When people come and go on JoeUser, one of the things that constantly amazes me is the perception that, because someone is highly ranked on the site, they are a "target". The shameful thing about this is that it's a perfect metaphor for life. Too often people will look at someone who's successful and feel it is their duty to bring that individual down in order to bring themselves up.

Not only is it flawed thinking, it rarely ever works as planned.

See, success is not a "zero sum game". That is, there is not a finite amount of success to be distributed among all comers. The perception seems to be that for one person to succeed, another has to fail. And nothing could be further from the truth.

Take capitalism vs. socialism as a prime example. In socialism, almost everybody suffered. Because the government tried to make everybody equal, and because such a large government was needed to accomplish that task, much of the country's GDP went to supporting the top heavy government. And the top heavy government fell. In our capitalist society, as imperfect as it is, we have some extremely wealthy. And we have a few very poor. The VAST majority of Americans fall somewhere in the middle. In fact, in the US, we can only muster a 13% poverty rate, even by our own inflated sense of what it means to be poor. That means that (gasp!) 87% of Americans are NOT POOR! Those are some pretty good numbers, don't ya think? If economics were a zero sum game, it is quite likely that 87% of the population WOULD be poor, because of the vast amounts of wealth held by the top 10% of the population.

People who try to build their success on the failure of others always get what's coming to them. Always. Which is why all you can do is pity them, really. Because you pretty much know where they're ultimately headed.