Abstract:

In my talk I will show that the way we think about success and failure today, at least in the West, is a late echo of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Fundamentally, and despite the intervening historical distance, the early Calvinists and we late capitalists employ the same patterns of thinking. Save for some niceties of language, today’s successful relate themselves to the “losers” of the social and economic game not very differently from how the communities of “chosen” believers treated the “reprobates” in their midst. The same assumption of damnation defines both cases: it’s who you are, and not what you do or say or think, that seals your fate.

The pattern exhibits several features: a primary need for differentiation, a good measure of self-righteousness, an obsession with purity and fear of contagion, a compulsion to exclude, an incurable anxiety over personal salvation. Most importantly, in both cases there is the same postulation, through an act of societal fiat, of a group of people as “bad” human material, something the others single out and ostracize.

Biography:

Costica Bradatan is a Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, USA, and an Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author and editor of more than ten books, among which Dying for Ideas. The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (Bloomsbury, 2015) and In Praise of Failure. Four Lessons in Humility (Harvard University Press, 2023). His work has been translated into many languages. Bradatan also writes book reviews, essays, and op-ed pieces for the New York Times, Washington Post, TLS, Aeon, The New Statesman, and other similar venues.