There are three different responses that we want to share for this myth:
Is it even possible for someone to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?
Does hard work automatically lead to success?
Am I my brother’s/sister’s keeper?
FIrst, can someone even pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?
It’s a bit of an absurd image, trying to imagine someone pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. When the term first emerged in the 1830’s, it was a humorous myth. But over time it has become a common sentiment.
Writing on that idea in the 1960’s, Martin Luther King, Jr. said that it is a “cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
Second, does hard work lead to “success”?
Many different factors influence the outcomes of our lives; Family, history, race, gender, health, geography, and so many other factors all play a part in determining the shape of our lives.
Success is complicated by forces larger than hard work. No matter how hard we work, success—in the form of financial security—might still be out of reach.
Furthermore, being unsheltered is not easy. Finding a safe place to sleep at night, oftentimes a different place every night, figuring out how to keep your stuff, your loved ones, and yourself safe, making sure you have enough food and clothing, all of those things take a tremendous amount of work.
At C@P, we walk alongside people every day who are working tirelessly to build a better life for themselves and their loved ones. People who are working multiple jobs in order to save enough money for a deposit on an apartment. People who are burdened with crushing medical debt. People weighing the cost of either working an extra job to pay for childcare or having more time to be with their children.
Not only does hard work not automatically lead to success, the flipside of that can be true, too. We don’t have to look far to see plenty of examples of people who haven’t had to work very hard to live a “successful” life.
Lastly, when someone falls into a pit, is our expectation that they will climb out on their own? Real harm and shame is done to a suffering human being when they are told, “Pull yourself out of that mess.” Or, “If you just worked harder, all your problems would go away.”
This is another way of asking the ancient question of “Am I my brother’s keeper?
So much of the writing in the scriptures are just commentary on that question that is first asked by Cain. And the resounding answer throughout the scriptures is: “Yes, we belong to one another.”
On that idea, Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes, “A person is a person through other persons. In Africa when you ask someone “How are you?” the reply you get is in the plural even when you are speaking to one person. A man would say, “We are well” or “We are not well.” He himself may be quite well, but his grandmother is not well and so he is not well either. Our humanity is caught up in one another’s. The solitary, isolated human being is really a contradiction in terms... The totally self-sufficient person, if ever there could be one, is subhuman.”
