Success Quote by Umberto Eco

Eco is poking at a national reflex: America’s habit of laundering moral judgment through the language of achievement. “Puritan ethic” isn’t just a history reference; it’s a diagnosis of how capitalism learned to sound like virtue. In that frame, success becomes evidence of character, a public sacrament. You don’t merely win; you deserve to win. Eco’s sly move is to call it “mythology,” not “belief” - a story people repeat because it organizes chaos into a tidy moral scoreboard.

Then he flips the lens to “Latin” and “Catholic” cultures, where the moral math can run in reverse: the rich or powerful may be admired, but also suspected. Catholic imagination has room for the idea that earthly rewards can signal spiritual peril - that the visible triumph might be bought, compromised, or simply distracting. Eco isn’t romanticizing either side. He’s sketching two different systems for managing envy, guilt, and social inequality: one converts success into proof of goodness; the other keeps success morally unstable, shadowed by sin.

The subtext is cultural semiotics, Eco’s home turf: societies don’t just distribute wealth and status, they distribute meanings. “Good” and “sinner” are not theological labels here so much as social shorthand for who gets trust, forgiveness, and authority. Read in late-20th-century context - the rise of American managerial optimism and media-made winners - Eco is warning that when achievement becomes ethics, critique starts to look like heresy.