How We Think We Need to Climb on Others' Backs to Get Ahead

Does getting ahead really require standing on someone else? I keep coming back to the question of why lifting ourselves up seems to demand pushing another person down. Somewhere along the way we absorbed the idea that one person's win has to be paid for by another person's loss. And layered on top of that is the steady pressure many people apply to keep others fixed in their place. My own wins were rarely celebrated by anyone around me, which oddly sharpened my hunger to achieve. The problem was that achieving, for me, almost always meant someone else came up short.

I didn't do well socially as a kid. I was part of the out group, a thing that only exists because there is an in group for it to be measured against. The kids on the bus bullied me and enjoyed every minute of it. The bus driver, a high school dropout, made it worse by going along with it. He let the teasing continue and looked past what was happening to me, because the kids doing the teasing made him feel like he belonged with the older crowd. The whole arrangement ran on the assumption that somebody had to be the target so everyone else could feel good about themselves.

The arrangement works even better when other people envy you and want what you've managed to get. That pattern is old. Think of the feudal setup, the Lord sitting above a field of serfs, needing all of them to keep his land running. Maybe that's the reason there's always a push to keep ordinary people down.

Staying humble is a hard thing in a world that puts winners on a platform above everyone else. I'd ask it one more time: why do we believe getting ahead means climbing over the people next to us? Each person who succeeds adds to what all of us can do for one another.

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