One of my favorite TikTok accounts is a man whose account has a running theme that “self-made is a toxic myth.” He focuses mostly on singers and musicians who come from wealth and privilege (Taylor Swift and The Strokes come to mind), and how that wealth and privilege helped them gain a foothold in the cutthroat and highly competitive music industry. He doesn’t deny their talent and work ethic. But he realizes having parents with money, connections, and advantages helped these singers and musicians attain success. Even artists who weren’t flush with cash and connections benefitted from a supportive community like the iconic band Nirvana.
What am I getting at? Well, in other words, nobody is totally self-made, American rugged individualism is total bupkis, and we all benefit from having a sense of community, support, and a safety net.
And this idea of being self-made and picking oneself up by one’s bootstraps is thoroughly investigated in Alissa Quart’s eye-opening and impactful book Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream.
The idea of American idea of being self-made. Quart gives us examples of hyper individualism and total self-efficiency naming people like Laura Ingalls Wilder for creating “A pioneer-Western-self-creation-fantasy,” the Horatio Alger stories, and the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ayn Rand.
Interestingly enough, if you dig deeper into those people you will find out many of them benefitted from the government and the largesse of other people. Pioneer families like the Ingalls benefitted from 1862’s Homestead Act, which gave 160 acres of land to citizens that they could nurture and live on. Emerson grew up with considerable wealth and Thoreau often depended on the generosity of others. And though Rand thought of Social Security as some type of welfare (even though we pay into our entire working lives), she had no qualms about taking Social Security in her latter years.
However, those truths are often buried under a load of myth, and I must admit it did open my eyes quite a bit. We all benefit from a collective of some type of community both public and private. The trick now is to get Americans to understand how we benefit from a sense of a supportive society for all of its citizens. And Quart gives us examples of people who are trying to do things that help others thrive.
One such group of people are the Patriotic Millionaires. Patriotic Millionaires actually want to be taxed more (yes, these people exist). And they want their taxes to go to things that actually benefit all Americans, not just themselves.
Quart also mentions various grassroots organizing that is occurring all through out the United States that benefit communities and individuals. But she also mentions we shouldn’t live in world where people have to rely on GoFundMe to pay for their cancer treatments or go through countless hoops just to get food stamps. Quart also talks of how the Covid 19 pandemic really made us look at ourselves as a sense of community in such a critical time. It was a time where we relied so much on essential workers like those in healthcare or those working at the grocery stores, as delivery drivers, and teachers educating our children through Zoom. But sadly, there were also vile people flipping out when they were asked to wear a mask while shopping at Wal-Mart.
Bootstrapped is a book that focuses on a very fraught concept and is one that should inspire conversation and perhaps some change in this idea that relying on others is a bad thing. As Prince one sang, “Dearly beloved. We are gathered here today, to get through this thing called ‘life’.”
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