The End of Failure

Stock price goes up? Give the CEO a raise. Stock price goes down? Give the CEO a raise.

Pietro Longhi, The Mountebank, 1757

I miss failure. Not my own, of course. Nobody wishes to repeat his own failures. I mean the idea of failure. Sometime over the past 20-odd years the language of failure got bright-sided, to borrow a term from my late friend Barbara Ehrenreich. Humans stopped experiencing problems or even difficulties and started experiencing challenges, a euphemism that made the problems or difficulties sound kind of fun. If you objected to something—that is, saw failure in something outside yourself—you didn’t have disagreements with it; you had issues with it. In this judgment-free world nothing could be painful or inadequate or wrong. Maybe it started when I heard my kid’s second-grade schoolteacher praise my son’s spelling. She didn’t call it correct. She called it conventional.

If the new therapeutic vocabulary was supposed to reduce suicides, it didn’t work. The suicide rate in the United States rose nearly 30 percent between 1999 and 2016, and that doesn’t count the “deaths of despair” attributable to opioid use, which reversed a longstanding decline in mortality for white non-Hispanics. If the idea was to reduce polarization, that didn’t work, either. Partisan and racial and class divisions just grow and grow. Calling these divisions challenges and issues didn’t narrow them. It just created a culture of denial that, if anything, helped them widen.

In no realm is the culture of denial more formidable than in the upper reaches of corporate America. The latest proof is that about one-third of S&P 500 companies whose shareholder return declined in 2022 (the worst stock year since 2008) gave their chief executives, who of course were wildly overpaid already, a raise. Up is up, but down is up, too. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.