I’m not a major fan of Ayn Rand, but one of the more attractive ideas coming out of her work is from Atlas Shrugged, written about a world in which the “people of the mind”– business leaders, artists, philosophers– go on strike. It’s an attractive idea. What would happen if those of us in the “cognitive 1 percent” decided, as a bloc, to secede from the mediocrity of Corporate America? Would we finally get our due? Would we stop having to answer to idiots? Would the dumb-dumbs come crawling to us, begging that we return?
No. That would never happen. They have as much pride as we do.
It’s an appealing concept, for sure. Individually, not one of us is substantial to society– that’s not a personal statement; no one person is that important. Any one of us could be cast into the flames with little cost to society. Yet we tend to feel like, as a group, we are critical. We’re right. I am insignificant, but societies live or die based on what proportion of the few thousand people like me per generation get their ideas into implementation, and it’s only after the fact that one knows which side of the critical percentage a society is on. Atlas could shrug. Society could be brought to its knees if the most intelligent people developed a tribal identity, acted as a political bloc, were still ignored, and chose to secede. Science and the arts would stagnate, the economy would fall into decline, and society would be unable to correct for its own morale problems. The culture would crater, innovation would die, and whatever society endured such a “strike” would quickly fall to third-class status on the world stage.
That doesn’t mean we, the smart people who might threaten such a strike, would get whatever we want. Imagine trying to extort a masochist. “I’ll beat you up unless if you give me $100.” “You mean I can not give you $100 and get beaten up? For free? I’ll take that option; you’re so kind.”
I don’t mean to call society masochistic, because it isn’t so. Societies don’t make choices. People in them do, often with minimal or no concern with the upkeep of this edifice we call “civilization”. Now, the people at the top of ours (Corporatist America) are stupid, short-sighted, uncultured, and defective human beings. All of that is true. To assess them as weak because of this is inaccurate. I’m pretty sure that crocodiles don’t crack 25 on an IQ test, but I wouldn’t want to be in a physical fight with one. These people are ruthless and competitive and they’re very good at what they do– which is to acquire and hold position, even if it requires charming people (including people like us, much smarter than they are) to get it. They’d also rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. That’s why we’ll never be able to pull an Atlas Shrugged move against them. They care far more about their relative standing in society than its specific level of health. We’d be giving them exactly what they want: less competition to hold the high social status they currently have.
Also, I think that an Atlas Shrugged phenomenon is already happening in American society, with so little fanfare as to render it comically underwhelming. Smart people all over the country are underperforming, mostly not by choice, but because they are not getting opportunities to excel. Scientists spend an increasing amount of time applying for grants and lobbying their bosses for the autonomy that they had, implicitly, a generation ago. The quality of our arts has suffered substantially. Our political climate is disastrous and right-wing because a lot of intelligent people have just given up. Has the elite looked at the slow decline of the society and said, “Man, we really need to treat those smart people better, and hand our plum positions over to those who actually deserve them?” Nope. That has not happened; it would be absurd to think of it, as the current elite has too much pride. And if we scale that up from unintentional, situational underperformance to a full-fledged strike of the cognitive elite, we will be ignored for doing so. We won’t bring society to a calamitous break and get our due. We’ll see slow decay and the only people smart enough to make the connection between our strike and that degradation will be the strikers themselves. We already have a pervasively mediocre society and things still work– not well, but we haven’t seen catastrophic society-wide failures yet. It might get to that point, but it’ll be too late for the kind of action we might want.
In sum…
- fantasy: the cognitive elite could go on “strike” and the existing elite (corporate upper class, tied together by social connections rather than anything related to excellence) would, after society fell to pieces, beg us to rejoin on our terms, inverting the power dynamic that currently exists between us and them.
- reality: those parasitic fuckers don’t give a shit about the broad-based health of society. We’re not exactly a real competitive threat to them because they hold most of the power, but we do have some power and we’d just be making their lives easier if we withdrew from the world and gave that power up entirely.
As intellectuals, or at least as people who aspire to be such, we look at civil decline as tragic and painful. When we learn about expansive civilizations that fall into decadence and ruin, we tend to imagine it as a personal death that’s directly experienced, rather than a gradual historic change that few people notice in contrast to the day-to-day struggles of higher personal importance. So we often delude ourselves into thinking that “society” has its own will and makes “choices” according to its own interests, as opposed to the parochial interests of whatever idiots happen to be running it at the time. Thus, we believe that if “society” refuses to listen to our ideas and place us in appropriately high positions, we can withdraw as a bloc, render it ineffective, and impel it to “come crawling back” to us with better terms. We’re dead wrong in believing that this is a possibility. Yes, we can render it ineffective through underperformance (hell, it’s already arguably at that point, just based on the pervasive conformity and mediocrity that have declawed most of us) but this reorganization that we seek will never happen. We tend to overestimate the moral character– while underestimating the competitive capability (again: think crocodiles)– of our enemies. They are all about their own egos and they will gladly have society burn just to stay on top.
One concrete example of this is in software engineering, where the culture is mostly one of anti-intellectualism and mediocrity. Why is it this way? Given that an elite programmer is 10-100 times as effective as a mediocre code monkey, why do companies tailor their environments to the hiring en masse of unskilled “commodity” developers? Bad programmers are not cheap; they’re hilariously expensive. So what’s going on? The answer is that most managers don’t care about the good of the company. It’s their own egos they want to protect. A good programmer costs only 25 percent more than a mediocre one, but is 5 times as effective. Why not hire the good one, then? The answer is that the manager loses his real motivation for going to work: being the smartest guy in the room, and the unambiguous alpha male. Saving the company some money is not, to most managers, worth that price.
What we fail to realize, as the cognitive 1 percent, is that while society abstractly relies on us, the people running society think we’re huge pains in the ass and would be thrilled not to have to deal with us at all.
Do I believe that it’s time for the cognitive 1 percent to mobilize, and to take back our rightful control over society’s direction? Absolutely. In fact, I think it’s a moral responsibility, because the world is facing some problems (such as climate change) too complex for the existing elite to solve. The incapacity and mediocrity of our current corporate elite is literally an existential risk to humanity. We ought to assert ourselves, as a group, and start fixing the world. But the Atlas Shrugged model is the wrong way to go about that.
