Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  Small and Loewenstein’s research confirms what many budding thought leaders intuit by reading the faces in the crowd: that people feel and care more when you help people to see a problem in terms of individuals. In Cuddy’s case, she experienced this whenever she spoke about young girls, rather than adult women, shrinking physically. A light would go off in the heads of men with daughters. “A sixty-year-old man would come up to me and go, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much. This is so important for my daughter and for her kids.’ They were open to it. Suddenly, the audience that I could never capture when I talk about, ‘You need to change as a leader; you need to say that this is not okay; you need to do this and that’—those people who completely turned off to me were suddenly open when I was talking about their daughters and the opportunities their daughters would have.”

  Cuddy wondered if a thought leader could use feedback like this to her advantage. If you want to talk about the structural power of sexism, first make people think of their daughters. “People want their daughters to have every opportunity, but they don’t feel like that about their female coworker,” Cuddy said. For a thought leader, the advantage of zooming in, of telling the story of sexism and power and systems as a story about your daughter is that you hook people. The risk, which the thought leader may or may not acknowledge, is that you change the nature of the problem by that act of zooming. By framing it as a problem for their daughter, you shrink the issue. “There’s this problem where people don’t generalize beyond their daughter, because their daughter is different from other girls,” Cuddy said. “They call it subtyping.” It is the age-old phenomenon of the racist who says, “My black friend is different.”

  Many thought leaders, facing this pressure, give in. And Cuddy insists that it is not because they don’t wish to press for bigger changes but because they are human. “It’s not that you, as a thinker, are forgetting that it’s about the group. You’re not,” she says. “When you’re talking to other humans, you want a response, you want to see them move, you want something other than a neutral facial expression. You want an interaction. You crave that. And so when you find over time, talking about these ideas, that when you start talking about individuals, suddenly people start becoming animated, I see how you’re led down that path or how you follow that path. It’s not just more gratifying; it gives you hope. You actually feel like people are going to change. I think that’s where you start to think, Now I have to reach all of them as individuals.”

  Listening to Cuddy, it was possible to understand the symbiosis that developed between MarketWorld elites and their thought leaders. The thought leaders put out a variety of ideas and, being human beings, noticed what moved people at places like the Aspen Ideas Festival and TED. What especially moved such audiences was the rendering of social problems as unintimidating, bite-sized, digestible. The thought leader picked up on this and spoke more and more in these terms. The audience responded more and more rapturously. The actual nature of the problem receded.

  This is why Cuddy was interested in the possibilities of the second social psychology concept, the one involving zooming out. She felt it might break up this limiting symbiosis. The formal term for the concept is the “assimilation effect,” and it occurs when people link the personal and specific to the surrounding social context. You tell the story of that one girl, and those men think of their daughters, but then they also “assimilate the concept of their daughter to other girls. It’s the girls who don’t look like their daughter. It’s the girls who have brown skin and who are from poor families,” she said. The challenge, as Cuddy sees it, is to humanize a vast political and social problem without triggering the opposite reaction, which is called the “contrast effect.” “Oh my God, but my daughter is so special,” Cuddy said, mimicking the contrast reaction. “She’s so different from all of the other girls. I need to protect her from that. I need to protect only her.”

  The thought leader, when he or she strips politics from the issue, makes it about actionable tweaks rather than structural change, removing the perpetrators from the story. It is no accident that thought leaders, whose speaking engagements are often paid for by MarketWorld, whose careers are made by MarketWorld, are encouraged to put things in that way. To name a problem involving a rich man’s daughter is to stir his ardor. To name a problem involving everyone’s daughter, a problem whose solution might involve the sacrifice of privilege and the expenditure of significant resources, may inspire a rich man to turn away.

  For her own sense of integrity, Cuddy wants to find an escape from this trap: to focus on helping victims, to draw people into problems by zooming in, but to avoid giving power a pass. “How do you bring these things together?” she asked. “Messages about what the in-group is doing wrong, unless it’s with the lining of hope that here’s an easy thing you can do to be a better person—I think that those messages are the ones that get shut down.”

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  What happens to a society when there is not one Amy Cuddy but thousands of thought leaders, each making their private bargains, pulling punches in order to be asked back, abiding certain silences? What is the cumulative effect of all of these omissions?

  In part, they have given rise to watered-down theories of change that are personal, individual, depoliticized, respectful of the status quo and the system, and not in the least bit disruptive. The more genuine criticism is left out and the more sunny, actionable, takeaway-prone ideas are elevated, the shallower the very idea of change becomes. When a thought leader strips politics and perpetrators from a problem, she often gains access to a bigger platform to influence change-makers—but she also adds to the vast pile of stories promoted by MarketWorld that tell us that change is easy, is a win-win, and doesn’t require sacrifice.

