The Individual Against the System, Meritocracy in the Age of Capital

“ He must practice "selling himself" until the habit of using sales skill in everything he does and says becomes second nature to him. Sales skill is the dynamic factor of success. It transforms potential powers into actual accomplishments. It enables the qualified man to turn his individual capabilities to best account.
Opportunity A Constant Companion
Sometimes a man says, as an excuse for his failure, "I never had a chance." The truth is that Opportunity is a constant companion to every man. Each of us has within himself limitless wealth. All normal people are rich in ability. ”

“ Selling power is confidence backed up by the will. Success is ambition and desire driven by the will. Do you desire success? How much? When you desire it as a starving man has hunger for food, you will win. Want to attain your ambition? How much? When your ambition becomes a thirst, a burning consuming thirst, such as the lost traveler has in the blistering sands of the desert, then you will achieve. What you want is not opportunity, the world is flooded with golden opportunities. ”

“ He has mastered all four principal elements of the complete secret of certain success. Consequently he is able to create and to control his opportunities to succeed. He makes and governs his own good luck.
Everywhere the most desirable positions in the business world are in need of men who can fill them. Only the poorer jobs are crowded. But when Opportunity has to seek the man, the right one is often overlooked. The golden chance is gained by another—less qualified and less worthy, perhaps; but a better salesman of himself. ”

“ Millions of worthy men, otherwise qualified for success, have failed solely because their merits were not appreciated and rewarded as they would have been if recognized. Capabilities, like goods, are profitless until they are sold. Therefore the man who deserves to win out in life can make his victory sure only by learning and practicing with skill the certain success methods of the master salesman. ”

“ On their own initiative, as a product of their own industry and skill, they will develop the talents that command respect in the market place. They will provide their own capital, build their own enterprises, [98] sell their own wares, compete among themselves until they have learned to compete in the whole wide world. ”

“ But if he hasn't the dollar to spare, he should make no pretensions whatever.
Opportunity has no doubt frequently played a large part in man's success. In my opinion, however, the most acceptable theory in the science of commercial success is that every man takes his own. ”

“ So long as candidates’ contributions are unlimited as to amount we are, nevertheless, openly tolerating conditions which give the maximum effect to wealth as a qualification for public office. True we wish to encourage our men of wealth to go into politics, but we desire them to do so on the basis of their brains and character, not on the basis of their dollars. Even without the use of money in their own interest they enjoy a tremendous advantage for candidacy in their leisure and freedom from material cares. ”

“ I have admitted that there are cases where advantage falls to a man which cannot be explained by anything he deserves, or has done to win it. And the advantage, such as it is, often works untold hurt as an example. Just as the winnings of one gambler may tempt a hundred others to their undoing, so a single case of coveted luck is apt to encourage young men to transfer their hopes of success in many directions, from law to luck. You see here and there a man who accumulates a large fortune from beginnings that look as much like pure chance as was that piece of spoiled cloth. ”

“ Practical success alone makes early middle-age the most pleasurable period of a man's career. What has been worked for in youth then comes to its fruition.
It is true that brains alone are not influence, and that money alone is not influence, but brains and money combined are power. And fame, the other object of ambition, is only another name for either money or power.
Never was there a moment more favourable for turning talent towards opportunity and opportunity into triumph than Great Britain now presents to the man or woman whom ambition stirs to make a success of life. ”

“ It is an interesting fact in this money-getting era that a poor author, or a seedy artist, or a college president with frayed coat-sleeves, has more standing in society and has more paragraphs written about him in the papers than many a millionaire. This is due, perhaps, to the malign influence of money-getting and to the benign effect of purely intellectual pursuits. As a rule every great success in the money world means the failure and misery of hundreds of antagonists. Every success in the world of intellect and character is an aid and profit to society. ”

“ Yet we take pleasure in the lie, and are glad we can cozen ourselves. Nor is it only in our walls and ceilings, but all that we call happiness is mere painting and gilt, and all for money. What a thin membrane of honour that is! and how hath all true reputation fallen, since money began to have any! Yet the great herd, the multitude, that in all other things are divided, in this alone conspire and agree—to love money. They wish for it, they embrace it, they adore it, while yet it is possessed with greater stir and torment than it is gotten. ”

“ We did not know that success meant the chicanery of knaves, the puff and clamour and brazen advertisement that gold alone could command, the endless subterfuge and tricks by which man outwitted man in the race, the prostitution of the highest gifts for the base wages of popularity. ”

“ Who ever heard of a man rising from a respectable competence to a fortune? According to the papers, you must start with nothing; that is the first rule of the game. We have ten thousand a year, so we can never hope to be rich. Fortune only favours the pauper. ”

“ These problems of "the sweating system," the unemployed, the pauper class, the natural products of the working of a system of competition where the competitors start from widely different lines of opportunity, can never be solved by the private play of enlightened self-interest, unless that enlightenment take a far more altruistic form than is consistent with the continuance of competitive industry. ”

“ The fact is, that the profit system on which all Modern Capitalism rests is radically and fundamentally vicious and wrong. Men work and strive, not to produce for use, for service, but for profit. Profit becomes the aim of human endeavor—nothing higher or better—Competition. ”

