From John Steinbeck (1902-1968), American writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961):
Strength and success – they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn’t seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.
While it generally might be argued that Steinbeck “knew” of what he spoke, I would argue that he displayed his soul with this comment. A soul “immune” from the logic of his retort.
Moral “strength,” if consistent with reasoned discovery, PRODUCES success. Said strength and success are attributes of morality when accruing from reason. Divorced from same it produces a predatory brute.
To place them ABOVE morality is to reverse cause and effect.
An excellent comment. Steinbeck’s ethics implicit in his works (at least the three novels I read) never recognized the link between morality and true success and their cause-effect relationship. What this comment recognized was the lack of moral accounting for anything called “success.” By 1961, and certainly more so in our day, corruption ran deep enough that “success” as denoted by wealth, power, and position shielded those who had achieved them from any moral reckoning regardless of how that “success” was achieved. Crony capitalism was well entrenched, especially in Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. Only two years later Kennedy was assassinated, probably by a shadowy Deep State cabal. Now corruption is even more entrenched, and outright criminality goes unpunished among those in the elite. Those who honestly set out to succeed find themselves hindered, harassed, and worse at every turn by those whose “success” has come from their connections and abilities to wrest favors from governments, or from the government itself. We are indeed at the state where, “No crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.” This state of affairs, as Ayn Rand noted, precedes collapse.