If you are unfortunate enough to live in difficult times, where the traditional signs of success are difficult or impossible to attain without losing personal integrity, then you are going to have to create an illusion for yourself that outflanks and replaces the traditional model. You must make reality anew. There is no alternative to this; if you do not at least to some degree live out a life of make-believe, then your sense of failure will eat at your spirit (there is no hungrier demon) and will corrode your morale. You must understand that this illusion is necessary, and fundamentally good. Ignore what others say about illusion, as if it is a sad thing. If the ultimate state of being is joyful fruitfulness, and a personal illusion helps you get there, then the illusion is good.
‘Success’ is a concept at the heart of human illusion; it is there that the prime battleground of make-believe, the chief killing field of necessary fantasy, can be found. In my own time, success means the following. It means material wealth, regardless of its provenance or nature; and it means social prominence, regardless of its actual value or contribution to the collective. The kind of success that is generally resonant in my times stems from simple verbs such as ‘to own’ and ‘to be’. People say, ‘I own my house’, and ‘I am a lawyer’, and this is enough. The traditional language of success is simple and spare. This is where its violence stems from; it is as inarguable and as straightforward as a bomb-blast. Knowing this, you must aim to construct your own lived illusion upon language that is equally devastating.
How you define success is central to your survival; it is the narrative ground upon which you build your necessary illusion. You must self-define success; this definition must spring from your unique nature, and from the particular facts of your natural preferences. To use another metaphor from the modern battlefield: your definition must be as felicitous for you as the bullet is for the gun.
Success means to me, generally speaking: self-realisation. In practice this means, the production of beautiful songs and the production of beautiful essays. These are the two activities which make me feel most alive, through which I attain my fullest and most tangible state of being. A life without singing and writing would for me be a life without self; it would be literally selfless. This is a human quality which some aspire to, but I do not. I have self-defined my own success and it rests on self-realisation. Anything short of that is a failure.
(A note on failure: it is far better to fail on your own terms. At the very least, you decided your own path, and were your own master. In contrast, failing on others’ terms, and considering it failure, is a form of slavery.)
The end-point of all this is: I practice the activities through which I realise myself, and I do not care what others think of me. Their own narratives are irrelevant in the face of my necessary illusion. I am able to say, ‘I am one of the greatest living songwriters’, and, ‘I will make a memorable polemicist’. (I consider my songs to be superior to my essays, but I need to produce both). I have travelled so far down this path that I no longer question statements like this; I do not doubt myself. This is my ‘to own’ and ‘to be’. Has my construction of an illusion made me delusional? It is not important. There are worse things than madness, like chronic misery for example. What is important is that I feel good and strong. What is important is that I have convinced myself I am successful.
In challenging times, if you are to prosper, you must convince yourself of the same. This is the necessary illusion. It is very simple.
Like all simple things, it is difficult to achieve. It is not by chance that when I think of the creation of an illusion, I draw my images from the language of battle and warfare.
I will explore the difficulties in a longer essay in my forthcoming publication, The Gorgon, but for now I have said enough.
