There’s nothing wrong with the concept of self-help, until there is.

Bootstrapping rugged individuals. Sure, I buy it, to a point.

But habitually, we wander way past that point.

On the Taibbi/Halper podcast, they put forth an interesting bit of data. It turns out that there are only two countries with a long rich tradition of breeding serial killers. Those two countries are the two postwar Empires, the US and the USSR.

In a way, this is is also the ultimate argument of the movie Joker. (“What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash?”)

When you have a culture dedicated to systemic violence and war, a country committed to dividing people, including their own, into sheep and goats, winners and losers; in short, when countries become nations become Empires, you get mental illness in a thousand forms.

Sometimes, people can bootstrap and motivate their way past the effects of marinating in a rotten stew of greed and blood and hate their whole lives. It happens. But it doesn’t happen nearly as often as the narrative of Opportunity tells us it does. And even when ‘success’ happens, the collateral damage to the souls of those who Rise Above can have bitter costs, to the Successes and to everyone around them.

Trump is an example of this, but not a great example, since he was born with all the advantages and only needed to hold onto them. His father serves to exemplify the situation. So does the infamous “MyPillow” guy, who was a dedicated crackhead before becoming a bedtime entrepreneur, financial guru, and advocate of big chief authoritarianism and martial law at the presidential level.

We can also turn to the example of Jeffrey Epstein, island-owner and pedophile enabler to the Successes at the highest levels.

Tomorrow.