Three factors explain the decline of the public intellectual and the rise of the thought leader, according to Drezner. One is political polarization: As American politics has grown more tribal, people have become more interested in hearing confirmation of their views, by whoever will offer it, than in being challenged by interesting, intellectually meandering thinkers. Another factor is a generalized loss of trust in authority. In recent decades, Americans have lost faith in virtually every institution in the country, except for the military, thanks in part to years of hard economic realities and a dysfunctional public sphere. Journalists have come to be trusted less than chiropractors. This loss of faith has pulled public intellectuals down a few notches, and created new space for the less-credentialed idea generators to vie for attention. Yet in Drezner’s view it is rising inequality that has most altered the sphere of ideas. It has had a paradoxical effect. On one hand, extreme inequality has created “a thirst for ideas to diagnose and treat the problems that seem to plague the United States.” On the other, it has spawned “a new class of benefactors to fund the generation and promotion of new ideas.” So America is more interested than ever in the problem of inequality and social fracture—and more dependent than ever on explainers who happen to be in good odor with billionaires.
Drawing on his own surveys and scholarship by others, Drezner shows how these explainers get pulled into MarketWorld’s orbit—how thinkers like him and Cuddy and others are coaxed to abandon their roles as potential critics and instead to become fellow travelers of the winners. “As America’s elite has gotten richer and richer, they can afford to do anything they want,” he writes. “It turns out a surprising number of them want to go back to school—or, rather, make school go to them.” Thinkers are invited to become the elite’s teachers on the circuit of “Big Idea get-togethers”—“TED, South by Southwest, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Milken Institute’s Global Conference, anything sponsored by The Atlantic.” These thinkers often find themselves having become thought leaders without realizing it, after “a slow accretion of opportunities that are hard to refuse.”
It could be added to Drezner’s analysis that even as plutocrats were providing these alluring incentives, less corrupting sources of intellectual patronage were dwindling. On America’s campuses in recent decades, the fraction of academics on tenure track has collapsed by half. Newsrooms, another source of support for those in the ideas game, have shrunk by more than 40 percent since 1990. The publishing industry has suffered as bookstores vanish and print runs dwindle. We live in a golden age for digitally beaming out ideas, but for many it has been a dark age for actually making a living on them. Many thinkers have no expectation but that a life making ideas will be grueling, unremunerated, and publicly unsung. But for those drawn to money or stardom or solo influence, publicly oriented sources of support have been eclipsed by privately oriented ones, and the new patrons have their tastes and taboos.
It can be said that MarketWorld’s circuit, and the world of the thought leader more generally, has had many virtuous effects. It has made ideas more accessible and available to many people. It has created, with the new form of videotaped talks, an alternative to the heavy tomes that many people, frankly, didn’t read a generation ago and aren’t about to start reading now. It has extended the opportunity to reach a wide audience to people from backgrounds long shut out by the old gatekeepers at publishing houses and newspapers.
But the world of thought leadership is easily conquered by charlatans. It is long on “affirmation without any constructive criticism,” as Drezner argues, emphasizing beautiful storytelling and sidelining the hurly-burly of disputation that helps ideas to get better and keeps bad ones from attracting too many adherents. And it puts thinkers in a compromised relationship to the very thing they are supposed to keep honest and in check: power.
The phenomenon Drezner details matters far beyond the world of thinkers, because on issue after issue, the ascendant thought leaders, if they are positive, unthreatening, mute about larger systems and structures, congenial to the rich, big into private problem-solving, devoted to win-wins—these thought leaders will edge out other voices, and not just at conferences. They get asked to write op-eds, sign book deals, opine on TV, advise presidents and premiers. And their success could be said to come at the expense of the critics’. For every thought leader who offered advice on how to build a career in a merciless new economy, there were many less-heard critics aspiring to make the economy less merciless.
The Hilary Cohens and Stacey Ashers and Justin Rosensteins and Greg Ferensteins and Emmett Carsons and Jane Leibrocks and Shervin Pishevars and Chris Saccas and Travis Kalanicks of the world needed thinkers to formulate the visions of change by which they would live—and to convince the wider public that they, the elite, were change agents, were the solutions to the problem, and therefore not the problem. In an age of inequality, these winners longed to feel, on one hand, that they had “some kind of ethical philosophy,” as Pishevar put it. They needed language to justify themselves to themselves and others. They needed the idea of change itself to be redefined to emphasize “rolling with the waves, instead of trying to stop the ocean.” The thought leaders gave these winners what they needed.
