Politics & Power Quote by Mary McCarthy

A neat eight-word insult disguised as anthropology: Europeans get to treat existence like a résumé, Americans like a coin toss. McCarthy’s split turns culture into temperament. “Career” implies a mapped route, institutions that remember you, a society built to validate continuity - class, credentials, old cities, old rules. “Hazard” is more than risk; it’s contingency. You can do everything “right” and still get crushed by bad luck, medical bills, a layoff, a wrong zip code. The line lands because it flatters and wounds both sides at once: Europe as orderly but possibly airless; America as thrilling but structurally unstable.

McCarthy’s intent isn’t tour-guide comparison. It’s a critique of the American myth that freedom is the same thing as security. In a country that sells reinvention as moral virtue, hazard becomes a lifestyle brand: the gamble is framed as character-building, even when it’s just exposure to failure without a net. “Career” carries the opposite subtext: a life arranged by systems that can look like protection or like preordained fate, depending on your politics.

The context matters: McCarthy is a mid-century intellectual, shaped by Depression and war, watching the United States consolidate power while remaining oddly improvisational about care, labor, and belonging. Her sentence is built like a proverb, but it’s really a diagnosis: Americans romanticize risk because admitting the alternative would require building institutions that make risk less heroic - and less profitable.