On "Success" and "Failure"

"Success" is a rather relativistic term. One can only speak of success--and its opposite, failure--in relation to some object.

Yet told that someone is "successful" at something people do not ask "Successful at what?" Rather it is taken for granted that the object is individual socioeconomic advancement, with success at that game the attainment of some given level of income and position.

There is a lot to unpack here. There is the implicit assumption that individual socioeconomic advancement is the sole proper focus of a person's endeavor--that anyone who has other priorities is behaving aberrantly. Also implicit is the idea that an individual's outcomes in this area reflect on themselves as a person--that one's choices and efforts are what make for success or its lack, all this mattering far, far more than background or chance, or for that matter, scruples or the lack thereof; that this makes the pursuit of success a "tough" but essentially fair game. Indeed, this is so much the case that those who are not "successful" are dismissed as, sneered at, as failures, without a second thought given to the cruelty involved in that.

The result is that the language of "success" and "failure" that pervades our culture is ultimately an ultra-conformist expectation that the world is some big meritocracy that rewards people according to their deserts, with those not doing so well as they would like not worth bothering about, and every utterance of these words and their derivatives in the sense discussed here reinforcing the deep roots all this has in contemporary speech, thought, feeling and action.