The Social Animal (35 page)

This rationalist mode of thought is omnipresent and seems natural and inevitable. The rationalist tradition proved seductive. It promised certainty, to relieve people of the anxiety caused by fuzziness and doubt. People’s perceptions about human nature seem to be influenced by the dominant technology of their time. In the mechanical and then the industrial age, it was easy to see people as mechanisms and the science of human understanding as something akin to engineering or physics.

Rationalism gained enormous prestige during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it does contain certain limitations and biases. This mode of thought is reductionist; it breaks problems into discrete parts and is blind to emergent systems. This mode, as Guy Claxton observes in his book
The Wayward Mind
, values explanation over observation. More time is spent solving the problem than taking in the scene. It is purposeful rather than playful. It values the sort of knowledge that can be put into words and numbers over the sort of knowledge that cannot. It seeks rules and principles that can be applied across contexts, and undervalues the importance of specific contexts.

Moreover, the rationalist method was founded upon a series of assumptions. It assumes that social scientists can look at society objectively from the outside, purged of passions and unconscious biases.

It assumes that reasoning can be fully or at least mostly under conscious control.

It assumes that reason is more powerful than and separable from emotion and appetite.

It assumes that perception is a clear lens, giving the viewer a straightforward and reliable view of the world.

It assumes that human action conforms to laws that are akin to the laws of physics, if we can only understand what they are. A company, a society, a nation, a universe—these are all great machines, operated through immutable patterns of cause and effect. Natural sciences are the model that the behavioral sciences should replicate.

Eventually, rationalism produced its own form of extremism. The scientific revolution led to scientism. Irving Kristol defined scientism as the “elephantiasis of reason.” Scientism is taking the principles of rational inquiry, stretching them without limit, and excluding any factor that doesn’t fit the formulas.

Over the past centuries, many great errors and disasters have flowed from the excessive faith in pure reason. At the end of the eighteenth century, revolutionaries in France brutalized the society in the name of beginning the world anew on rational grounds. Social Darwinists imagined they had discovered the immutable laws of human evolution, which could be used to ensure the survival of the fittest. Corporate leaders under the influence of Frederick Taylor tried to turn factory workers into hyper-efficient cogs. In the twentieth century, communists tried to socially reengineer whole nations, attempting to create, for example, a New Soviet Man. In the West, Le Corbusier and a generation of urban planners sought to turn cities into rational machines—factories for traffic—by clearing away existing neighborhoods and replacing them with multilane highways and symmetrical housing projects cut off from the older city. Technocrats from affluent nations tried to plant large-scale development schemes across the developing world without much concern for the local context. Financial analysts at the big banks and the central banks thought they had mastered economic cycles and created a “Great Moderation.”

In short, the rationalism method has yielded many great discoveries, but when it is used to explain or organize the human world, it does have one core limitation. It highly values conscious cognition—what you might call Level 2 cognition—which it can see, quantify, formalize, and understand. But it is blind to the influence of unconscious—what you might call Level 1 cognition—which is cloudlike, nonlinear, hard to see, and impossible to formalize. Rationalists have a tendency to lop off or diminish all information that is not calculable according to their methodologies.

Lionel Trilling diagnosed the problem in
The Liberal Imagination
when he noted that so long as politics or commerce “moves toward organization, it tends to select the emotions and qualities that are most susceptible to organization. As it carries out its active and positive ends it unconsciously limits its view of the world to what it can deal with, and unconsciously tends to develop theories and principles, particularly in relation to the nature of the human mind, that justify its limitation.” As a result, “it drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination. And in the very interest of affirming its confidence in the power of the mind, it inclines to constrict and make mechanical its conception of the mind.”

Rationalism looks at the conscious mind, and assumes that that is all there is. It cannot acknowledge the importance of unconscious processes, because once it dips its foot in that dark and bottomless current, all hope of regularity and predictability is gone. Rationalists gain prestige and authority because they have supposedly mastered the science of human behavior. Once the science goes, all their prestige goes with it.

This scientism has expressed itself most powerfully, over the last fifty years, in the field of economics. Economics did not start out as a purely rationalist enterprise. Adam Smith believed that human beings are driven by moral sentiments and their desire to seek and be worthy of the admiration of others. Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek expressed themselves through words not formulas. They stressed that economic activity was conducted amidst pervasive uncertainty. Actions are guided by imagination as well as reason. People can experience discontinuous paradigm shifts, suddenly seeing the same situation in radically different ways. John Maynard Keynes argued that economics is a moral science and reality could not be captured in universal laws calculable by mathematics. Economics, he wrote, “deals with introspection and with values ... it deals with motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties. One had to be constantly on guard against treating the material as constant and homogenous.”

But over the course of the twentieth century, the rationalist spirit came to dominate economics. Physicists and other hard scientists were achieving great things, and social scientists sought to match their rigor and prestige. The influential economist Irving Fisher wrote his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of a physicist, and later helped build a machine with levers and pumps to illustrate how an economy works. Paul Samuelson applied the mathematical principles of thermodynamics to economics. On the finance side, Emanuel Derman was a physicist who became a financier and played a central role in developing the models for derivatives.

While valuable tools for understanding economic behavior, mathematical models were also like lenses that filtered out certain aspects of human nature. They depended on the notion that people are basically regular and predictable. They assume, as George A. Akerlof and Robert Shiller have written, “that variations in individual feelings, impressions and passions do not matter in the aggregate and that economic events are driven by inscrutable technical factors or erratic government action.”

