Pharmakon III: Parable of the Talents

“Even more disturbingly, the odds of a state governor’s child eventually holding the same title is 1 in 51; 1 in 47 for Senators; 1 in 13 for Presidents; and 1 in 9 for billionaires.”

At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire—held a year before the 2016 presidential election—an audience member asked then-candidate Donald Trump to recall a time he had ever been told “no.” In the midst of a by now familiar format of reply-cum-monologue, he obliviously remarked, “It has not been easy for me…my father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.” It was only an interjection by the moderator suggesting that the candidate may have had an egg on his face (“Let’s put this in perspective…a million dollar loan is going to seem pretty easy to a lot of people,”) that caused a double-take. And to what extent does complacent acceptance of the rationalization provided by the unfazed candidate Trump speak to both the habitual concealment of critical factors taken for granted in the pursuit of the American Dream, and the gullibility of the have-nots in underestimating these factors: “a million dollars isn’t very much compared to what I built?”

This gem of a sentence, a worthy companion to President Trump’s other all-time greatest hits like “[Bankers] are killers. These are not the nice sweet little people you think. You’re living in a world of make-believe,” “Fake news,” “You think our country’s so innocent,” “Their leaders are much smarter than our leaders,” and “The world is laughing at us…at our stupidity”—gleams with spitshine clarity in a way the dull polish of a professional politician’s oratory never will. A rare signal in political noise. The candor inculcated through decades of not having to care exposes the buried assumptions impossible to glean from the rank-and-file well-to-do, whose aphoristic prescriptions for success betray a blindness to—or willful concealment of—an unearned tailwind as the dominant factor in their success. Such remarks are, therefore, invaluable symptoms in diagnosing the ills of a country capable of construing this imposter as a self-made man. It is a sickness that even his most vocal critics are infected by, and it has undermined the moral credibility of politicians and pundits, experts and leaders, across the entire political spectrum.

Let us see what a life of constantly being told “no” looks like without a real estate tycoon for a father—in a country whose social infrastructure is in tatters. Let us verify if the real mechanisms by which success is achieved have any semblance to the purported one of meritocracy in this vaunted land of opportunity.