27 pages • 54 minutes read
The Fallacy of Success
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Themes
The Complexity of Falsehood and the Modesty of Truth
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. They use “wandering statements” and “intellectual rambles” that are all “very stirring” but useless (2).
By contrast, Chesterton defends his case with concise, direct, simple statements such as this claim:
It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation (2).
Succeeding means this or that; no further elaboration needed. Chesterton goes out of his way to emphasize the plainness of his view because he believes his words have the substance of truth and need nothing more.
Chesterton represents the authors of books about success as mystics because mysticism as a form of spirituality emphasizes what is impenetrable, vague, mysterious. According to Chesterton, these writers have a mystical view of the wealthy and famous: They do not really understand how these individuals succeeded, but they admire them. The cloud of mystery conceals the emptiness of their notions from themselves and their readers. By contrast, Chesterton emphasizes his own candor about what he thinks he knows, and he readily calls attention to what is hidden. He positions himself as the barber in the Midas myth who sees the truth and feels compelled to convey it to the reeds—his readers—without embellishment or self-aggrandization.
The Instinct to Worship
The very first thing Chesterton says about books on success is that “They are much more wild than the wildest romances of chivalry and much more dull than the dullest religious tract” (1). The notion that text could be simultaneously fantastical and a drudgery to read presents readers with a paradox. A possible answer to the apparent tension is that books about success are wild in their representation of success as a sublime ideal and of attaining success as a kind of legendary adventure; however, they are dull in their lengthy, monotone repetition of that same idea. They are like mantras or chants, in which the words spoken or sung repeatedly take on their own ritualistic identity. They are no longer the words of an individual, but a depersonalized instrument of worship.
In fact, Chesterton’s allusion to religious tracts—like his later, apparently incidental reference to “the sin of avarice” (3)—are not accidental. The question of worship becomes explicit in his analysis of the attitude of the author of “The Instinct that Makes People Rich.” Chesterton, informed by his Christian religious affiliation, believes that human beings will worship something—whether God, nature, or humanity itself, of which the rich and wealthy are, in the eyes of many, glorious exemplars. Chesterton dedicates a whole essay to criticizing this latter form of worship in “The Worship of the Wealthy,” another essay in All Things Considered.
In “The Fallacy of Success” Chesterton argues that the worship of the wealthy is driven by ignorance—ignorance of the ordinary means by which such people became wealthy and ignorance of those aspects of their humanity that make them the equals of everyone else. Against this thoughtless, “ignorant” worship, Chesterton stresses the importance of self-awareness and good humor. Chesterton admits that he is no different from anyone else. He has the worship-instinct: “I look reverently at the portrait of Lord Rothschild; I read reverently about the exploits of Mr. Vanderbilt” (10). However, Chesterton combats this tendency by taking nothing seriously, making humor and satire distinguishing elements of his personal writing style. When he presents an earnest point, he frequently follows it with a joke, as though to puncture any illusions that he himself deserves reverence: “We must not have King Midas represented as an example of success; he was a failure of an unusually painful kind. Also, he had the ears of an ass” (10). For Chesterton, the comic is sacred; it is his religious rite.
The Viciousness of New Values
As a Christian apologist, Chesterton defended traditional values in an age of their decline. His firm conviction was that the traditional virtues, values, and doctrines of Christianity were good and beneficial, while the progressive secular, skeptical movements of his day were vicious and harmful. This he plainly states in “The Methusalahite,” another essay in All Things Considered:
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends idleness, and calls it art (4).
Expanding on this, the authors of books on success defend what Chesterton calls avarice (a synonym for greed) but what the author of the article Chesterton analyzes alluringly calls an “instinct” for acquiring wealth. Chesterton sees sophistry in this: the deceitful, artificial manipulation of appealing words to disguise intellectual weakness and moral corruption. These authors lure readers into what Chesterton calls an “unhealthy world of mere wild words” (4). The similarity between this descriptive phrase in “The Methusalahite” and Chesterton’s descriptions of the content of the books on success—it is all “wandering statements” and “intellectual rambles” (2)—is clear.
In the latter half of his essay, Chesterton leans into the moral side of his criticism, committing himself to resist the ideological current of self-promotion and aspiration to materialistic prosperity that inspired the new, modern scriptures of success. He frames this ideology in consciously religious terms both to underscore the reverential sentiment underpinning it and to cast it as a blasphemous successor to Christian teachings. For example, he accuses these books of promoting a “gospel”—a religious term for a revelation of good news—of avarice and pride (11).
Chesterton argues elsewhere in his writing that the novelty and popularity of a thing do not justify it, but rather make it suspect. His efforts to disassociate the ideal of success from the old wisdom of the Midas myth and to compare it negatively to what he calls the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice demonstrate this belief. Chesterton makes a considerable effort to emphasize the absurdity of those progressive values he deems dangerous, trusting that readers desire to imagine themselves sensible rather than up to date with the latest trending ideas.
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By G. K. Chesterton
