Life Without "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire" Syndrome

One of the most interesting aspects of Theodore Dreiser's A Book About Myself (for me, at least) was his frankness about how he felt facing the forbidding Rat Race as a young man of modest background, without the advantages that many of his rivals had--in part because of how rare it was, and remains, for those coming from such backgrounds to ever tell their stories, and also because so few of any background own up to feeling that way.

That attitude is the opposite of the outlook that has variously been called the "temporarily embarrassed capitalist," "temporarily embarrassed millionaire," and "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"--and I think it worth consideration for more than its obvious interests for a reader of classics like Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood saga or An American Tragedy.

After all, consider the hard reality of being in a winner-take-all society where, for all the pieties about "equality of opportunity" no person of any intelligence truly believes for a second that the competition is remotely equal in its openness to talent--but at the same time Authority demands that "everyone" fling themselves into the scramble with the utmost enthusiasm in the belief that somehow or other they will be the one winner who takes all, be the donkey in five thousand who gets the carrot, on the basis of . . . nothing whatsoever. It is not an expectation of rational behavior, but in fact a demand that one be irrational, irrational in a particular way. Indeed, should one fail to manifest said irrationality their peers and superiors are apt to accuse them of, if not being "lazy" or "shiftless," then of lacking in "confidence," "faith" or "optimism," all unforgivable character traits indeed in their eyes.

It is, of course, a far from socially neutral matter--the convenience of the elite resting upon this outlook. (That the lower orders should look at social arrangements in a calculating way, that workers should work to live rather than live to work, is an outrage from the standpoint of those who think the lower orders exist only for their convenience rather than in their own right. And an outrage especially for the businessmen who think that the prerogative of economic calculation be taken up by anyone else, the rest of humanity, whether as worker, consumer, public official or anything else properly an object on which they as the only subjects can exert their will.)

Still, irrational and exploitative as it all is, few question it, with Dreiser lamenting the fact but not offering any serious intellectual challenge to it. If he could not help being horrified by the order around him and wishing there was another way, and not just for him, he also felt himself to be lacking for feeling the way he did, and indeed writing his "Trilogy of Desire" Dreiser imagined Frank Cowperwood as the man he wished he was (while I dare say, in a Forbes Gurney, brutally satirizing the man he actually thought himself to be)--though his view would seem to have evolved afterward. In the book generally thought Dreiser's masterpiece, An American Tragedy, in Clyde Griffiths he presented a protagonist who had what Dreiser felt to be lacking inside himself--but also an even less advantageous background--with all this figuring into how he believed in and played by the rules of the game, and the consequences following therefrom. Summing it up I cannot possibly do better than David Walsh, who characterizes the tale as one of a man who born into this society, and "fervently believes in that society and wishes nothing more than to be a respected member of it," to the point of a "willingness to sacrifice everything human in himself," and in the process only suffer being ground up by that machinery and destroyed over the book's near-thousand pages, the American Dream become American Nightmare ultimately the source of the American Tragedy in what may be the greatest indictment of that vision of life ever put to paper.