When Existence Becomes the Only Claim to Worth |
Redefining success as corruption can preserve self-worth and protect against shame.
When achievement and relational meaning are unstable, identity may collapse onto existence itself.
Beliefs that protect the self are often held with certainty and resist examination.
This post is the second in a two-part series. You can read Part 1 here: Why Some People Need to Believe Success Is Immoral.
In my previous post, I recalled that, at a friend’s party many years ago, I found myself speaking with two people I had never met before—siblings, though I did not realise that immediately. They were, in different ways, similarly striking.
A belief that cannot be examined
The brother’s statement—that those who live comfortably must be immoral—no longer reads as a casual opinion. It functions like a defence. A way of organising the world that does not invite scrutiny.
Because if that statement were to be examined—if it were to open—it would immediately raise a different question: what explains the gap between his life and theirs?
And that question is far more difficult to hold.
The sister’s response operates in a similar way, though it appears different on the surface.
Her insistence on the point was not really about policy in the abstract. It seemed to carry a different weight. The right to have children was not, for her, simply a principle to be defended; it felt more personally charged, as though something in it could not be allowed to loosen. To grow up knowing that one was not born into love, or into a relationship that had chosen and wanted a child, but into something far more instrumental, leaves a particular kind of question—one that is not easily held in direct form.
In that context, the idea that having children is an absolute right—something beyond question, beyond scrutiny, beyond any larger discussion of planning or consequence—may begin to serve a different function. It becomes something that has to be held in place.
Because if it were to shift, even slightly, it would begin to touch something much closer. It would raise the possibility that one’s own existence was not grounded in care, or intention, or choice—but in something far more contingent.
And that is not an easy possibility to live with.
Two different styles. The same underlying structure.
When reality cannot easily change, its meaning often does
In both cases, what presents as a moral position, in fact, functions as a form of protection. The content differs, but the structure holds. A belief becomes fixed not because it has been fully examined, but because it cannot be examined without destabilising something more fundamental.
Psychological research on scarcity and deprivation has consistently shown that when life is organised around constraint—whether material, social, or developmental—attention narrows. Immediate concerns and short-term orientation take priority. Long-term planning becomes more difficult, sometimes almost inaccessible.
But deprivation does something else, less often articulated. It shapes not only what people think they can do; it also shapes how they make sense of what others do.
When one’s own life does not offer a stable or coherent pathway—when effort does not reliably lead to outcome, when there is no clear model of progression—the success and strategies of others can become difficult to interpret. It no longer appears as the result of process, but as something suspect, something externally granted, or morally compromised.
And when one’s own origin cannot easily be held as meaningful, or chosen, or secure, certain ideas begin to take on a different kind of importance. They are no longer simply positions; they become structures that support the self.
Beliefs that protect the self are rarely open to examination
Seen in that light, the brother’s claim and the sister’s insistence begin to align.
One protects the present by redefining success as immoral.
In this framework, those who achieve stability or financial security are not simply disciplined or fortunate. They must have compromised themselves in some way. If success is immoral, then failure can be morally pure. If success is reframed as corruption, then one’s own lack of success is no longer a deficit. It becomes evidence of integrity.
The other protects the past by holding birth itself beyond question.
In this framework, the act of bringing a life into the world is not something that can be examined, contextualised, or weighed against circumstance. It must remain absolute. It must remain right. If birth is sacred, then one’s own beginning does not have to be reconsidered. It does not have to be understood as contingent, or instrumental, or shaped by conditions that are difficult to face.
Both, in different ways, organise the world so that what is most difficult to face does not have to be confronted directly.
Looking back on that evening, what stands out is not the content of the conversations, but their function. Neither of the siblings was trying to persuade me in a conventional sense.
They were maintaining something. A structure that allowed them to remain psychologically intact in a world that, for them, may not have offered many other sources of validation. Understanding this does not require agreement.
But it does reveal something important: Sometimes, what appears to be a judgment of others is, at its core, a way of preserving oneself.
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