  What the thought leaders offer MarketWorld’s winners, wittingly or unwittingly, is the semblance of being on the right side of change. The kinds of changes favored by the public in an age of inequality, as reflected from time to time in some electoral platforms, are usually unacceptable to elites. Simple rejection of those types of changes can only invite greater hostility toward the elites. It is more useful for the elites to be seen as favoring change—their kind of change, of course. Take, for example, the question of educating poor children in a time of declining social mobility. A true critic might call for an end to funding schools by local property taxes and the creation, as in many advanced countries, of a common national pool that funds schools more or less equally. What a thought leader might offer MarketWorld and its winners is a kind of intellectual counteroffer—the idea, say, of using Big Data to better compensate star teachers and weed out bad ones. On the question of extreme wealth inequality, a critic might call for economic redistribution or even racial reparations. A thought leader, by contrast, could opine on how foundation bosses should be paid higher salaries so that the poor can benefit from the most capable leadership.

  When this denuding of criticism happens on not one or two issues but every issue of import, the thought leaders are not merely suppressing their own ideas and intuitions. They are also participating in MarketWorld’s preservation of a troubled status quo by gesturing to change-making. Not long ago, Bruno Giussani, the man who had hosted Amy Cuddy’s TED talk, was grappling with his own role in this phenomenon. Giussani is one of a small handful of curators of the TED organization, and the host of some of its events. It was from his stage in Edinburgh that Cuddy catapulted to global stardom several years earlier. A former journalist from Switzerland, Giussani is one of the small team of senior executives who decide on presenters for the conference’s main stages, who coach the speakers and edit the talks, and who help disseminate their ideas. He is known to be something of a dissenter from the technology-loving, market-admiring ethos that dominates TED events, but obviously not to the extent that he doesn’t still work for TED. He is a behind-the-scenes operator who doesn’t have a household name but has helped to make ma
ny of them.

  Giussani was meant to be on a long-awaited sabbatical. But he had quit his respite a few months early, because the rise of populism around the world and the spreading politics of anger had him worried and wondering about what had happened to societies gone mad.

  At first the anger at elites could seem puzzling, for in Giussani’s own social circles he saw a plethora of organizations and people socially concerned and socially active. “You go to any dinner, and not only at TED or at Skoll or at Aspen or anywhere else, but you go to any dinner with people in this circle,” he said, “and to your right is somebody who just sent $1 million to an NGO in Africa, and to your left there is somebody whose son just came back from spending six weeks operating on somebody in a field hospital.” Giussani joked that there were so many elite do-gooders trying to change the world that “if everybody would jump at the same time, it would probably tilt the axis of the earth.” And yet look what was happening to the world—seething populism, anger, division, hatred, exclusion, and fear.

  In recent years, Giussani noticed how elites seemed increasingly guided by lite facsimiles of change. These ideas largely exempted markets and their winners from scrutiny, despite their immense power in deciding how people’s lives were lived and their support for a system that produced extraordinary fortunes and extraordinary exclusion. These notions of change were shaped and hemmed in by the complex of “intellectual assumptions that have dominated the last two decades,” Giussani said. Among them: “Businesses are the engines of progress. The state should do as little as possible. Market forces are the best way at the same time to allocate scarce resources and to solve problems. People are essentially rational, self-interest-driven actors.” Speaking as a man who had controlled access to one of the most powerful stages in the world, Giussani said that over this period, “certain ideas have got more airtime because they fit into those intellectual assumptions.” Others fit less well.

  MarketWorld finds certain ideas more acceptable and less threatening than others, he said, and it does its part to help them through its patronage of thought leaders. For example, Giussani observed, ideas framed as being about “poverty” are more acceptable than ideas framed as being about “inequality.” The two ideas are related. But poverty is a material fact of deprivation that does not point fingers, and inequality is something more worrying: It speaks of what some have and others lack; it flirts with the idea of injustice and wrongdoing; it is relational. “Poverty is essentially a question that you can address via charity,” he said. A person of means, seeing poverty, can write a check and reduce that poverty. “But inequality,” Giussani said, “you can’t, because inequality is not about giving back. Inequality is about how you make the money that you’re giving back in the first place.” Inequality, he said, is about the nature of the system. To fight inequality means to change the system. For a privileged person, it means to look into one’s own privilege. And, he said, “you cannot change it by yourself. You can change the system only together. With charity, essentially, if you have money, you can do a lot of things alone.”

  This distinction ran parallel to Cuddy’s reframing of her antisexism message in her TED talk. What motivated her to study the topic was inequality—specifically, a lack of power in one set of students because of the power held by another set (and people like them). This was a crime with a victim and a perpetrator. By the time this idea made it to TED, the inequality, as we’ve seen, had been resculpted into poverty. “Women,” Cuddy said, “feel chronically less powerful than men.” The crime was still a crime, but now it wanted for suspects.

  Giussani had a clearer view than most of how thinkers were tempted into this kind of thought leadership. It wasn’t as though you had no choice but to compromise. You could easily develop your ideas and promote them through what he labeled “marginal magazines” and “militant conferences.” But your reach would be limited. If you had acquired from the age something like what Hilary Cohen had acquired, the sense of wanting to help others at Coca-Cola-like scale, and you knew your ideas could help, you could feel that your purity would limit your reach, which would hurt rather than help all the people who needed you. Your alternative, Giussani said, was to do what Cuddy had done: Bite your tongue to open their ears. “You can go out and make this stuff known by packaging it in a way that it becomes appealing to big stages, high-level audiences or large audiences, hoping that in that context you can still put in enough of those ideas that are supposed to drag them along, rather than just those ideas that are supposed to please them or satisfy them or just keep them there listening to you.”

