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Have you ever entered into a contract? Societies have contracts, social contracts. By being a part of a society, you agree to follow certain rules, and in exchange, you get the benefits being a member of a society entails. If you are unhappy with the terms of the social contract you find yourself in, you can either attempt to change it or you can opt out. If you choose to change it, though, you can't simply disobey the rules you don't like because other people can't justify them by your subjective metric. If you do, you run the risk of finding out there are consequences for breaking the rules and because you've been all to happy to reap the reward for being a member of society, you also must accept punitive measures when you're in breach of contract.
Success, the way I meant it, means the least amount of suffering. Societies exist to decrease suffering. Rules in societies exist to reduce suffering in societies. This can be demonstrated using any number of and combination of metrics. An example would be low crime rates, access to clean water, food, and drugs, economic and financial stability, access to affordable and quality healthcare, adequate defense both military and civil, and any number of other things which can objectively be demonstrated to reduce suffering. By these metrics, the social democracies of Northern Europe and Canada, which are more socialistic that the United States, beat the United States's more capitalistic society rather soundly. I can go into much greater detail on this if you wish.
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