A History of Failure

 

Art by Rachel A Rosen, who also designs amazing covers for books (HINT!)

This essay is not about Taylor Swift – or at least, it’s got far less to do with Taylor Swift than my last essay. But there is a connection.

It’s pretty hard to deny that even though it’s made adequate bank, Life of a Showgirl has had – at least on parts of the internet I’ve seen, i.e. my Discord channels and my Youtube and Substack algorithms – a pretty negative reaction from fans and a lot of critics. The line between “fan” and “critic” is blurrier than it’s ever been, in this current era of accessible content creation and platforming. You don’t need to be an expert for your opinion to matter; you just need to catch the algorithm at the right or wrong time.

Regardless, some people are treating the album, and Swift, as a laughingstock, and not for the first time.

Now, in my own life, I mentioned in my last essay that I was running for the local public school board, and while I managed to get over 2900 votes, from a voting turnout of about 18% and about 20k voters or so, I didn’t get a spot on the school board.

 (My shitshow of a provincial government apparently is floating the idea of just abolishing school boards anyway. If you’re Albertan, this is a reminder to make a fuss and do your best to piss off the UCP. Operation Total Recall is underway, and please check it out, because this government is attacking our democratic rights and everyone’s interests, regardless of preferred political affiliation.)

Now – my personal failure here was a disappointment, but I’ve had a much kinder reaction from people. Partly, I don’t have the expectations placed on me that, you know, a seasoned political candidate or a world-famous celebrity like Swift does. And while I’m proud that I made the attempt, there’s still a certain shadow over any effort that doesn’t bear fruit.

It got me thinking: what does failure mean?

There’s something really interesting about failing these days. Now, maybe it’s a modern problem, or maybe there’s a historical precedent here, but at least in my own English-speaking, Western cultural context, it seems to me like failure has developed this moral weight to it.

A Quick, Dirty History of Success

I’ve alluded to the basic concepts of Calvinism and gestured at the Protestant work ethic and its resulting trauma before. In a quick, dirty overview, a prominent strain of Christianity held that some people were chosen for Heaven and others simply aren’t, and the seats are limited: predestination. However, and here’s the extra nasty bit, people thought that God would hint at who was destined for eternal salvation by favouring them with success in their earthly life.

So of course, people who belonged to Calvinist strains of Christianity ended up working as hard as possible to try and demonstrate their state of blessedness. Mix that into the cultural soup of the Industrial Revolution, and you have an extremely toxic recipe for the future.

This whole belief system has kind of evolved into what’s now called the Prosperity Gospel, which is a more aggressive focus specifically on the idea that God will reward you in not only Heaven, but your earthly life, with actual riches. Immortality in a paradise of fellowship amongst loved ones and a divine parental figure is no longer enough to satisfy people who are scraping to make ends meet.

John Steinbeck did not actually say, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” The thing that this popular misquote gets wrong is at least partly its attribution of blame. It has this implication that damn it, these poor people are just stupid and stubborn, or ignorant – if only they’d see what’s gone wrong!

That perspective glides over the extremely intensive propaganda efforts that have gone into making people believe that poverty is their own fault. After all, if you just work hard enough, you can be a billionaire too, right? Ignore the widening legal loopholes for transference of wealth, avoidance of taxation, and the inheritance chains of property, wealth, and privileged advantages that directly tie into chattel slavery and European aristocratic families, of course. It’s just about luck and working hard! Get on that grindset, girl!

Back to Failure

The thing about focusing on success and The Power of Positive Thinking, and other similar late-Victorian and early 20^th century self-help texts, is that it doesn’t really account for what the fuck happens if…you just fail. In The Secret, one of the more recent and deeply influential permutations of modern prosperity gospel, there’s a whole thing about “The Universe” wanting to reward you by giving you whatever you think about most. Of course, that means that worrying about failure will actually result in failure…because the universe is kind of stupid and bad at consent, I guess.

Perhaps, dear reader, you can see the direction I’m pulling you in. The logical corollary of the axiom that success = favour from God or the Universe…is that failure means God, or the Universe, is disappointed in you.

I haven’t seen this discussed much, but the idea lurks like an urban legend intruder beneath the bed, breathing and panting damply, evident but too terrifying to confront directly.

“Bad Things That Happen to You Are Your Own Fault”

People don’t say this out loud in exactly these words, but the implication sits there, and turns up constantly, just like that urban legend slasher. Even after #MeToo in the late 2010s, people still say and imply that one’s clothing or behaviour could have been responsible for sexual assault and harassment.

Not attaining the success you expected at work, missy? Clearly the problem is that feminism has failed, and it’s time to Retvrn to the (imagined) past mode of life. Be more…traditional. You want a family, don’t you? Wouldn’t it be relaxing to just spend time with your children at home while your husband takes care of things? All you have to do is the chores, and you already do those! Why work in addition to that?

This particular message is all over social media, popping up in different forms like mutating toxic mushrooms around the earthen cellar door where fascism dwells.

Never in this line of propaganda is there a discussion of, say, fertility problems. Despite the wide accessibility of fertility treatments in our current era, having any kind of trouble, say, getting pregnant or impregnating someone, still carries the sting of humiliation. Never mind the question of what happens if you find out that you can’t crack it as a parent *after* you have children, or the constant, pervasive fear every parent has of failing their child.