  There is a tendency in MarketWorld to deny what Cuddy and Giussani candidly admit: that one does, often but not always, have to keep certain ideas at bay in order to gain a hearing. “You need to cut some of your moral corners or some of your convictions in order to package your ideas to make them palatable to this kind of environment,” Giussani says. For many thought leaders, he said, it was still a terrific deal. “If that’s your belief,” he said, “you want to be able to repeat that next week and the following week—and by repeating it and by reinforcing it and by keeping researching on it and by touching more and more people, you’re trying to have an impact to create change.”

  Many thinkers cut these moral corners and contort themselves in these ways because they are so reliant on the assent of MarketWorld for building their careers. Some manage to forge robust careers without a single paid speaking gig, without summer panels at the Monsanto- and Pepsi-sponsored Aspen Ideas Festival, without the usage of platforms like TED or Facebook, where sunnier ideas have more of a shot. There remains, Daniel Drezner observes in The Ideas Industry, “a middle class of intellectuals housed in the academy, think tanks, and private firms.” But they have few of the opportunities of the thought leaders shooting past them into the stratosphere of fame and public recognition. “To stay in the superstar rank, intellectuals need to be able to speak fluently to the plutocratic class,” Drezner writes, adding, “If they want to make potential benefactors happy, they cannot necessarily afford to speak truth to money.”

  It isn’t that any of those elites had ever telephoned Giussani and told him to keep this or that person offstage. It does not happen like that, he said. These invisible mantras are enforced subtly. One means of enforcement is the preference these days for thinkers who remind winners of their victorious selves, Giussani said. A critic in the traditional mold is often a loser figure—a thorn, an outside agitator, a rumpled cynic. The rising thought leaders, even though their product is ideas, are less like that and more like sidekicks of the powerful—buying parkas in the same Aspen stores, traveling the same conference circuit, reading the same Yuval Noah Harari books, getting paid from the same corporate coffers, accepting the same basic consensus, observing the same intellectual taboos.

  “People like winners, and we don’t like losers, and this is the reality,” he said. And, yes, he knew one could argue that people like him should defy that preference rather than pander to it. “If conferences don’t put losers onstage, then they will forever remain losers,” Giussani said, anticipating his critics. But he told himself that it was unfair “asking a conference organizer or the New York Times to solve a social problem at the end of the chain that exists because people like winners and don’t like losers. If I put only losers onstage, I become one of them because nobody comes to my conference.” (He said he was using “losers” in thick quotation marks, to capture how they are perceived, not his own view. And, to be fair, Giussani has smuggled a number of critics onto the TED stage, most notably Pope Francis.)

  It wasn’t necessarily malice or cynicism that sustained these patterns, but, in Giussani’s telling, something far more banal. The people who served as tastemakers for the global elite—people like Giussani—were, like many, in an intellectual bubble. “The French have an expression for that, which is une pensée unique. The sole way of thinking? Everybody thinks the same way.”
In his world, he said, that meant an unspoken consensus (widespread but not total) on certain ideas: Progressive views are preferable to conservative ones; globalization, though choppy, is ultimately a win-win-win-win; most long-term trends are positive for humanity, making many supposed short-term problems ultimately inconsequential; diversity and cosmopolitanism and the free flow of human beings are always better than the alternatives; markets are the most realistic way to get things done.

  What this pensée unique did was cause his tribe to “ignore a lot of issues that were relevant to other people and not to us,” Giussani said. “And so the more this went on, the more we kind of left behind a lot of these issues and sensitivities and culture eventually—culture in a broad sense that then came back and is haunting us.” By this he meant the rising populist anger, for which he blamed himself in a modest way.

  Of course, it wasn’t only curators and arbiters like him who protected their own worldview and shut out others. It was also the elite audiences who heard only what they wanted to hear. He gave the example of Steven Pinker’s popular TED talk on the decline of violence over the course of history, based on his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker is a respected professor of psychology at Harvard, and few would accuse him of pulling his punches or yielding to thought leadership’s temptations. Yet his talk became a cult favorite among hedge funders, Silicon Valley types, and other winners. It did so not only because it was interesting and fresh and well argued, but also because it contained a justification for keeping the social order largely as is.

  Pinker’s actual point was narrow, focused, and valid: Interpersonal violence as a mode of human problem-solving was in a long free fall. But for many who heard the talk, it offered a socially acceptable way to tell people seething over the inequities of the age to drop their complaining. “It has become an ideology of: The world today may be complex and complicated and confusing in many ways, but the reality is that if you take the long-term perspective you will realize how good we have it,” Giussani said. The ideology, he said, told people, “You’re being unrealistic, and you’re not looking at things in the right way. And if you think that you have problems, then, you know, your problems don’t really matter compared to the past’s, and your problems are really not problems, because things are getting better.”