Both sections, in their complex ambiguity, seem so relevant today, as the Taliban move towards Kabul. What a mess.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This is extraordinary, but goes to explain how some people think. Fortunately no one that I know!
The anti-vaxxers are angry at us. They say we’ve been judgemental. We don’t listen to them. We don’t respect their views.
So I started listening.
Here’s what they have to say:
Rules don’t work, so we shouldn’t have them.
Some anti-vaxxers have said they’re not following health guidelines simply because it’s being forced on them. The same goes for masks and social distancing. They say putting mandates in place hasn’t stopped the virus from spreading, because people don’t follow the rules.
That means rules are pointless.
It’s oppressive to make rules and try to get people to follow them, because most people are going to ignore those rules. So you’re really just punishing people following their own nature.
There’s no point in trying to modify anyone’s behavior. If you’re going to try, you should be nice and non-confrontational about it.
That way, it’s easier to ignore you.
The same logic applies to masks. The cheap cloth masks don’t stop the spread of these more contagious variants. So instead of trying to find better masks, we should just ditch them altogether. Besides, there’s no point in asking someone to make small sacrifices for someone else. Everyone’s responsible for their own health. (We’ll talk more about that later.)
It doesn’t matter how many lives are at stake. We should always just present information and let people make up their own minds. If half the population is making a poor choice, then the other half just have to mask up and stay home or get out of their way. It doesn’t matter whether we have jobs, vulnerable relatives, or kids who belong in school.
It’s your life.
Just figure it out.
In their view, we should just let everyone do their own research and make their own health decisions. It’s pointless to worry about whether you get someone else infected.
That leads to their next point.
Everyone’s responsible for their own health.
Anti-vaxxers still believe the coronavirus targets unhealthy people, especially the ones who don’t take care of themselves. So if you exercise and eat healthy, then you have nothing to worry about.
You’re invincible.
In this worldview, every single aspect of your health is under your control. There’s no such thing as hereditary disease. Everyone is born with a fundamentally healthy body and mind. What you do with that is up to you. It’s sad that some people live in areas without access to decent grocery stores. It’s too bad that companies thrive on marketing junk food to poor people, and they go to great lengths to suppress information about their products. It’s too bad that fast food chains smother America.
There’s nothing we can do about this. It’s the way the world works. You should just eat healthy and not worry about anything else.
We’re not sure what “eating healthy” means. It could mean eating fruits and vegetables, but maybe not. It could mean a paleo diet, a keto diet, an Atkins diet, or a blood-type diet. It could mean taking any number of supplements which might or might not work. It probably means following the advice of fitness gurus and eating what they promote on their social media channels, and their self-published e-books.
The best course of action during a pandemic is to follow your diet guide and do absolutely nothing else to keep yourself from catching it. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Sure, there’s stories about fit, healthy young people getting really sick with coronavirus. They might take years to recover, or maybe never. There’s more studies showing that even if Covid doesn’t kill you, it can leave you with serious long term illness and disability.
Again, that’s just life.
Nobody can prove anything.
Some anti-vaxxers have said there’s no way to gather any definitive information on the coronavirus, so there’s no point in having debates. There’s no definitive proof that mRNA vaccines are safe. There’s no definitive proof that the coronavirus infects healthy people and kids.
There’s no definitive proof that the virus is mutating into deadlier variants that could escape immunity altogether.
The only way to prove something for certain is to see it happen for yourself. Until then, you might as well do whatever you want. That means living your normal life, until you get infected.
We all take risks. Driving around in your car poses the same risk as carrying on with your normal routine during a pandemic.
All risks are created equal.
If it’s not happening to you, it doesn’t matter.
Anti-vaxxers put their own choices above everything else.
Don’t tell them what to do, it’s that simple.
Lots of anti-vaxxers have said there’s no evidence that they should be worried about the coronavirus, because they haven’t been infected with it. Nobody they know has been infected with it either.
There’s no evidence that hospitals are overrun, because the hospitals where they live are doing just fine. One of them even told me, “If any of this were true, it would be front page news.”
(Actually, it is.)
It’s fine to use anecdotal evidence to make important decisions. In fact, anecdotal evidence can outmatch statistical data. It’s just as valid, because what you personally observe in your own life is more important than what’s happening anywhere else in the world.
Out of sight, out of mind.
