The Fallacy of Success

Chesterton’s underlying belief was that falsehood required distracting disguises of confusion, complexity, and abstraction to appear credible, whereas truth required no decoration at all. Therefore, throughout “The Fallacy of Success,” Chesterton represents the subjects of his criticism—the authors writing about success and the books themselves—as tactically, intentionally confusing. The implication is that they misdirect readers to conceal their vacuousness. By contrast, Chesterton writes in such a way as to be intelligible to all readers. He writes plainly because he is confident that the truth can support itself without the assistance of philosophical jargon or flattery.

What Chesterton believes books about success are hiding is emptiness of thought and barrenness of usefulness. They are books about nothing—they “literally contain no kind of idea, and scarcely any kind of verbal sense” (1)—which must pretend to be something. Chesterton explores and exposes the techniques the authors use to make readers think they have something to say in his imaginative attempt to write about jumping and playing cards in the manner of such authors. His hypothetical samples are drawn-out, repetitive, and needlessly wordy, indicating that such authors rely on the profusion of words to seem to say something.