As mentioned, the dominant cultural milieu in the West is flavoured by both capitalism and Christanity. Both the wealthy and the super-wealthy benefit from having the broad working class focused on aspiration rather than justice. If people are trying to grind their way to the top, and fighting each other for scraps, they won’t target the people actually holding the reins of power and wealth. Furthermore, if people see wealth as a blessing from God or the Universe, poverty indicates either withholding of a blessing, or failure.

Failure and poverty are thus made uncomfortable housemates, necessary to each other. Any type of failure risks the danger of poverty, and poverty itself is a form of implied failure.

Let’s Make It Worse

So, this is pretty bad, right? Like if you take apart the idea that failure is always your own fault *and* a result of not being good enough for the Divine Parent (whether that’s God or the Universe), it’s pretty scary and daunting. It’s a damn hard standard to meet.

Now put that in the context of our panopticon society. Speaking of 19^th century morality that’s stabbing us in the ass, the panopticon was a prison design meant to allow constant surveillance of prisoners, to make sure they were reforming properly. Constant scrutiny and an absolute destruction of privacy is clearly the way to stop someone from hurting people, right? Of course, if we’re talking about people breaking the law, we should probably allude to that whole “poor people commit crimes because they’re poor” thing that tends to happen. So basically, if you surveil and shame people adequately, it should be possible to fix their unfortunate moral defect of poverty.

The best part is, now we have the thing where user interfaces on social media treat every person like a content creator, people feel both social pressure and algorithmic pressure to post regularly. Between the data exposure required for social media and actually posting stuff about one’s personal life, we’ve developed a societal system of self-exposure and peer surveillance.

Now, peer surveillance has always been kind of a thing – people have been up in each other’s business for as long as we’ve been social animals, and in fact, other animals are nosy, too. But the current mode of peer surveillance transcends previous social models. Before, you’d have to be seen or heard doing something you weren’t supposed to; your thoughts, at least, were sacrosanct.

But now we share our thoughts as well, and present the world with an entirely new path of judgement.

And, in a world where the middle and lower class are collapsing together, rather than forging class solidarity and focusing on our mutual opposition, we resort to cannibalism, in hopes of temporary catharsis and relief. After all, if we can root out the class traitors, the “Treatlers” who still order snacks from food delivery services, surely we’ll be able to defeat our enemies, right? Somehow, people bullying each other on social media platforms has failed to trigger the revolution.

How the fuck do we fix this?  

The thing is, this situation isn’t unfixable. In addition to plain compassion and critical thinking and asking ourselves questions – should I *really* repeat this or engage with this content? Am I being too harsh on other people? – we need to practice both self-compassion and compassion towards others.

This sounds extremely boring and un-fun, so if you find yourself with superfluous hostile or mischievous energy, direct it towards the real targets: people in power. You have a right to be angry for what they’re doing to us, so write angry, ferocious letters, make art, or find other creative outlets to express your anger. People in power are so much more fragile than we think they are. We should make them scared again. For legal reasons, I am not directly advocating violent action, but I am advocating protests and strikes, and whatever forms of disruption you can manage.

Harass politicians and political figures who are trying to strip your rights away. Cover for your coworkers when they’re sick or “quiet quitting”. Ignore shoplifting customers, especially if you’re a fellow customer. Buy food for homeless people (and also just give them money). Find out what your neighbours’ names are and actually say hi to them. Be nice to random people on the internet, especially when you don’t want to. And above all else, reframe how you see failure.

What failure really means

Not everything we try to do is going to succeed, but instead of seeing failure as the end of a story, see it as part of a cycle. We can’t learn what works without failures along the way. Like death, failure is an inevitability. Also like death, it tends to be terrifying until you actually encounter it, and realise that it’s an essential part of living. In various ways, we will fail over and over – so the trick is to see how long one can keep going before the next failure; as well as to stop treating failure itself as a moral judgement on everything about us in our lives.

This is hard, slow work, and sometimes being nice to yourself is harder than being nice to other people – so turn your compassion outward; towards friends, family, and strangers, even celebrities.

(Compassion doesn’t mean blind defense, but if you don’t know the difference, maybe go spend some time sitting with that before you yell at me. There’s your first lesson: stop wasting your time yelling at random people on the internet when you could be trolling and harassing CEOs of large corporations.)

With practice at turning compassion outward, it gets easier to ask, “Would I say this to my partner? My best friend?” when dealing with negative thoughts and judgements rooted in the Christian/capitalist paradigm.

The other thing to do with failure is to see the freedom in it. If you’ve already failed, you’re already “a sinner”, and “damned” – so what comes next?

Well, actually, anything you want. If you’re already lost, why not go further? Modify your approach. Find a new goal. Instead of waiting for happiness later, find small happinesses now.  Instead of longing to be a billionaire, or waiting for heaven, ask yourself – what were you hoping for from those things anyway? To help your friends? You don’t need a billion dollars to do that. Life only gets better when you realise that the metrics of success were impossible anyway. To quote a song I like, “we’ll never get to Heaven ‘cause we don’t know how.”

Now, do I actually succeed in living by all of these precepts? It’s a work in progress. But hey, the more I fail, the more I have a chance to try again.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook