Have you ever had the misfortune of being told by a potentially well intentioned, but certainly misguided, individual that: “you need to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”?

Often this sentiment is directed to someone who is struggling financially, mentally or emotionally as a mode of getting through whatever trouble they are facing. This notion suggests that all that is needed for the person to resolve the issue is self-reliance and increased effort and determination. Generally, this does nothing but make the individual feel worse about themselves and does more harm than good. The good news is that the next time someone offers you that hollow advice rather than offering empathy and actual help, you can now tell them just how silly and ignorant they are.

If you think about this idiom for even a second, it becomes quickly apparent that the idea makes no sense to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of simple concepts such as gravity. To pull yourself off the ground using only your bootstraps you would need help from another source, either something that pulled you up, or something solid you could use to provide leverage to pull yourself up. So why on earth are we walking around spouting this figurative nonsense and judging people in need for not accomplishing an impossible task?

Weirdly enough, the idea goes back to 1785 by way of a fictional character, the German nobleman Baron Munchausen created by Rudolph Erich Raspe. While Raspe’s Baron Munchausen was a satirical figure, he was designed to throw some blatant shade towards a real person: Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen. The real Von Münchhausen was an acknowledged braggart in German social circles, known for his exaggerated tales of military conquests, and was clearly disliked by Raspe. That said, Raspe had a bit of a reputation as a conman and a swindler himself, so any criticisms he hurled should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

Regardless, Raspe anonymously published his book, Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia which was a collection of exorbitant tales unrivalled by any of the other fictional fantastical adventurers of the time. Among the many adventures of Baron Munchausen: he survived being swallowed by a whale, single-handedly won a battle against thousands of polar bears, jumped feet first into Mt Etna where he met the Roman God Vulcan down below, rode the Sphinx across the ocean to the Cape of Good Hope, and visited the moon – twice.

As Raspe never claimed ownership of the work while he was alive, the narrative quickly took on a life of its own. Given that Von Münchhausen was looking to take legal action against the writer, Raspe did not come forth, even when another publisher took the works and started adding tales to the collection and reaping the rewards from the sales. Multiple versions of the Baron Munchausen tales were released, and each time the stories were adapted and added to and spurred other works as the Baron became a sort of folk figure in the popular imagination. The book is quite the read, and it even inspired a movie rendition by Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame, and co-starring Robin Williams, which as you can imagine is quite the exercise in absurdist silliness.

One of the more popular tales in later additions to the Baron’s legends involved him riding his horse into a quagmire and becoming stuck in the mud. With no other way to escape his quandary, the Baron performed quite the feat: pulling himself out of the sinking mud by yanking his own pigtailed hair until he rose to the surface. Clearly this is ridiculously impossible, you cannot just pull yourself up out of somewhere by yanking on your hair.

Over time, this proposition became a popular idiom for an impossible task and even inspired a philosophical thought experiment, the Münchhausen trilemma. This trilemma wasan epistemological argument that there is no way to ever satisfactorily complete any proof. It posits that absolute truth becomes an impossible task as it always must rely on either a circular, regressive, or axiomatic argument to get to completion. While this may sound confusing, it is basically just a statement that the methods to get to absolute truth are about as helpful as pulling on your own hair to get out of a swamp. Circular arguments are called that because they send you round in circles, regressive arguments are a rabbit hole of endless and subsequent “but why’s?”, and axiomatic arguments are the equivalent of saying “just trust me”, none of which put you on the firm standing that absolute truth requires.  

As with most folkloric ideas, this tale changed with the times and became associated with bootstraps once fashions changed and very few men were riding around in pigtails. Somewhere along the way, someone completely misunderstood the concept and started using this idiom as motivational material, which seemed to catch on, despite the fact it was completely illogical.

So next time you see someone flailing in the quagmire of life, rather than expecting the impossible from them, be the force that lifts them up or provides the solid foundation they can use to help themselves. We all will be better for it.