* * *
—
Cuddy’s choice of topic at PopTech paid off. She hadn’t talked about the structural power of men. She had talked about poses that individuals can do to feel more powerful, and the crowd had loved it. Word of her compelling, digestible research and her Wonder Woman shtick got out, and soon afterward she was asked to give a main-stage TED talk.
She said she had no desire to sugarcoat reality in the talk. But she decided to speak of the feeling of powerlessness that many women experience without getting into the causes of that sentiment. In an interview years later, she was straightforward about the motivation behind her “power pose” research. It came, she said, from watching her female students not speak in class: “Seeing their body language, watching them shut down and curl themselves up, that truly was it for me. It was watching that and then seeing myself behaving the same way when I got into an interaction with a man who I found intimidating.” In the interview, Cuddy minced no words about the cause of the behavior. It flowed from “sexism.” But in the talk she sanded the rough edges of these ideas. She described the classrooms in which she had taught, where some students come in “like caricatures of alphas,” physically and conversationally expansive, and others are “virtually collapsing when they come in.” Then she casually mentioned the gender factor, even though it was the founding observation of the research. The collapsing behavior, she said, “seems to be related to gender. So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising.”
Cuddy was a leading authority on why women chronically feel less powerful than men, who does that to them, and how. But that story was not for this stage. Instead, Cuddy led the audience toward the findings of her and her colleagues’ study of “power poses.”
It was already known that being and feeling powerful made people stand more grandly and spaciously. But what if you did not have to redress those larger power imbalances to get more women speaking up in the classroom? What if you could teach them to stand grandly and spaciously in the hope of making them feel, and even be, more powerful? What Cuddy and her colleagues wondered, she said that day at TED, was: “Can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful?” Their big conclusion was that you can. “When you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful,” she said. “Tiny tweaks,” she added a moment later, “can lead to big changes.” In closing, she asked the audience to share the poses far and wide, because, she said, “the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power.” Now at lea
st they had new tools for pretending.
More than forty million people would eventually watch Cuddy’s TED talk, making it the second most popular talk of all time—even as some began to question her research. Members of the “replication movement” in social psychology, who have been pushing for more rigorous standards of double-checking, re-tested her findings and reported the effects of posing on hormones to be nonexistent, while acknowledging some effect on people’s self-reported feelings. The ensuing battle turned bitter at times, with one of Cuddy’s own coauthors publicly disavowing the power-pose work. Cuddy acknowledged on the TED website that “the relationship between posture and hormones isn’t as simple as we believed it to be,” even as she has continued to defend—and further research—the effects of power posing on people’s emotional states. And the controversy in academia did nothing to deter people from stopping her in the street to thank her tearfully for giving them confidence. Her email inbox began to overflow. She would soon land a book deal. And she would become one of those people known for a phrase that you can never escape—the “power pose” woman forevermore.
Cuddy was still Cuddy, was still a strong feminist, was still a scholar and dangerously equipped foe of sexism. She remained better qualified than most people on earth to explain why women weren’t born feeling powerless but had that feeling implanted in them. But she had pulled a punch in her talk, leaving out the critic-style utterances and making a pleasant, constructive, actionable, thought-leaderly case, and the world had rewarded her by listening.
* * *
—
As Cuddy figured out how to address these new forums and audiences, she had the benefit of many surrounding examples. The culture was full of instruction, if you were open to it, about how to become more hearable as a thinker—how to move toward the thought-leader end of the critic/thought-leader continuum. This becomes apparent when you consider some of Cuddy’s contemporaries who have also gone the thought-leader way. You start to see a few basic dance steps in common—what we may call the thought-leader three-step.
“Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator” is the first of these steps. The phrase itself comes from Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist who has surged to the highest altitudes of thought leadership in recent years—“one of his generation’s most compelling and provocative thought leaders,” as his own book jacket declares. When faced with a problem, the human instinct is often to hunt for a culprit. But that is a win-losey approach to solving a problem. Grant proposed a more congenial way to deal with problems such as sexism. “In the face of injustice, thinking about the perpetrator fuels anger and aggression,” he wrote. “Shifting your attention to the victim makes you more empathetic, increasing the chances that you’ll channel your anger in a constructive direction. Instead of trying to punish the people who caused harm, you’ll be more likely to help the people who were harmed.”
