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  • Humans have always seriously messed up their lives,

  • but the way in which failure has been viewed

  • has a long and fascinating history that it may help us to know about.

  • Athens, 429 BC

  • It's the premiere of a tragedy called "Oedipus the King", written by the great playwright, Sophocles.

  • It's the story of an honorable, capable and highly resourceful man who,

  • nevertheless messes up his life in a catastrophic way

  • but the audience doesn't leave the theater thinking of Oedipus as a loser.

  • Greek tragedy was designed to show audiences

  • that terrible things can and very often do happen to good people,

  • and therefore we must remain sympathetic and kind in the face of failure.

  • The Greeks force this message upon themselves again and again at prestigious annual festivals.

  • The Greeks also love the story of the Spartan army at Thermopylae,

  • where a small contingent of warriors held out to the last man against a vastly larger Persian force.

  • The Spartans were utterly defeated, but their failure was seen as profoundly noble.

  • You can lose and be good. That was the moral.

  • Rome, 46 AD

  • Julius Caesar celebrates yet another triumph over the enemies of Rome.

  • The Romans worship success.

  • They believed that success in the here and now is all that counts,

  • and that success means three things: money, fame, and military glory,

  • which creates a lot of anxiety around failure.

  • Germany, 9 AD

  • The Roman general, Varus, kills himself after losing a battle in the Teutoburg forest,

  • not far from modern-day Hanover in the north of Germany.

  • He's made some major strategic errors in deploying his troops.

  • His suicide is an expected consequence;

  • Failure is so humiliating and shameful that it shows one doesn't deserve to go on living.

  • The Romans represent a society where failure is thought of as naturally accompanied by shame.

  • When big things go wrong you just kill yourself.

  • There's no excuse.

  • A small hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee, 30 AD

  • A former carpenter and itinerant preacher delivers a tender speech,

  • which has since become known as the Sermon on the Mount.

  • Jesus Christ tells his followers "blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth".

  • In other words, the unsuccessful are, in a way, more successful than the successful in the eyes of God,

  • because their failures erode arrogance and invite dependence on the divine.

  • For hundreds of years Christianity lends glamour and prestige to failure,

  • and challenges the worldly values of Rome.

  • Privileging poverty, obscurity and weakness over wealth, fame and strength.

  • Not simply you're not meant to commit suicide when you fail,

  • failing is a sign of being blessed.

  • Eastern India, sometime in the fifth century BC

  • A wealthy young Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as The Buddha, The Enlightened One,

  • comes to a key realization about human beings:

  • all of us are deeply maladjusted, unhappy creatures.

  • Worldly success, power, riches, love can mean nothing and will never satisfy us.

  • We must learn to renounce our desires, and escape from constant cycles of craving and wanting.

  • In Buddhist eyes, true success means utter failure in the eyes of a Roman soldier or a modern American.

  • It means living under a fruit tree, owning nothing but a loincloth, and begging from passers-by.

  • Paris 1799

  • Napoleon Bonaparte inaugurates a new social order, which will begin to be known as a meritocracy.

  • No longer will success go only to members of the old corrupt aristocracy;

  • he wants to launch a meritocracy marked by what he terms "la carrière ouverte aux talents";

  • careers open to the talented rather than just the privileged.

  • France requires a new honest system based on merit.

  • Thegion d'honneur, which is given to people of all classes,

  • who were judged not by ancestry or wealth but by military scientific or artistic prowess.

  • Suddenly, success comes to seem a lot more fair and deserved, which is very advantageous in many ways,

  • but it also means that failure starts to be re-categorized as not merely accidental or morally neutral,

  • as the Christian ideal had implied, but also in some ways, deserved.

  • Paris, 1863

  • The French government sponsors its annual artistic salon, where the most successful painters are exhibited and celebrated.

  • The jury, headed by the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, the head of the Academy of Fine Arts,

  • is that year, extremely conservative and rejects two-thirds of the paintings presented,

  • including those of Courbet, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, and Whistler.

  • The rejected artists and their friends are outraged and protest.

  • The Emperor, Napoleon lll, eventually relents and allows the rejected artists to set up their own rival exhibition.

  • Gradually the public and critics recognize that the officially successful artists,

  • people like Alexandre Cabanel and Franz Winterhalter, are terrible painters,

  • and that the unsuccessful ones are, in fact, the true geniuses.

  • This will be a theme throughout the history of 19th and 20th century art, and society more broadly.

  • The genius is at first rejected by a stupid, blinkered world,

  • but eventually comes to be accepted and celebrated

  • This is what happens to, among others, John Keats, Vincent van Gogh, Marcel Proust, Janis Joplin and Steve Jobs.

  • "Real successes aren't successes immediately" goes the story;

  • they might need to wait for a long time, perhaps until after their dead,

  • a consoling story with echoes of the Christian idea of redemption.

  • New York, October 5, 1987

  • The right wing economics magazine, Forbes, publishes its first list of the richest people on the planet.

  • The richest man is Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who is at that point worth 20 bilion dollars.

  • The tone of the magazine is celebratory, and un-nuanced,

  • reflecting an uncritical acceptance of the idea of the American dream:

  • "he who is richest finishes first".

  • It's a small irony, therefore, that two weeks later, on October 19th, the world stock markets collapse,

  • destroying wealth on an enormous scale, and shaking everyone's confidence in the merit and sanity of the economic system.

  • New York, September 2011

  • Following yet another global economic meltdown,

  • a group of protesters occupy Zuccotti Park in the financial district of Manhattan.

  • Their protest is, in a narrow sense, about the corruption and blindness of America's financial institutions,

  • but more broadly, the protesters are arguing that a narrow elite, the 1%, as they call them,

  • have twisted our ideas of success and the good life.

  • The so called "heroes", people like Jamie Dimon,

  • the head of JP Morgan, who's paid around 20 bilion dollars a year, are in fact the villains.

  • Being a decent person doesn't necessarily mean making a lot of money,

  • it means acting wisely and kindly towards others and the planet.

  • The protesters have a good few months in which to make their case,

  • which sounds remarkably like that made by Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount,

  • before the forces of contemporary capitalism hose them down and shut them up.

  • Slowly, the economy recovers, which also means that

  • the battered American dream, equating mobility with financial success, becomes dominant once more.

  • Most of us are going to endure horrific failures in some area or other of our lives.

  • We're an extremely success-focused world, and define success by some very narrow, normally financial criteria.

  • There's endless talk about opportunity, and well-meaning efforts to make sure that everyone can have a chance,

  • but there is a deep silence about what happens when you fail.

  • To weaken the power of the narratives of success, we used to have religion, and we used to have art.

  • We have less of that now; the very idea that failure could be noble has entirely disappeared.

  • We need to go back in history and fetch some ideas that could stop us from being fatally hard on ourselves,

  • when we mess up in the eyes of Forbes magazine and the American Dream in general.

Humans have always seriously messed up their lives,

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思想史--失敗 (HISTORY OF IDEAS - Failure)

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