Via Stulti

The United States currently describes itself as divided.

By race, religions, political camps arguing over what is fair, what is true, what the country should be.

But beneath those arguments, there is a quieter agreement.

One of our unwritten rules that shows up in how people explain success, failure, and responsibility.

That each person is responsible for securing their own outcome. And that, in some meaningful sense, what they end up with is what they deserve.

This belief feels natural enough that it rarely gets questioned.
But it wasn’t always this way.

A Warning That Didn’t Stay a Warning

Adam Smith did not present this idea as a virtue.

In The Wealth of Nations, he described what he called the “vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.

He was not talking about ordinary workers or small traders. He was describing the elites. The landowners and merchants with political influence. People positioned to shape the rules in ways that benefited themselves.

Smith understood that self-interest existed, but he also argued that a functioning society required moral restraint, sympathy, and institutional limits. Left alone, concentrated power would organize the system around its own advantage.

What he described was a pattern at the top.

What followed, over time, showed that the pattern did not stay contained.

Policy Moves Before People Do

The shift didn’t begin with people changing their beliefs or values. It began with the environment changing around them.

Starting in the late 20th century, especially in the United States, economic policy began to move in a consistent direction. Not through a single plan, but through alignment.

During the Reagan era:

– Top marginal tax rates were sharply reduced
– Financial markets were deregulated
– Union power declined under political and economic pressure
– Social programs were reframed as sources of dependency

Each decision had its own justification. Growth, efficiency, and freedom.

Taken together, they did something consistent, they offloaded risk from institutions and placed it on individuals.

This pattern didn’t stop in the 1980s.

In the 1990s, welfare reform replaced guaranteed assistance with work requirements, reinforcing the idea that support had to be earned through individual effort.

At the same time, retirement shifted from defined-benefit pensions to individual 401(k) accounts, transferring long-term risk from institutions to individuals.

In the 2000s, the “ownership society” pushed the same logic further:

– Retirement tied to personal investment accounts
– Healthcare tied to employment or individual plans
– Housing expanded through mortgage access and private debt

George W. Bush said it directly, “If you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country.”

The language made it sound empowering.
But structurally, the direction was consistent.

Less collective protection.
More individual exposure.

And once exposure increases, interpretation follows.

When Outcomes Need Explaining

Policy changes alone don’t create belief.
They create conditions.

Belief comes from how those conditions are explained.

This is where rhetoric and media enter.

Reagan’s messaging wasn’t technical, it was moral.

Government was cast as interference.
Markets were framed as expressions of freedom.
Success was treated as evidence of effort and character.

The implication didn’t need to be stated directly.
If success reflects character, then failure reflects something too.

That framing persisted across decades, across parties, across formats.

“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
“Makers and takers.”

Backlash to the idea that infrastructure or society contributes to success.

Constant celebration of the “self-made” individual.

These are not isolated phrases.

They all apply the same rule.

Outcomes belong to the individual.

This interpretation does more than explain outcomes. It stabilizes them.

If people believe results are personal, they are less likely to question the structure producing them.

Once that rule is accepted, structural explanations start to feel like excuses.

The Role of Just Enough Success

For a system like this to hold, it doesn’t need to be universally true.

It needs to be believable.

And for that, it needs examples.

A small number of visible success stories do most of the work.

The entrepreneur who builds something from nothing.
The investor who becomes wealthy.
The public figure who embodies upward mobility.

These cases are not typical.

But they are visible and easily repeated as stories. Easy to point to as evidence that the system works.

They serve as proof of possibility.

And once possibility is established, something shifts.

If someone made it, then making it must be possible.
If it is possible, then failure becomes harder to attribute to structure.

The system doesn’t need to deny inequality.
It only needs to produce exceptions.

Turning Behavior Into Identity

At this point, people are already living inside the structure.

But to stabilize it, behavior has to become identity.

This is where consumer culture plays its role.

Throughout the 20th century, American advertising did more than sell products. It sold interpretations.

A house became proof of stability and success.
A car became proof of independence.
Consumption became a reward for effort.

As historian William Leach observed, American consumer culture elevated acquisition as a path to happiness and made money the primary measure of value.

That message didn’t stay in advertising.
It moved into television, then into reality programming, then into social media.

Now it is constant.

People don’t just live their lives.
They display them.

Success is visible and comparable.
“Keeping up with the Joneses” was intensified, normalized, and recast as aspiration.

To have more is now to be more.

The Inversion

This is where the shift completes.

What Adam Smith described as a dangerous tendency among elites becomes something closer to a general expectation.

Self-interest is no longer something to restrain.
It becomes something to respect.

Even admire.

At the same time, its opposite is recoded.

Dependence becomes weakness.
Collective provision becomes inefficiency.
Structural explanation becomes excuse.

The original warning is inverted.

What was once a description of how power behaves becomes a guideline for how people should live.

Not because anyone formally declared it.

Because everything around them reinforces it.

No Master Plan, Just Alignment

This doesn’t require a conspiracy.

There doesn’t need to be a room where this was designed.

Those with advantages operate within incentives that already favor accumulation.

Policies that support those incentives are adopted because they align with existing interests.

Narratives that justify those policies spread because they make outcomes feel legitimate.

Others adapt because adaptation is rational.

If stability depends on individual accumulation, people focus on accumulating.

If risk is individualized, people prioritize themselves.

If failure is personalized, people distance themselves from it.

Over time, alignment emerges.

What It Becomes

The United States still argues about ideology.

But across those arguments, a shared baseline remains.

People are expected to secure their own stability.
Compete as individuals.
Interpret outcomes as personal.
Treat success as earned and failure as deserved.

Not everyone believes this fully.
But most people recognize it.

And more importantly, most people operate within it.

What began as a warning about how elites behave has become something closer to a common moral reflex.

The vile maxim did not spread because it was taught.

It spread because it was built into the environment.

And once it feels like reality, it no longer needs to be defended.