All information is subjective.
There’s a reason why the information you share with anti-vaxxers doesn’t persuade them. They didn’t budge on masking or social-distancing either. It’s because that’s just your opinion.
Any evidence you present is always incomplete and partial. It can always be challenged by another piece of information.
The media is controlled.
The CDC is controlled, along with every other agency and fact-checking organization. The information they trust is what they found digging through the web on their own, from people who already agree with them. This information beats yours, always.
That’s because you’re brainwashed, and you get your information from biased sources who have an agenda. They don’t have one.
Only you do.
Everyone has a right to a bad opinion.
Anti-vaxxers have told me they’re taking a principled stand on their own individual rights and personal freedoms.
To summarize:
If someone wants to catch Covid and take their chances, that’s their right. It doesn’t matter if they spread the virus.
If someone else dies, it’s becausethey should’ve taken better care of themselves — even unvaccinated children.
There’s no proof that healthy people or children are at risk, even if we’re starting to see more kids in hospitals. The only way to prove that is for thousands of kids to get sick and die. Even if that happens, it’s probably just liberal propaganda.
We should just let everyone do what they want, and then we’ll see how many people die this coming year.
That’s a fair representation of their stance. It’s exactly what they’ve said to me when it comes to handling the pandemic.
If you point out how selfish or ignorant this sounds, then you’rebeing judgmental. You’re the hateful one who’s creating division. You’re the one who has a closed mind, not them.
You’re the bad guy.
It’s fine if someone else wants to endanger their own lives, and put yours at risk. It’s fine for corrupt politicians and shock jocks to spread misinformation to tens of millions of people. It’s fine to harass and ridicule health workers and experts you disagree with. It’s fine to openly speculate that maybe it’s the vaccinated people who are responsible for everything, including variants that appeared before vaccines were even available. It’s fine to take it all back after you get really sick, and need their help.
Calling them out makes you petty and sanctimonious.
Anti-vaxxers are allowed to publicly air skepticism and suspicion about vaccines. They’re allowed to threaten doctors and nurses and accuse them of murder. They’re allowed to compare vaccine passports to yellow stars and pink triangles, or even concentration camps.
You’re supposed to listen to them.
You’re supposed to nod.
It’s fine to believe whatever you want until you get someone killed. It’s fine to refuse masks and vaccines and then infect someone, watch them die, and then blame liberals. Nobody should ever make you feel bad for your colossal mistakes, especially if you never admit them. Everyone makes mistakes that result in incalculable levels of death and suffering.
It’s arrogant and hateful to point out someone else’s logical fallacies and unconscious biases. It’s immature to criticize someone else’s poor behavior or reckless decision making. If you were truly empathetic, you would just shrug and leave them alone.
Your hardships and sacrifices over the last year mean nothing to them. You should be kind to the ones who’ve mocked you for wearing a mask and intentionally invaded your personal space at stores, making you anxious to be in public. You should smile at those who’ve disregarded your rights. You should be understanding as they call you a brainwashed sheep, until they finally get sick and deprive you of a hospital bed.
Idiots have a right to their opinion. They have a right to respect. They have a right to affordable healthcare.
You don’t.
Whatever you do, never repeat their views back to them.
The Distant city - the view from the Mermaid bar on the Gold Coast, Australia
I spend a great deal off my time recording life as it flies (see the strap line of this Journal) and sometimes wonder if my delight in so doing interferes with my actual enjoyment and immersion in the present. To Anais Nin, there was no doubt, and here she presciently skewers those who move though life endlessly seeking to preserve the experience
I am lying on a hammock, on the terrace of my room at the Hotel Mirador, the diary open on my knees, the sun shining on the diary, and I have no desire to write. The sun, the leaves, the shade, the warmth, are so alive that they lull the senses, calm the imagination. This is perfection. There is no need to portray, to preserve. It is eternal, it overwhelms you, it is complete.Here in Mexico they see only the present. This communion of eyes and smiles is elating. In New York people seem intent on not seeing each other. Only children look with such unashamed curiosity. Poor white man, wandering and lost in his proud possession of a dimension in which bodies become invisible to the naked eye, as if staring were an immodest act. Here I feel incarnated and in full possession of my own body.
To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep. Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor’s hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body… As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances.
