Be an Individual, Be Free, Consume, Earn

When we hear someone "stands on their own two feet," a picture forms almost instantly: someone who needs no one, earns their own money, makes their own calls. The picture feels so natural that it's almost hard to imagine success being defined any other way.

Honestly, that definition isn't natural at all. It's a sentence a particular system has been whispering to us for a long time, over and over: "Be an individual, be free, consume, earn."

Here's the thing: those four commands look unrelated when you take them one at a time, but read them together and a single recipe for success comes into focus. Be an individual, meaning stand apart from the crowd. Be free, meaning don't depend on anyone. Consume, meaning prove your worth through what you own. Earn, meaning let your bank account confirm what you're worth. Stack the four on top of each other and the silhouette of "the person who stands on their own two feet" shows up in front of us.

Look at it this way: something stands out in that silhouette. There's no connection to another person inside it. No family, no community, no solidarity. It's almost as if being alone has been quietly written into the definition of success, right?

And yet in other times and other cultures, success has been framed completely differently. Being able to provide for a family, contributing to a community, carrying on a tradition: those counted as success. The question wasn't "can you stand on your own two feet?" but "can you walk without stepping on anyone else's?"

What we count as success today, if you look at it closely, describes exactly the kind of person the system needs most: a solo consumer, a solo earner, a solo decision-maker, the kind least likely to push back.