Tom's Views

Dear [Mentat],

In certain situations, people may feel a sense of liberation when they exceed their parents’ accomplishments. Sometimes, yes, they find that they can achieve a more fulfilling life by shedding some of their ingrained hardships. In this specific and limited sense, I agree with you. That is: Folks can indeed rise above their raising. But whether or not this is   always   the right thing to do is quite another story.

You speak of this   self-fulfilling prophecy   as you call it [where acknowledging that we might not succeed more than our parents did guarantees that we will not].   [You imply that] there are no valid reasons for people to believe that they’re most likely to achieve approximately what their parents did, and then to tailor their careers accordingly. You say that you recognize them.

But your comments suggest that you tend to excessively minimize their restrictive impacts of a person’s upbringing. I take issue with that, because heaps of evidence establish how supremely important the role of one’s raising is. I grant you that the   complete   dismissal of one’s greater potential is fool-hardy. But also, it is reckless to assume that   absolutely no   hardship is inherited that limits one’s greater potential.

We understand today that parents can all too easily wreck a child’s chances through improper rearing practices; anything from poorly prepared meals and bad nutritional habits to improper sexual contact, to substandard educational systems. So to assume, just because some people manage to rise high, that everyone   should [do the same] and are wanting if they don’t, greatly lacks compassion as well as a complete understanding of humanity; particularly, how knowledge, ability, and motivation propagate from generation to generation, and the large degree to which they do. There are legitimate and formidable negative influences with which we all contend, that come from our ancestry as well as our environment. Thus, one’s accomplishments in life are not simply a matter of the choices he makes, which I’m sure you understand.

One must also examine what motivates his choices. Upon doing this, he’ll find that some choices appear easier to make than others, and some have consequences that can be better accommodated than others. How hard a choice can be to make and sustain, in addition to the specific amount of will in the person, depends on what Spock described in   The Wrath Of Kahn   as a person’s   gifts.   A given choice for you for example, is easier for you to implement than it would be for me. Also, there are choices that I might consider easily made and implemented that you would not make, and even if you did, could not see them through to completion. When figuring out a person’s worthiness to receive reverence, the matter is more complicated than simply figuring out who is lazy and who isn’t.

Indeed, external factors that seem to stack up against a particular choice of career for example, can reak havoc on a person’s health.  For details, see my    Push The Wrong Way, Die Too Young!   post.

Keep in mind [...] that a strong desire to break free of the mold doesn’t mean that the mold is not in fact, logical. There are very compelling reasons that the mold exists; reasons beyond mere superstition. It is not simply an outgrowth of unenlightened thinking, but rather, of extensive multi-generational experience; history that is governed largely by genetics, ingrained traditions, and external environmental circumstances. People think this way because it often turns out to be true.

Scientists and anthropologists have demonstrated repeatedly that people mirror their parents in many ways, including level of achievement. If you consider how many for whom this is actually true, and how many have proven it false, you’d find that it’s true very much more often than not. So if sheer numbers are any indicator of society’s propensities, then the tendency for the upper bound of a particular human’s achievements   naturally   hovers close to his parents’. This is not to say that we cannot exceed this bound. We certainly can, given circumstances that favor such a change. But if one decides to excel in ways that drastically differ from his parents’, then he’ll likely incur severe psychological or physical costs, as discussed above. If he chooses to run against the prevailing currents of his life, then he also chooses to bear all the resulting hardships; difficulties that will often kill him before his time.

Also, it appears that we’re muddling at least two distinctive ideas regarding this self-fulfilling prophecy mold. Consider that this mold derives not simply from people’s beliefs that they can only succeed about as much as their parents did. In fact, there are many reasons a potential immigrant for example, might see his opportunities as too limited in his home country, and thus wish to come to America. [...] These include governmental, economic, religious, and human rights curtailments, not to mention official corruption within these morally decrepit regimes.  However, many immigrants make great sacrifice to come here only to find disappointment and disillusion.  See my piece on   Sad Immigrants   for a discussion about why not all immigrants have managed to rise above thir raisings even though they made it all the way to America.

No doubt, American society offers perhaps the greatest opportunity for people of all walks of life. Yet there’s still room for improvement. It’s not good to favor the status quo simply because, as you say, it’s better than it’s ever been before. If software companies operated with this attitude for long, they’d be out of business, and so too would America. No matter how good things are, we can’t afford to grow complacent and start believing that they’re good enough, and thus need no further changes.

So while I agree that America corners the market on the number and diversity of opportunities it offers, I’d temper that by saying that there’s never a good reason to stop pointing out shortcomings and then seeking to eliminate them. As I see it, a major chink in America’s armor is conservative society’s tendency to blame fully a man for his failures.  This is cruel, ignorant, and certainly something we ought to stop doing in centuries to come.

Next, I’d only partly agree with your comment about this nation’s success being the result of more people   rising above their raisings.   I suppose that in a very basic sense that‘s true. But there’s a chicken-in-the-egg scenario brewing here. Is it people rising above their raising that makes America so great (as you say), or is it that America being so great actually enables people to rise above their raising? I suggest that it’s both. America, by virtue of its laws, established infrastructures, climate, and hundreds of other factors is indeed the land of opportunity, and I think it’d be hard to demonstrate that all of these points in America’s favor originated in a person’s desire to outdo his parents.

As I’ve said before, the forces opposing one’s realization of his maximal potential are varied and many. It’s certainly not the case that the only reason people haven’t achieved more is because they believe themselves bound by hereditary destiny. For a description of some of the many other forces of at least equal limiting power, see my   Bonds Of Manifest Destiny   post

So given all of this, unlike you, I don’t believe that the dominant factor in restricting a person’s maximum potential derives from his being resigned to doing only about   as well as   his parents. This is indeed a factor to be sure, but it’s only one of a great many, most of which he can’t control himself. An attitude of resignation may be   the   reason for a person’s stagnation. But we can’t know that for sure until we learn what motivates that attitude. You are correct that some people, even given the best of external circumstances, would still shy away from achieving, and this is sad. But I suspect that much more frequently, their willingness to default to “the old ways” or to be lazy comes from having to cope for generations with the formidable forces listed above as well as others. Myths generally have a basis in fact.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Bonds Of Manifest Destiny
• More Than Effort To Outperform Our Parents
• Push The Wrong Way, Die Too Young!
• We Cannot Achieve Just Anything We Want