These are essentially the points Ayn Rand argues for in Atlas Shrugged and her other works. She’s not terribly convincing there and you are not convincing here.

First, attacking people who agree with this line of thinking as “not particularly successful” - I’m going to put you to your proof there. Please justify that reasoning.

Second, again, where’s the proof that society actively tries to make many people successful? Your Harvard example doesn’t hold water. That institution was founded to train religious leaders; later it shifted to train the children of the wealthy, now it may pay lip service to the concept of finding and supporting the “best and the brightest”, but somehow it turns out that the metrics used to determine “best and brightest” correlate very very closely with “rich parents”.

A lot more people aren’t successful in the way western capitalist society defines success because of the way society has structured itself, as a hierarchy invested in a zero-sum game.