The Self Made Sorcerer?

My wife bought me a mug for Christmas last year. It’s big enough for two Aeropress shots, and has the words “Self Made” on it, so I love it.

All my life I have heard about “Self Made Men”, and how that is a thing to shoot for. I am certainly honored that my wife sees me in this light. There has however been a lot of push back on the term, most of it justified. If the idea of being Self Made, makes you think that you really did it all yourself, and that you owe nothing to anyone, and you can’t understand why people don’t just go out and be more awesome, then you have a very skewed view of life and circumstance.

Essayist William George Jordan once wrote “When a man fails in life he usually says ‘I am as God made me‘. When he succeeds he proudly proclaims himself a ‘self made man’“. 

You know how in Gnosticism there is a God and then a Demiurge? And how in the Chaldean Oracles there is a First and Second Father? I agree that there are two creators. Be it god or providence, we are created with certain genes and thrust into a world with certain privileges and oppressions. We chose none of this for ourselves. Gods and Circumstance therefore are the first creator. The second creator works with the material that the first creator produces. That’s you. You are your own Demiurge.

Whenever people look at famously hyper-successful like Musk, or Bezos, of Gates, you can see that they are not self-made in the sense that they came from nothing and made it. They had racial privilege, and educational privileges, and connected parents.  On the other hand millions of other people have the same advantages that they had and either succeeded in a more or less average way that draws no notice, or squandered what they had and coasted by. So if people are saying that they are truly self made, and that therefore everyone should just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps – I think that’s an argument that we can dismiss as ignorant. But that doesn’t mean that these men (and the many women who are successful but not as famous) did not take the material they were handed and do something extraordinary with it. In this sense they are Self Made. If you read about the lives of extraordinary people and walk away with nothing other than the idea that they were lucky, then I think we can dismiss that as ignorant as well.

I think Jordan is correct. Claiming to be Self-Made as a title is taking too much credit, and saying you are as you were made avoids too much responsibility. To me the idea of being Self Made is a challenge to take on, not a title to claim. No one should pretend that they did everything themselves, simply being born to circumstances that let you read this post on a screen makes you more privileged than many people on this spinning globe of noise and strife. But no one should pretend that what they make of their circumstances doesn’t matter either. Another saying of Jordan is: “you are placed into this world not as a finality, but as a possibility“. Doing something awesome with whatever you are handed is what counts.

It is true that some people get material that is easier to work with right from the start. But hey, you know magic. That is an advantage right there.

Go forth and make yourselves.