Climbing Out of the Bucket
Why do we resent ambitious people?
(This article originally appeared on Lone Conservative)
When I was driving for Uber in Baltimore, I once had a particular young man as a passenger, a born-and-raised Baltimorean. Driver and passenger don’t always feel like talking at the same time, but that evening we were both in the mood for conversation. I asked him what it was like to grow up in the city. He said he hated it, everyone hated it. He was born and raised in the ghetto, he was hyper aware of it, and he wanted to leave.
The problem, he said, was that Baltimore was like a bucket of crabs.
“What do you mean?”
“A bucket of crabs. You put a bunch of crabs in a bucket; if one starts to climb out, the rest of the crabs’ll pull him back down. If you try to leave the ghetto, everyone pulls you back in.”
Baltimore, of course, is know for its crabcakes. Crabcakes are made up of the unlucky creatures who can’t get out of the bucket.
I’m reading a book called “Life at the Bottom”, written by a privileged British doctor working in the slums of England with the country’s “white-trash” and immigrant social refuse. He writes about poverty mentality the way Darwin wrote about the Galapagos Islands, constantly reassuring the reader that the strange creatures he’s writing about truly exist. If you grew up poor, are poor now, or live as most of us do with the creeping specter of poverty breathing down your neck, the book is a must-read: you’ll see more of yourself in it than you’ll like.
One of the central topics he explores is the reasoning his clients use to abandon opportunity and aggressively pursue lives of perpetual addiction, abuse, ignorance, and misery. Over and over the story plays out: A young, promising so-and-so is offered an opportunity to better him or herself, but is then dogpiled upon by peers and bludgeoned out of a sensible mindset into the animal oblivion of living as a slave to one’s appetites. The man with the scholarship drops out of school; the girl who finally left the city returns to her abuser. They both turn up a few years later at the door of the hospital, having aged a decade, and eager to temporarily break their substance addiction so they can experience the euphoria of relapse.
As I read the book, I kept hearing a whispered refrain in my mind: bucket of crabs, bucket of crabs, bucket of crabs. One lucky creature scurries up the wall on the way to freedom, until a mob pulls them back down.
Sometimes the crabs in a bucket will try to pull an outsider down to their level. A friend of mine overheard a conversation at a conference for rural leadership, in which a distant colleague of his scolded another man for wearing a suit to the event. “If you come back in a suit again,” he said, “I’ll cut off your tie.”
My friend was mortified and apologized on behalf of the other attendees. He found out later that the suit-wearer was a representative of one of the event’s main sponsors, and would probably not return again.
Why can’t we be happy for each other’s successes and sources of pride? What drove the scolding man to lay into the man in the suit? Was it insecurity? A drive to suppress another person’s excellence so you don’t feel stirred to address your own lethargy?
None of us belong in a bucket. If you see someone climbing out of one you’re both stuck in, you might feel a pang of jealousy, fear, or anger. Don’t give into it, and don’t try to pull them back down. Instead, see if they’ll take you with them.
If you’ve read this far, you’re definitely an interesting and thoughtful person. Let’s keep in touch.
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