'The wild geese doe not intend to cast their reflection; the lake has no mind to receive their image' - Chuang Tzu
I am beginning to understand what Dostoevsky said about the need to confess. As one reaches old age, we need to state our truth - to tell our story - not to receive absolution, but simply to set down how we have passed though this world, before our lives dissolve like a bubble on the surface of the lake.
The need to confess doesn’t absolutely require another person to listen, but if one is fortunate enough to have a friend who can hear one’s story without interruption and most importantly, non-judgementally, I imagine that is more satisfying than talking to a therapist or simply making a recording. We may like those close to us to listen or we may not - but either way, we shouldn’t confess to our spouse, as there may be aspects of the relationship that may be less than ideal and there is no need to go looking for trouble! Furthermore the issue of ‘other women’ will almost certainly arise in any long life, and the purpose of confessing is certainly not to cause pain or give rise to doubts that could poison what’s left of one’s time together. So, men should confess to other men with the clear understanding that any secrets will be securely kept.
Another aspect of this is the desire to tell other people’s stories too. In my case, this takes the form of writing obituaries for those close to me, and substantial eulogies if asked to speak at their funerals. It seems wasteful to me not to record all one can of someone’s life, as otherwise they pass through almost without trace as far as the world is concerned, except for the memories and mementos in the keeping of their families. This is one reason I take so many photos, as I can usually summon up photos to accompany an obituary, to add colour to friends’ lives. Crucially now too, the internet allows such things to be made public - though in practice only someone that knows the obituary had been written will find it.
We used to make things. Now we have meetings. On any given weekday some 50m meetings are held in American workplaces alone. The average executive now spends 23 hours in them each week, a figure that has more than doubled since the 1960s. The number of meetings proliferated in the 1980s as Western economies moved away from manufacturing towards “knowledge” industries that seemed to require a lot of talking. And while covid-19 may have shut down the office (at least temporarily), it magnified the importance of meetings, which now take place on our laptops. During the pandemic we’ve spent more time in them than we ever did in person.
Despite their centrality to modern life, few of us have a good word to say about meetings. Surveys suggest we consider at least half the ones we attend to be ineffective – the same bores drone on, the people with something useful to say don’t speak and nothing of importance gets decided. In many office cultures, a meeting is a byword for a tedious, time-wasting exercise.
Frustration with meetings has fuelled a mini-industry in management books – “How to Hold Successful Meetings”, “Meeting Design” and “Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable” – dedicated to solving what one author labels “the most painful problem in business”.
Yet perhaps the sharpest analysis lies elsewhere. Though office meetings are a relatively recent phenomenon, people have been gathering to discuss decisions since Adam and Eve huddled over the forbidden fruit, and successive generations of poets and writers have chronicled the dynamics in their work.
“The Iliad”, Western literature’s foundational text, kicks off with a meeting. The Greeks are nine years into the siege of Troy, a plague has ravaged their ranks and they gather to ponder the flagging campaign (good teamwork is conspicuously absent: Achilles, the Greek’s foremost warrior, comes close to killing the commander, King Agamemnon).
In detailing the twists and turns of this conference, and subsequent ones held by the Greeks, Trojans and gods of Mount Olympus, Homer nails meeting behaviour with a precision that management gurus today can only dream of. Where Homer blazes a trail, other literary greats follow: the Western canon is ripe with unharvested wisdom on how to make meetings more productive. Time to put yourself on mute, turn off your camera and get reading.
The Iliad: Listen to your foot soldiers
Though “The Iliad” is ostensibly a book about bloody battles and an interminable siege, much of the action turns on arguments between key individuals. A little way into the epic, the assembled Greeks are once again holding a discussion on what to do about their stalemate (in fact Agamemnon has already resolved to have another crack at the walls of Troy). A commoner, Thersites, speaks up to make the case for cutting their losses: their ships are rotting, they already have plenty of loot and Agamemnon has already proved to be a poor leader. Isn’t it time to head home?
Odysseus, a high-ranking commander, orders Thersites to check his “glib tongue” and then beats him up for “playing the fool” and daring to “argue with princes”; the crowd delights at Thersites’s humiliation.
By inviting us to watch a reasonable argument dismissed with violence, Homer makes clear that the Greeks did not believe in a frank exchange of views. The meeting was a large one, but common folk were there to legitimise decisions already taken by their superiors. Such assemblies were clearly as frustratingly common in Homer’s time as they are in ours.
