In Painfully Rich: J. Paul Getty and His Heirs by John Pearson, the author talks about “willpower.” As I research Atlas Stumbles and very wealthy people, I’ll hear that word again and again: willpower.

But in Painfully Rich, you don’t have to go very far to get to the essential absurdity of the term. When describing Paul Getty, has “formidable resources – originality, strength of will and an obsessive mastery of detail.”

The same writer on the same page says that Paul Getty was driven by competition with his dead father to create a huge fortune. Paul Getty had indomitable willpower, but is driven by a clichéd daddy complex? At the same time, Paul Getty is also a master of his emotions, but obsessed by this same childish revenge fantasy against his dead father!

Which is it? Does Getty have “strength of will” or did he spend his life seeking his dead daddy’s love through the pathetic surrogate of material acquisition? It seems to me that a person with real strength of will – if one believes such things exist – would conclude a person of great willpower wouldn’t particularly care that they didn’t live up to the parochial expectations of their parent’s fundamentalist morality. They could get by or through it to live their life on their own terms, unhaunted by the ghosts of the dead. In short: they would exercise self-control.

It is an inherent paradox to say that someone was both master of their fate but also driven by the ghost of their dead father. It is a contradiction to say that someone has mastered their emotions, while also obsessed with chasing a dead man’s approval. John Pearson fails to note these essential contradictions – often on the same page.