Paradox of Success

I wonder if this is a thing. I googled it this morning and only found a book on business executives who, according to the paradox, win at work, but lose in life. I understand that and don't disagree, but clearly I am talking about something different. Perhaps I need new words?

It seems to me clear, however, that there is something to this. If you are successful, really successful, then your success will not be recognized. Or something. Perhaps this is why we have spin and PR firms.

Take Y2K. SOF spent God-only-knows how many hours working on that, along with just about every other IT professional. Their success resulted in many people concluding that there was no real problem to begin with. The same thing occurred last spring with the WHO response to the swine flu. Yeah, and some luck in how the virus mutated. A conservative friend told me that our efforts were a massive over-reaction.

I wonder if this is not part of the problem for liberals right now. Their goal, in many cases, is to develop programs that work--that reduce poverty, or improve healthcare, or improve the environment. Many of those programs, due to the political realities and the common failures of humans, will, in fact, fail. But many will work. What happens when those successes result in the assumption that the program itself was not needed, and the problem would have been solved on its own? Those who did the successful program get no credit. Only blame for those programs that don't work.

Conservatives, it seems to me, have an easier standard. They believe that government is inept, and so when they undermine or reduce funding for a program, and it fails--they can say, "see, government is inept." The failure for that program never seems to fall on the conservatives who work (perhaps with genuine belief and principle) to reduce the effectiveness of that program.

How else to explain how Medicare now becomes a "line in the sand" for conservatives who claim that liberals are trying to undermine this program? Or conservatives who look at the last 8 years of underfunding social programs, refusing to pay for wars and regulation, and now, viewing the wreckage, proclaim, "what we need is less government."