Within a very short time economists were emphasizing monetary motivations to the exclusion of others. Homo Economicus was separated from Homo Sociologus, Homo Psychologicus, Homo Ethicus, and Homo Romanticus. You ended up with a stick figure view of human nature.

Taggert and his team didn’t study intellectual history. Rationalism was just around them in the air they breathed, shaping their assumptions and methods in ways they did not appreciate. The rationalist mentality was in the economics courses they took in college, the strategy courses they took in business school, and the management books they read every day. It was the mentality that narrowed useful information down to the sort of thing that could be captured on PowerPoint slides.

As the recession deepened and lingered, Erica watched them make a series of disastrous moves that threatened to destroy the company. Forced to cut costs, they first cut every single practice that might have fostered personal bonds. For example, they took the company phone number off the Web site so it was nearly impossible for a customer with a problem to call and talk to a human being. They eliminated all the company gatherings that used to build camaraderie. They cut office space. Some people who had worked for decades to get a real office now found themselves in ego-destroying cubicles. The floor plan had looked so efficient when the management team had presented it.

Jim Collins argues that institutional decline is like a staged disease. Companies can look fine on the outside but already be sick within, and once they get sick, there is a certain progression they follow on the way to their doom. If that’s true, then the cable company went through all of the phases all at once.

At first, the Intercom executives were thrilled by the economic slowdown. “In China, the word for ‘crisis’ also means ‘opportunity’!” they would tell one another. They saw sliding revenues as a call to enact all their experiments. The launched off on a hyperactive process of reorganization and restructuring. They relieved division heads, and put in new people. They put out a new long-term strategy called Leapfrog Growth. They were going to grow the company at all costs, pour money into sectors that promised 10 percent growth, and get rid of divisions that were just crawling along. “We no longer have the luxury of doing what we’ve always done,” Taggert would bark out at meetings. “We have to rip up the playbook. Think anew.”

Soon, there were even more acquisitions. Taggert, bored with running a cable company, bought a television network. Now he could hang around with the stars. He could go to dinner parties and talk about the prime-time lineup. He didn’t bother to think about whether a company providing a technical service could really mesh with a company providing artistic product.

There were other acquisitions—a biotech firm, an online appliance store. Erica watched her colleagues as they got swept up in the seduction of doing the deal. After each one, a triumphant memo would go around the executive suits. This deal allows us to “double our reach ... transform our company…. In a single move we revolutionize the landscape…. This is an absolute gamechanger…. We now have a blockbuster product that will herald a new era…. Today we witness a new dawn and a new beginning.” Each deal was supposed to be the silver bullet that pulled the company out of its slide, but weeks and months later, the slide was still there, only with more debt.

As everything new was being polished, everything old was being squeezed. Old suppliers were squeezed, contractors were cut back, old employees were told to do more with less. A lifeboat mentality began to pervade the company—month by month, the weak were thrown overboard, and the survivors gripped the gunnels more tightly. Morale suffered. Customer engagement plunged. When bad news came in, there was a search for those responsible, but somehow responsibility could never be assigned. Each decision had been made by a layering of committees. When everyone was responsible, no one was.

Erica watched the debacle with grim disgust. She had withstood the death of her own company, which was more or less unavoidable. Now she was going to be part of one of the worst management fiascos in the history of capitalism. Who was going to hire her after that?

Month after month, the numbers got worse and worse. One day she was at a meeting when a new set of revenue numbers were announced. “You must have that wrong,” one of Taggert’s butt boys responded. Erica heard a spontaneous groan from the back of the room. No one else seemed to notice, but when propriety allowed, Erica swiveled her head over to see who had made the noise. It was a jowly older guy, with white hair, wearing a white short-sleeve shirt, and a red and blue rep tie. She’d seen this guy at many of the bigger meetings, but she had never heard him say anything. She stared at him. He had his eyes down, staring at his meaty hands. Then he looked up and their eyes locked. He smirked, and she turned away.

After the meeting she followed him down the hallway, and eventually pulled up alongside him. “What did you think?” she ventured. He just looked at her suspiciously.

“Pathetic,” she finally whispered.

“Fucking pathetic. Unbelievably fucking pathetic,” he replied.

And so Project Valkyrie was born.

The guy’s name was Raymond. He’d worked for the company for thirty-two years. They couldn’t get rid of him because no one else knew the technology, but they put him in a job far away from decision making where he ended up cleaning up other people’s messes. Through him, Erica learned there were others in the company just as disgusted as she was—a lot of them, actually. They set up a dissident underground. They had a samizdat network on their private e-mail accounts. At first they just bitched and moaned, and then they planned. Erica persuaded them this action was a matter of survival. If the company went down, they’d all be destroyed. If the company went down, then an institution they had spent their lives building would be gone. Surely they weren’t going to just sit there and await their fates. Surely something could be done.

MÉTIS

ERICA
SPENT
HER
DAYS
BEING
APPALLED
BY
TAGGERT
AND
his minions. At night, sometimes late at night, she’d come home and vent to Harold. Harold couldn’t really help her with concrete business advice. He’d drifted away from the corporate world over the years. But he did try to give her some help on how to think about her problems.

Harold was now deeply ensconced at the Historical Society. He’d begun writing catalogue copy for the exhibitions, but he’d been promoted and now was a curator and helped organize exhibitions. The Historical Society was a sleepy old institution, started in the nineteenth century, with countless artifacts in its storerooms. Harold would spend spare hours down in the basement, poking through old boxes and files. Sometimes he’d go into the vault, where the Society’s most precious treasures were stored.