Encouraging junior staff to voice their opinions is one of the biggest difficulties modern managers face. Many, like Homer’s warlords, shut them down – truly open meetings are a nightmare to run. But getting the view from the floor isn’t just good for employees’ morale; it’s a way to gather useful information and different opinions. Any organisation that shuts down its Thersites is losing valuable insights. The Greeks took Troy in the end, but Thersites was right about the state of their navy: Odysseus, famously, got shipwrecked on the way home.
King Lear: Majesty often stoops to folly
Bosses typically get to be bosses because they are confident in their own judgment and willing to assert themselves. That often means they become furious when they’re challenged – which makes it hard to step back and hold an open discussion.
Few works of literature dramatise this problem better than “King Lear”. Like “The Iliad”, the play opens with a meeting, as Lear discusses how to manage his succession. As with many managers, he has already predetermined the course of action: he plans to divvy up his kingdom between his three daughters. His only decision is how large a share to give each child, a judgment he will make depending on their answer to the question, who “doth love us most”. The real purpose of the meeting, it becomes clear, is for the old king to be lavished with “opulent” praise.
His two older children strive to outdo each other with performative sycophancy (no other joy, apparently, is as great as their love for their father). But Cordelia, his youngest – and the only one who genuinely loves her father, as the play goes on to demonstrate – refuses to flatter him (“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth”). Rather than hear her out, Lear flies into a rage, strips her of her portion and disowns her.
The snap decision testifies to Lear’s poor management skills. What comes next is even more of a no-no. Kent, the king’s most loyal aide, steps in to ask his master to reconsider his punishment of Cordelia. Lear silences him, warning, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” Kent insists on speaking his mind, saying he is duty bound to be “unmannerly when Lear is mad”. The king sends him into exile.
The figure of the overbearing leader who pays the price for his failure to countenance “the moody frontier of a servant brow” recurs throughout Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. In “Henry IV, Part I”, the rebel Hotspur is so unwilling to listen to counsel that his ally Northumberland blasts him for “tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own!” In “Richard III” the king turns on Buckingham, his partner in crime, the moment that he expresses faint doubts about Richard’s schemes. Similarly, bosses who expect their underlings merely to back up their views – and leave them too frightened to contradict them – often make bad decisions.
Nowadays, leaders are better at pretending to listen to their subordinates. But fear of displeasing the boss still shapes most meetings. During the Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy was so concerned that his national-security staff would rather say the right thing in front of him than work out the best strategy that he left the room for many discussions.
Today’s chief executives tend to follow King Lear, not Kennedy. According to one study, the person running a meeting generally speaks for between a third and two-thirds of the time allotted to the session. As the authors of this survey noted: “Even in egalitarian Denmark, we very rarely observed meeting participants challenge their leaders’ right to speak as much as they please.” King Lear created a “stage of fools”. Try not to do the same.
Lord of the Flies: Meetings beget meetings, not results
Anyone who thinks keeping a group discussion on track is easy would do well to study “Lord of the Flies”. William Golding’s novel follows a bunch of schoolboys stranded on a desert island after a plane crash. Meetings become central to their attempt to structure their mini-society, and they adopt a rule that anyone can speak if they’re holding the group’s conch shell (a prefiguration of Zoom’s yellow halo).
They clearly believe that more voices would improve the group’s decisions. It is a great, democratic experiment. But it fails.
Ralph, the boys’ putative leader, finds it impossible to translate talk into action, and laments the frequency of meetings at which nothing is achieved. “Everybody enjoys speaking and being together. We decide things. But they don’t get done.” His words will resonate with many modern managers.
The inability to manage discussion also results in a two-tier system. As Ralph observes, “practised debaters – Jack, Maurice, Piggy – would use their whole art to twist the meeting.” This leads to less adept speakers becoming marginalised. As Jack puts it: “It’s time some people knew they’ve got to keep quiet and leave deciding things to the rest of us.”
We have all experienced the situation whereby a few individuals dominate – and people who talk first and frequently in meetings tend to have an inordinate impact on the flow of discussion. Individuals who love the sound of their own voice are not necessarily well liked by others in the group, but we generally listen to them: people tend to think of them as influential by default. And talkativeness feeds on itself. Studies show that the more someone contributes in a meeting, the more they are likely to be asked questions. We seem to assume that people speak because they have something useful to say. So it was with Golding’s tribe on the island.
