The Perils of Privilege

What the Elon Musk spectacle can teach us about success, failure, and growing up.

Photo credit Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash.

A few years ago, I flew first class for the first (and, so far, only) time, the ticket attained through credit-card gaming and a profligate use of air miles. I had a tight connection, and when I reached the gate for the second leg of the journey the plane was already boarding. When I saw the line of waiting passengers, a thought flashed through my mind—I should go to the front.

My better nature kicked in. I got in line and waited my turn to board.

I settled into my comfy seat, wiping my hands with a warm eucalyptus-scented washcloth as the flight attendant set a glass of chilled white wine on my tray. I thought about that momentary feeling of injustice. I shouldn’t have to wait. I’m first class! It amazed me how fast privilege poisons the brain, how all it took was little dish of warm mixed nuts to convince me that I deserved better than my cohorts in coach with their half-cans of Diet Coke.

At the University of California, Irvine, a research team devised a rigged Monopoly game to better understand the way privilege affects people’s mindsets. In the study, strangers were grouped into pairs, and a coin toss determined who would be the “rich” player and who would be the “poor” player. The rich players started the game with twice as much money as the poor ones and received twice as much cash when they passed “Go”—an advantage magnified by the fact that they also moved around the board twice as quickly (they rolled two dice at each turn while their opponents rolled one).

As the game progressed, the advantaged players became louder and ruder. They smacked their pieces on the game board, ate more pretzels, crowed about their winnings, and taunted their opponents for their poor showing. When the rich players invariably won, every one of them attributed their victory to skills rather than to the coin toss. “None, not one, of the rich players attributed their inevitable success in this game to that force of luck that randomly got them that privilege in the first place,” said Professor Paul Piff, who conducted the study.

Wealth and privilege make people confident that they deserve what they have, and it’s true that some high-net-worth individuals are smarter and more disciplined that the average person. But for every Steve Wozniak, there are multiple millionaires and billionaires whose primary talent is manipulating market systems to fatten their bank own accounts. When Disney pays CEO Bob Iger 1,424 times more than the median employee salary, it’s clear that the payment-to-value metric is off, as the ongoing screenwriters and actors strike is making clear.

Then there’s Elon Musk, who, perhaps more than any other individual, is exposing the myth of the brilliant billionaire. In October 2022, Musk, then the world’s richest person, purchased Twitter for $44 billion. By June 2023, the company was worth $15 billion, a third of what he paid. The devaluation followed a series of outrageously bad business decisions by Musk including (but not limited to): spooking advertisers, gutting the staff, undermining safety and privacy controls, refusing to pay bills, restricting access to the platform, and alienating the users who produce Twitter’s most popular content.

For most people such a dazzling inventory of incompetence might be humbling, but Musk is unrepentant, and he continues his long streak of making unhinged and juvenile comments. Earlier this month, he challenged Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match and a … measuring contest.

It’s aggravating, but the spectacle provides useful perspective for anyone who has ever shuttered a failed business, lost a job, or just looked at their life and said, this is not how it was supposed to go. It’s not just that Musk has grossly mismanaged Twitter—it’s that nearly any one of us could have achieved better results by simply leaving the platform as it was.

We shouldn’t take our failures and disappointments too seriously. Even more important, we shouldn’t take our successes too seriously.

In his lovely book, If You Should Fail, literature professor Joe Moran offers the example of Virginia Woolf, who declined numerous awards and honors in her lifetime. “It is an utterly corrupt society … and I will take nothing that it can give me,” she wrote in her diary about refusing a Doctor of Letters title from the University of Manchester. “Nothing would induce me to connive at all that humbug.”

This was not false modesty, but rather a very sophisticated understanding of the nature of awards. “She refused to be pinned down by prizes, which are meant to burnish a life and only diminish it,” Moran writes.

We debase ourselves when we take the world’s accolades too seriously. We become the monsters loudly munching pretzels during a rigged Monopoly game, the entitled jerks in first class snubbing the plebs in steerage. Whether it’s a warm cookie or a blue checkmark or a gold medal, we can’t succumb to the idea that these trinkets are accurate measures of our worth. “Success feels like a sham because we crave it and solicit it from others. The pursuit of it means relinquishing control over our lives,” writes Moran.

Musk is a tragedy because he can do anything he wants, but he chooses to reduce himself to pettiness and personal grudges. He appears doomed to his bottomless hunger and his never-ending quest for admiration.

 I’m not sure I’m much better, though.

“Success feels like a sham because we crave it and solicit it from others. The pursuit of it means relinquishing control over our lives.” — Joe Moran.

When I was struggling to finish a novel, I could easily become tormented by the success of books I considered subpar. At one point, I was particularly vexed by the awards and praise lavished on acquaintance’s novel. I didn’t think the book was very good, and I begged my friends to go to the bookstore and read a few pages. Don’t buy it, I’d insist, just tell me I’m not crazy.

After I published a book of my own, I become hypnotized by the exhausting process of building a platform. I relentlessly tracked my social-media followers, book sales, web traffic, etc. I told myself I was being a shrewd and realistic citizen of the market-based economy, but it went deeper than that. I used these metrics as a scorecard of my worth as a writer (and perilously close to my worth as a human being).

That was many years ago, and my essential personality hasn’t changed significantly since then. Today, a perceptive person might see a shadow fall across my face as she tells me about her latest book deal or prestigious teaching stint, and Substack has provided me with a whole new set of metrics to obsess over. But since I’m a seasoned veteran of envy and insecurity, I’m better at managing these emotions. I’ve learned to relax into the familiar tightness in my chest, and I know how to talk to myself when this sensation arises. You’re feeling threatened right now, and that’s all right, but remember you’re at a backyard barbecue and not at war. I have learned, with the help of many terrific meditation instructors, that relaxing into difficult emotions is much less painful than resisting them.

“At the core of our neurosis lies a small seed of sanity and sense,” writes Moran. “We are searching for a world beyond success or failure, where we would not need to act like winners to disguise our fear that we are losers.” Connecting with that sanity is the first step to becoming a true adult. “A proper grown-up is a depressive realist who accepts that life is knotty and unfair and that our plans will often be foiled. Life’s biggest challenges can’t be solved, only outgrown,” writes Moran.

While writing this essay, I re-read the first pages of my acquaintance’s novel, the one I considered so unworthy of its success. The book still wasn’t for me, but the writing was warm and graceful, and hundreds of people had posted online reviews saying they loved it. More than a decade after its publication, it still sells very well.

I’m fortunate that my friends never bothered to go to the bookstore to report back to me that I wasn’t crazy. I was crazy. And I’m still crazy to a certain extent. But at least I’ll never challenge Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match.

 How has privilege, success and/or failure influenced the way you see yourself and the world around you?