The Worship of the god "Success"

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word ‘success’—is our national disease.” Those were, and remain, very strong words, suggesting as they do that success is corrosive of virtue because we more often than not yield to the temptation to make a virtue of success, and when we do not know the content of success, we are in serious trouble. 

For…