By Farooq Kperogi One of the English proverbs I memorized in high school is, “Nothing succeeds like success.” This simple proverb encapsulat...
By Farooq Kperogi
One of the English proverbs I memorized in high school is, “Nothing succeeds like success.” This simple proverb encapsulates why it's easier to get a job when you already have one. It explains why it's easier to get credit from banks and other lending institutions when your financial situation shows that you don’t need it.
And it captures why it's easier to sustain friendships with social, political, and symbolic higher-ups when you are so secure in your station in life that you have no need to ask them for favors.
The opposite is also true: the more you need something, the harder it often becomes to get it. Desperation doesn’t always inspire compassion. It can sometimes, perhaps most times, perversely signal weakness or risk, and the world often recoils from that.
That’s why employers tend to prefer a candidate already employed. To them, being already employed signals competence, reliability, and desirability.
It’s why banks lend more readily to those who don’t need loans because in those people, banks see less risk.
Social elites gravitate toward people who don’t need them, because such relationships appear to them less transactional and more flattering to their own status.
But what does it say about the world we live in that institutions prefer to extend opportunities to those who already project stability, and people with influence prefer relationships that don’t carry the weight of neediness?
It always takes me back to that English proverb about the self-perpetuating power of success. Privilege tends to multiply itself, while lack tends compound lack.
It’s not a fair system, but it reflects both human psychology (aversion to desperation, attraction to confidence) and the in-built structural inequality of capitalist society (capital, credit, hiring practices).
The world is drawn to confidence and sufficiency (or appearances of them), even when compassion should demand the opposite.
This cognitive and systemic bias ensures that, with a few exceptions, the rich get richer, the employed stay employable, and the socially secure stay connected.
Indeed, as the title of our book says (which we borrowed from the inexhaustible wellspring of Nigeria's popular imagination), dis life no balance!
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