The Corruption Of Success

By Leo Gura - November 29, 2024

Don’t overlook how corrupting pure success is. The more success you get, the more out of touch and delusional your mind gets, as you get both insulated from survival and at the same time entirely dependent on one narrow kind of survival which brought you your success. Your ego will use your success to rationalize its own greatness and illusions to itself. If ego got you this far, how can ego be wrong? If illusions got you this far, how can they be illusions?

And as you gain success you will start to socialize with other successful people who are doing the same thing as you, so you will all rationalize together about how great you are and how valid your worldview is. And as you are starstruck by famous successful people, you will take their delusional and immature ideas seriously, because they are even more successful and famous than you. After all, how can the world’s most famous, admired, and successful people be wrong? And just to maintain friendship with these famous people you will have to serve them, benefit them in some way. So you will not want to say or even think anything that challenges or questions their authority and position in society, since as soon as you do, they will get offended, outraged, and cut you off. And they will tell all their successful and famous friends that you are bad, since you are a traitor their class.

And so, in this way, you will become profoundly corrupt and disconnected from reality. Nothing is a more potent source of self-deception and fantasy than success. The ego will use success to insulate itself from truth. Who cares about truth when you got endless success and endless access to circles of successful and famous people?

The suffering that comes with failure forces you to confront your illusions, fantasies, and false ideas. Success has the opposite effect, lulling you into sleep. This is why the world’s most successful and famous people are some of the most delusional. In many cases their success was built on a foundation of delusion. Famous people are not famous because they are the most developed, mature, conscious, intelligent people, but because they have created a deep illusion around themselves, which they are now obligated to maintain, since their would life would lose all meaning if they stopped. And of course, such people are not even conscious enough to understand that this is their existential situation. They are just lost in success.

Notice that this profound issue is not taught anywhere. Nobody in school, university, the business world, or the celebrity world teaches you about this trap, so you won’t even know it exists. The reason they don’t teach it is because they are too unsuccessful to know about it, or they are too successful to care about it.

In this way the world is run by sick and corrupt minds.

Whether you are rich or poor, famous or not, your mind is not free. The mind is corrupted by both poverty and wealth, failure and success. So this is way deeper than anyone understands. Anywhere you turn, any path you take, corruption will haunt you. Corruption will follow you into the boardroom, into the nightclub, into the cubicle, into the church, into the classroom, into the laboratory, into the White House, into podcasting, into the bedroom. Corruption sleeps in your bed.

That is the genius of the Devil.

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