by Katalin Balog
Winners and losers
It might seem that the idea that one should remain indifferent to success is for losers. Yes, it is my own professional and personal setbacks that all of a sudden so sharpened my insights into the downsides of success. But actually, I am not new to this idea. I am not a virtuoso of failure and decay like Emil Cioran, but I come from a part of the world, East-Central Europe, where there is a venerable tradition of looking with suspicion at the ambition to succeed, to be a winner at life. The tradition, vaguely defined as it is, stretches from Russia through East-Central Europe to Germany and north to Scandinavia. In this tradition, we venerate martyrs and hopeless causes, the heroic individual who dares ignore received opinion, whereas our Western counterparts celebrate achievement and lionize winners.
The collapse of the Hungarian regime in 1989 – and, ironically, the rise of one of today’s most successful strivers, Viktor Orbán – started with the ceremonial reburial of five of the martyrs of the 1956 revolution against communism. Hundreds of thousands showed up for the reburial in Budapest, and millions more watched it on television. During the revolution, the Soviet army invaded the country and put down any resistance, installing a puppet government that went on to rule the country for another 30 years. The Prime Minister of the revolution and four of his closest associates were executed in a special secret trial, their bodies dumped in an unmarked mass grave one early morning in June 1958. Their families learned of their deaths from the newspaper the next day. Hungarians’ collective psyche was very much attuned to these facts at the time of the reburial. That being a hero might preclude success; that it might get you to suffer much indignity.
Those in the Hungarian Communist Party who made peace with Moscow and carried out the imprisonment and execution of thousands might have had their years of success. But members of the democratic opposition of the 1970s and 1980s, people whom the Western press liked to call “dissidents,” looked askance at this so-called success. I didn’t know anyone in Budapest at the time who wouldn’t have been disgusted by the suggestion that they should be caring about their ‘career’. Though an exaggeration, we believed that only the most craven opportunists were supposed to have a career. Most of my friends either didn’t have jobs because the regime deemed them unreliable or hostile, and so worked in the gig economy (as translators, research assistants, sometimes as pump attendants at gas stations, etc.) or had jobs, but their center of gravity lay elsewhere. Dissidents in Czechoslovakia had it worse; many of them ended up, upon the collapse of the regime in 1989, in the straight-from-prison-to-government pipeline.
The cult of winning
I have had plenty of status anxiety in those times. Of course, the striving for success, for status, is a human universal – even if capitalism intensifies and democratizes that drive. But so is suspicion about it: contempt of the world, a warning that real value can be found not in gaining worldly status. Kierkegaard, for example, says that “wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that … even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd … untruth would at once be let in.”[1]
Except, in the US, where I ended up right after the reburial, this scepticism seems to be in short supply. Of course, having a career in America doesn’t (necessarily) mean having to suck up to the regime. But lately, more and more of life is under the sign of the market. This, coupled with the ideology of meritocracy, where position in life is taken as an expression of merit – results in competition for literally every advantage. These circumstances would create a perfect environment for opportunism, even without our recent authoritarian turn, where many careers now – like back in Communist Hungary – are literally dependent on sucking up to the worst causes, the worst people.
One of the intriguing features of the Epstein scandal is that it provides an interpretive tool for what happened in the first year of Trump 2.0. What the Epstein files show is that there is a significant portion of the current elite – the winners of the meritocratic race – that is either willing to associate with a known criminal in the hopes of social contacts, money, and perhaps sex, or at least willing to overlook tell-tale signs of his fuckery. Woody Allen, in his birthday note to Epstein, compared his Upper East Side mansion to Dracula’s castle, an indication that the nature of his activities registered with his guests. And so there was this “Epstein class” – and it turns out they prized status above anything else. One might get the sense that the difference between those members of the ruling class who were Epstein associates and those who were not is a matter of degree. It is not a qualitative difference between people who care deeply about things beyond their careers and those who don’t. One should be forgiven for the impression that the Epstein class rules.
This mentality explains Republican capitulation to Trump. But capitulation is not just a Republican thing. American elites – irrespective of party affiliation – have proven themselves to be surprisingly cowardly in the face of the authoritarian onslaught of the second Trump administration. Eastern Europeans feel a little bit of glee watching the American bloodbath, remembering how haughtily Americans used to lecture them on their lack of democratic tradition and the resulting deficit of its principled defense. Institution after institution compromised in the hopes of holding on to their position, rather than standing up and risking losing status and advantage. Universities, business, big law, and the media have all capitulated to varying degrees to a grotesquely self-serving and corrupt president. They all, after all, have lived for a long time with the understanding that success matters most. Trump is only the most extreme and bold-faced exemplar of the American worship of “winning”. Thank God for so-called “ordinary Americans” who have marched in numbers, and for the brave people of Minneapolis, who have salvaged the good name of the country.
The Trump regime has laid bare the emptiness at the heart of the meritocratic regime. The tech elite, the richest and most powerful Americans, these role-models for success, have taken this the farthest as usual. Having given up the pretense of caring about the future of humanity, unable to process the thought of their own mortality and limitations, they no longer want to share in the human lot; instead, they want to live forever by becoming one with the machine.
The prize is not all
Rot from the top, and cynicism from below, is not a world-historical rarity. But times were quite different as recently as the 1960s and 70s. There was a counterculture in the US that valued authenticity, freedom, and openness to experience. There was also a mainstream cultural consensus that there is more to life than advancement and success; literature, and art, and music, and dance had mass appeal. That is no longer true.
The reasons why, as a society, we struggle to uphold those values are no doubt many and complex; streaming technology, social media, AI, and the culture of meritocratic striving are all part of it. It is clear, though, that the pressure to self-promote cheapens the culture. Patti Smith achieved cult status without doing any of what artists are expected to do today. These days, she writes great books, but she still doesn’t curate or package herself; in her Substack videos, she ad-libs, forgets things, but in the end often manages to say something worthwhile.
The problem is not success in itself. But failure has its charms, too. Freed from expectation, a kick in the mouth can help steer one to a truer path. The latest, as yet untranslated novel of László Krasznahorkai, a recent Nobel recipient, safeguards this freedom of failure. It takes an unusual angle on self-promotion by featuring a character called László Krasznahorkai, a famous writer, as well as a loquacious and self-centered man. „Krasznahorkai” is passionately interested in big questions about life and the universe, but his personal hygiene is sketchy. The other main character thinks of him just as „the pee-smelling celebrity”.
Well, winning is for losers anyway.
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[1] “For the Dedication to ‘That Single Individual’”, in The Point of View, Kierkegaard’s Writing, vol. 22 (eds. Hong and Hong).
[2] In the Eastern Block, it turns out many prominent artists (writers, filmmakers, etc.) were coerced to become secret police collaborators – lest they lose the chance for their work to be shown.