The second step is to personalize the political. If you want to be a thought leader and not dismissed as a critic, your job is to help the public see problems as personal and individual dramas rather than collective and systemic ones. It is a question of focus. It is possible to look at a street corner in Baltimore and zoom in on low-hanging pants as the problem. It is possible to zoom out and see the problem as overpolicing and a lack of opportunity in the inner city. It is possible to zoom out further and see the problem as the latest chapter in a centuries-long story of the social control of African Americans. Many thinkers tend to be zoomers-out by nature and training, seeing things in terms of systems and structures. But if they wish to be thought leaders who are heard and invited back, it is vital to learn how to zoom in.
Brené Brown, who has become a friend of Cuddy’s, offers a case study in how to zoom in successfully. She was a scholar of social work, a field that has produced few, if any, major thought leaders besides her. That may be because social work is almost constitutionally a zoom-out discipline. A psychologist’s analysis of a troubled child may not go much further than the parents and home environment. But a social work scholar is educated to consider and write journal articles in venues like Families in Society about the systems beyond the home that implicate us collectively—crime-ridden neighborhoods, failing foster care programs, chronic poverty, threadbare health care offerings, lack of nutrition options. This makes social workers poor candidates for thought leadership, because at any moment they might say something critical and win-losey.
As a researcher at the University of Houston, Brown started by studying human connection, which led to studying shame, which led to studying vulnerability—“this idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.” She studied this for six years, after which time she came to one inescapable conclusion: “There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they’re worthy of love and belonging. That’s it.” Now, scholars of social work tend not to speak like this. They are experts in the thicket of circumstances that keep so many of us from being our fullest selves—some of them escapable through individual effort, but many of them not, being structural in nature, or depending on the choices of many other actors we do not control.
Brown did not emphasize all of the other reasons and circumstances and forces—poverty, family abuse, police treatment, addiction—that made some people feel worthy and others unworthy. She became a thriving, Oprah-backed thought leader. She, too, gave one of the most popular TED talks of all time. “We live in a vulnerable world,” she said, in which people got sick, struggled in marriage, got laid off, had to lay others off. The country was deep into an economic crisis when she said this. Millions had lost jobs and homes and even loved ones as a complication. Brown warned people that numbing the pain wasn’t the answer, though that is what Americans were doing as “the most in-debt, obese, addicted, and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history.” (Following the first step, about focusing on the victim rather than the perpetrator, she did not mention the powerful interests pushing debt and fat and opioids and mood medications on people.) The answer to these woes was, for Brown, in acceptance—in saying, “I’m just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I’m alive.” In an age awash in vulnerability, an age in which the winners were reluctant to change anything too fundamental, this mantra of feeling grateful for vulnerability caught on. “There are 1,800 Facebookers today whose lives will never be the same,” a Facebook executive said after Brown spoke there. The winners loved her, Oprah loved her, and then everyone loved her. And everyone was now able to have their piece of Brown as she became that rarest of social work scholars—the productized one. She offered an array of electronic courses that promised to train people to be daring leaders, to “fully show up” in life, to engage in “self-compassion,” to live bravely and vulnerably.
This second step was, in a sense, to do the opposite of what a generation of feminists had taught us to do. That movement had given the culture the phrase “the personal is political,” credited to this passage from Carol Hanisch: “Personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.” It was an important and fruitful idea in February 1969. It helped people to see that things that happened in the quiet of personal life, and yet happened over and over again at the scale of the system, and happened because of forces that no individual was powerful enough to counteract alone—that these things had to be seen as and acted on politically, grandly, holistically, and, above all, in the places where the power was. A man beating a woman wasn’t just one man beating one woman; he was part of a system of male supremacy and laws and a culture of looking away that put the problem beyond solution by the woman in question. The shame one felt in getting an abortion wasn’t a feeling cooked up by the feeler; it was engineered and constructed t
hrough public policy and the artful use of religious authority. The feminists helped us to see problems in this way.
In our own time, the thought leaders have often been deployed to help us see problems in precisely the opposite way. They are taking on issues that can easily be regarded as political and systematic—injustice, layoffs, unaccountable leadership, inequality, the abdication of community, the engineered precariousness of ever more human lives—but using the power of their thoughts to cause us to zoom in and think smaller. The feminists wanted us to look at a vagina and zoom out to see Congress. The thought leaders want us to look at a laid-off employee and zoom in to see the beauty of his feeling his vulnerability because at least he is alive. They want us to focus on his vulnerability, not his wage.
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World Page 11