“ What was there wrong in their manner of doing business?”
“Can you see nothing wrong,” he answered, “in a system where one man’s fortune was built on the ruins of another’s, or perhaps a score of others, or where a business was started and increased solely by drawing from another one already established?”
“Why,” said I, “that is competition, which they no doubt thought better than monopoly. I can imagine that they argued that a man’s first duty was to himself and his family, that one had a right to go into any legitimate business, and that others must take care of themselves. ”

“ Socialism with inequality of income would not differ greatly as regards the economic stimulus to work from the society in which we live. Such differences as it would entail would undoubtedly be to the good from our present point of view. Under the existing system many people, enjoy idleness and affluence through the mere accident of inheriting land or capital. Many others, through their activities in industry or finance, enjoy an income which is certainly very far in excess of anything to which their social utility entitles them. ”

“ The first man who realizes that his line will be helped by publicity, has a tremendous opportunity. He can gain an advantage over his competitors that they can never possess. Those who follow him must spend more money to equal his returns. They must not 34only invest as much, to get as much, but they must as well, spend an extra sum to counteract the influence that he has already established in the community.
Whatever men sell, whether it is actual merchandise or brain vibrations, can be more easily sold with the aid of advertising. ”

“ The manufacturer who doesn't advertise has to depend on the jobber and the retailer. In the majority of cases his name never reaches the consumer. His trade is necessarily precarious, and he is constantly in danger of the kind of cut-throat competition that shaves the lowest margin of profit to nothing.
But the manufacturer who advertises has his name and the name of his goods on the lips of millions of people. The retailer who attempts to keep advertised goods from selling is like the man who cuts off his nose to spite his face. People will go elsewhere and get what they want. ”

“ Advertising is breeding new giants every year and making them more powerful every hour. Publicity is the sustaining food of a powerful store and the only strengthening nourishment for a weak one. The retailer who delays his entry into advertising must pay the penalty of his procrastination by facing more giant competitors as each month of opportunity slips by. ”

“ Every dollar spent in advertising is not only a seed dollar which produces a profit for the merchant, but is actually retained by him even after he has paid it to the publisher.
Advertising creates a good will equal to the cost of the publicity.
Advertising really costs nothing. While it uses funds it does not use them up. It helps the founder of a business to grow rich and then keeps his business alive after his death. ”

“ It is one thing for a manufacturer to be himself assured that his article is a better product for the money than that of his competitor. It is another thing for the consumer to be convinced. Therein lies the value of organized publicity.
To focus the attention of the great American investing public on the camp of Rawhide was the proposition before me. How was this to be accomplished? Display advertising in the newspapers is costly and requires large capital; the purchase of reading notices in publications which accept that class of business, even more so. ”

“ There is, of course, a small percentage of advertising that is useful, but most of it is boasting and falsehood, and even where it tells the truth it simply represents the effort of a merchant to persuade you to buy in his store instead of in a rival store—an achievement which is profitable to the merchant, but utterly useless to society as a whole. ”

“ The modern producer finds it difficult to know what his enormous public wants, and it profits him to assert, by advertisement, that what he makes is what the public wants. The consumer is confused and helpless, disorganised and very open to suggestion. Moreover, the power of finance, of trusts and combinations, to beat out competitors and to rig the market, acts more often than not in direct opposition to the real interests of the consumer. ”

“ Why, Eleanor, since I have been running over to New York every few weeks to see Amy and the children, and staring out of the car-windows at ninety weary miles of continuous advertising, I am cured forever of touching pills or pickles.
Yet they tell me (though I don’t believe it) that the success of any business venture depends wholly and entirely on its advertisements; that if people are told often enough to buy a thing they end by buying it; that if they are told imperatively or persuasively they buy it a little sooner; and that they can be startled into buying it at once. ”

“ Men think they push their own business to greatness, but they don’t. Nine out of ten have greatness thrust upon them by national advertising, but you never hear of them chasing the Agency that did it up the boulevard trying to catch and laurel it for pulling them out of the puddle of commercial provincialism. ”

“ The cost of advertising was amazing in those helter- skelter times. Only the small capitalists competed, and therefore they did the advertising. There being no competition where there was a trust, there was no need for the trusts to advertise. ”

“ When it was discovered how powerful the effect of suggestion upon the readers of advertisements could be, especially over such an audience as our modern great towns provide (a chaos, I repeat, of isolated minds with a lessening personal experience and with a lessening community of tradition) , the value of advertising space rapidly rose. It became a more and more tempting venture to "start a newspaper," but at the same time, the development of capitalism made that venture more and more hazardous. ”

“ How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were devoted to some other purpose-say the exaltation of the public sector-it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing institutions. ”

“ On the whole, then, newspaper advertisements ask, but do not compel attention. The whole theory of poster advertising is, on the other hand, one of tyranny. The advertiser who pays for space upon a hoarding or wall, although he may encourage a form of art, deliberately violates the wayfarer’s mind. A trade-mark or a catch-word presents itself when eye and thought are occupied with other subjects. ”

“ Nearly all the world of publications is open to the swindler, the exceptions being the high-class magazines and a very few independent spirited newspapers. The strongholds of the fraud are dailies, great and small, the cheap weeklies and the religious press. According to the estimate of a prominent advertising firm, above 90 per cent, of the earning capacity of the prominent nostrums is represented by their advertising. ”