The problem with letting meetings run wild isn’t just that quieter (and less white and less male) voices are marginalised. Counterintuitively, you’re not as likely to learn anything new. Garold Stasser, a social psychologist, has shown that when there are no rules to meetings, conversations tend to be a rehash of what everyone already knows. Meetings without order don’t achieve anything except the entrenchment of powerful personalities, as Piggy learned the hard way. You can’t save a civilisation – or bring light to the darkness of man’s heart – with a conch shell alone.
Paradise Lost: Satan is a hell of a chairman
At the start of “Paradise Lost” Satan and his army of fallen angels convene, much like Homer’s Greeks, in order to work out how to turn their fortunes around. Satan has just led the infernal rabble in a spectacularly botched rebellion in Heaven and now they’re literally stuck in Hell.
Unlike Agamemnon, Satan seems genuinely keen to come up with a strategy that everyone supports (not for nothing was John Milton an advocate of the parliamentarians in England’s civil war).
When Satan opens the floor to debate, four arch-demons make their case. Moloch advocates “open Warr”. Belial, whom Milton describes as an artful and cynical speaker, suggests that they do nothing and hope God sees fit to forgive them. Mammon argues for abandoning any idea of returning to Heaven and instead building an empire in Hell. And Beelzebub counsels sending a demon to Earth to seduce or destroy this “new Race call’d Man”. The issue is put to a vote.
This emphasis on collective decision making characterised many literary meetings after Homer. Influenced by the ideals of Athenian democracy, playwrights such as Aesychlus and Euripides depicted meetings in which the outcome was decided by the mood in the room, not the most senior person there. The result wasn’t always the right one, but the procedure was represented as admirable.
In Hell, the diabolical assembly chose to precipitate the fall of Man – which turns out to be the option Satan was most in favour of all along. Some scholars have suggested that Satan manipulated the vote. But perhaps they don’t want to acknowledge that, in getting people to vote for his preferred outcome, Satan was simply really good at meetings.
Management by plebiscite is not, of course, a viable option for most companies. But Satan knew what he was doing. It’s a good idea to ask everyone in the room to register their opinion at the end of the session, even if you don’t have a yes-no question – you can ask people how likely they think an outcome is, or to rank the various options presented. As well as giving people a sense that their voice matters, consulting a wider group gives leaders access to a collective judgment that – as a large body of literature on the wisdom of crowds shows – is likely to be a good one.
The Talmud: Honour thy disagreements
Deep in the laws and commentaries of the Talmud, there is an unusual provision about capital punishment: if all 71 judges in a capital case agree that the death penalty should be imposed, then it is automatically taken off the table.
This seems counterintuitive, given that courts today often insist on unanimity to convict someone of murder. But the Talmudic principle embodies an important insight about the perils of consensus: if everyone is seeing things a certain way, you may well have missed something important.
When you look back at famously bad decisions made by small groups – the launch of the Challenger space shuttle, Enron’s board of directors signing off on risky accounting practices – it’s striking how sure participants were that they were right, and how little disagreement was voiced.
Arthur Schlesinger, an adviser to Kennedy, noted that in the discussions that led up to the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, meetings “took place in a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus”. Information that might have disrupted that accord was excluded or rationalised away. The longer people talked to each other, the dumber they became. Meetings didn’t open minds, it closed them.
You sometimes need an active strategy to avoid groupthink, which arises from a toxic but beguiling combination of conformism and positive reinforcement. When the judges of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish court in Temple times, passed their verdicts, they would speak in reverse order of seniority, so that less experienced judges wouldn’t tailor their opinions to fit those of senior ones.
More recent management experts like Kathleen Eisenhardt and Jay Bourgeois actively encourage a “good fight” in meetings. Arguments can be a sign that participants fundamentally trust each other and are working towards the same goal – that’s what allows them to express substantive differences of opinion.
It takes a rare leader to see discord as a boon, however. Alfred Sloan, the legendary boss of General Motors from the 1920s to the 1950s, was one such maverick. “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here,” he said at the end of one board meeting. “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting, to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain understanding of what the decision is all about.” Agamemnon would probably have had him thrashed. ■
James Surowiecki is the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds”
