The narrative of American luck is laying waste to American excellence. In the USA and in most of the Western world, we have been told, and thus have begun to tell ourselves, that our success, both on an individual and a collective level, is the result of an immense amount of luck. “Of the 8,000,000,000 in the world, about 4% were born in the United States. On a greater scale, of the 117,000,000,000 people that have ever lived, 0.2% live in the United States today.” These types of statistics are belabored, often with the fair intention of elucidating the gift that Americans today have been granted and the responsibility that comes with this gift.

However, a more pernicious lining often underlies these statistics: that all is random and a matter of chance. In all chance, a wealthy American born today could have been born a poor German born in the early 1920s. In more concrete and nefarious terms, a winning enterprise today could just as easily have been a losing enterprise if luck were not in its favor. Therefore, people should not make bets or take stances or set grand visions and then determine to achieve them. Everything is too random to seek anything greater than the average of the world’s infinite randomness. And people should not feel angered or distraught when their vision goes unfulfilled–it was all up to chance anyway.

This mindset is certainly destructive to American optimism and American excellence. We lose our sense to strive when we give all to chance and fate. Yes, two things can be true at once: Americans are truly lucky to have been born where and when they were, but one should not extrapolate this phenomenon to all aspects of American life. As Peter Thiel titled his speech at SXSW 2013, “You are not a lottery ticket.” The USA is a nation of frontiersmen, people at the cutting edge, pushing the boundary forward. We are not meant to be a nation of pure luck, a nation that segregates others based on their supposed luck or lack thereof. We are not a nation that accepts the notion that life is purely stochastic and that no individual truly knows anything. Yes, we are a lucky people, but this luck cannot be the guiding principle in our lives. We must push beyond luck and into a determinate future where we set a vision and go to it.

On the back of each American bill, arguably the ultimate symbol of the USA around the globe, is printed the phrase “In God we Trust.” If we trust the way of God as we say, are we not called to emulate Him? We are called to be determinate, to be creators, not to wallow in the inevitable and infinite uncertainties of every day. We are called to be exceptional.

-Charlie, July 2024