There Will Be Blood and the Self-Made Man

I just saw the movie "There Will Be Blood." It seemed to mock the myth of the virtuous self-made man, which I think is a very powerful and important part of our culture. The main character is a self-made oil businessman who's deeply resentful and cruel but regretful. Greed and egoism alienates the people he was closest to- well, that, and violence that's so extreme and absurd that it makes him look more foolish than evil.

This has some timely political relevance. People like him populate the ultra-conservative movement that's now losing its hold on power. Sidney Blumenthal's "The Rise of the Counter-Establishment" offers what I think is the best portrait of this type of political personality. I've excerpted a passage below.

The Sunbelt entrepreneurs possess neither authority endowed by inheritance nor authority stemming from bureaucratic function. For almost all Sunbelt entrepreneurs, social status is derived entirely from crisp new money, not any prior rank in the community. Often their communities are new and their public leadership untested.....

The Sunbelt entrepreneurs generally don't view the corporation as a social institution with communal obligations. Instead they see it as the projection of an individual: they preach economic egoism. This new plutocracy lacks both the patrician heritage of nobless oblige and the managerial instinct for conformity. To the entrepreneurs, private success is the fulfillment of social responsibility. Members of the larger community, they believe should strive to emulate their example and become successful, too. Work-and-win is the way for everybody.

The entrepreneurs identify with an old version of business ideology, which they believe is completely contemporary. To them, free-market doctrine is autobiography. For the most part, they think of themselves as country boys who have made good in the city Entrepreneurs believe that the American frontier is still vibrant in the Sunbelt. They see themselves near the beginning of time, the New World still unexplored, its riches barely tapped. Free enterprise, individualism, survival of the fittest- these are their dogmas. they believe that this is the true Americanism and that the inherent legitimacy of go-getters derives from universal truths. If the entrepreneurial worldview isn't correct, the the very terms of American success that made this country great are wrong. And that can't be.

Although the Sunbelt entrepreneurs have accumulated great wealth, they are envious and resentful of the Eastern Establishment, which they equate with the Liberal Establishment. the pervenu entrepreneurs tend to be practical men who are often obsessed with the prerogatives of caste superiority, especially those they may not possess, such as an Ivy League education. their own rise is recent, a postwar phenomenon, and they feel excluded because of an Eastern Establishment monopoly of prestige and political power. To be wealthy and yet to be an outsider engenders an extremely powerful emotion of resentment.