someone covered previously. Thus my point was that the media spends much time glorifying a very small percentage of the over all population and that the sorts of high-level success they typically cover is indeed rare. I consider ten thousand reported successes in six months out of 300 million potential successes in this country quite rare. That’s less than one on-hundredth of one percent of the total US population who achieve enough success to be celebrated extensively.

No, the chances for success are almost   never   zero. But then, who said that the only time we should ever give up a pursuit is when there is absolutely   no   chance of succeeding? Sometimes, it makes perfect sense to give up a dream, even when the odds of achieving it are far from zero.

The media simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to tell all the stories of success, nor would people want to see them all. They seem to focus on   the most noteworthy   success stories. So yes, many successful people we hear nothing about.

Unfortunately,   prejudice   helps determine what society considers   noteworthy.   That said, prejudice creates significant challenges for its victims. Certainly, I’d never suggest that one should simply lay down and accept it just because it seems unbeatable. Prejudice is unjust, and thus, our culture would do well to get rid of it in spite of the effort this would require. But there are other limiting forces acting to augment or reduce a person’s potential, which, though not unjust, still exist and are still quite formidable. Some forces (particularly those unjust ones) are worth overcoming. Others however, are not.

I’d also suggest that whatever a person’s familial background, some form of success, to greater or lesser degrees, is possible for them. However, the background exerts an almost overpowering influence on the particular form and degree of success they attain. I’d argue that regardless of whatever successes you care to mention, the background of the person played an essential role in it. Without their particular backgrounds, successful people would not have attained success in the way they did. Hopefully, this is self-evident.

Yes, certainly there is more success being achieved out there than we learn of through the media. However, when you look at the health problems and the accompanying growth of the medical establishment in this post industrial age in the west, it’s easy to see that living the successful life has high costs. Indeed, it may turn out eventually that society has defined success incorrectly. Perhaps success has less to do with fast cars, lavish homes, and wide-spread popularity than it does with good health, simplistic living, and truly living one’s dream irrespective of the earnings potential.

Tom Hesley