Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The True Cost of Idealism

I have been guilty of the grave fault of idealism in much of my professional life. Consequently I cringe when I read of the young Elizabeth Holmes and her idealistic trajectory from the thrilling emotionally-laden launch of Theranos, which promised a breakthrough in medical technology, to its ignominious destruction as a fraudulent scam. In her I see myself - not in her level of talent or her self-confidence but in her profound self-delusion. It is this self-delusion which seems the universal cost of idealism, a cost which is borne not just by the promoter of an ideal but by the rest of the world as well - in her case about a billion dollars in round figures.

Idealism sells. What it primarily sells is itself - its promise, its enthusiasm, its own inherent goodness. Modern serial idealists in places like Silicon Valley are idealists about idealism. It is their idealistic energy and talent for putting together pieces in a technological/conceptual/commercial puzzle that gets them what they need: ideas, contacts, talented colleagues, reputation, and money.

The code phrase of the idealist is ‘Making a Difference.’ So Holmes “wanted to truly leave her mark on the world, she would need to accomplish something that furthered the greater good, not just become rich.” But most of all their energy and enthusiasm gets them power, the power to promote their own idealistic self-image.

Idealism is always couched in terms of abstract altruism, that is, improving the human condition. But no matter what the area in which a particular ideal is to be pursued - business, politics, medicine, academia - the idealist imperative, his or her sine qua non, is the acquisition and maintenance of power for themselves.

Power is a logical and practical prerequisite for the realisation of any ideal. Idealists therefore want to enrol the rest of us in their ideal. This is their route to power. Their role model is not that of Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa and the selfless doing of good but that of Pericles and the talking of doing good, usually about what others are required to do to prove their goodness.

The world of the idealist is constrained and defined by power regardless of the merits of the ideal put forth as its rationale. Power is the elephant in the room that no one talks about but that must be constantly fed. Eventually there is room for nothing else. The ideal one has started with becomes a nostalgic memory, restored to mind only at the behest of power to increase itself. This is the essential paradox 0f idealism: it will always end in tears.

The more articulate and forceful idealists are in presenting their ideal, the more power they accumulate. The idealist is a visionary, a prophet who deserves power because of the strength of their vision and prophetic acumen. Holmes made it clear to her employees that she was “starting a religion.” It is faith which justifies, for the idealist as for any believer, those actions necessary to acquire power. Chief among such actions is lying.

Chronic mendacity is not incidental or exceptional for the idealist. It is a necessary virtue of technique and substance. Lying is expected because all communication is negotiation, is it not? This is the common thread among idealists of diverse backgrounds, views, and personalities. Donald Trump is an entrepreneurial idealist; Benedict XVI is a religious idealist; Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are high-tech idealists; as indeed is Elizabeth Holmes. However else they differ, they share this distinctive trait: they lie instinctively and routinely, and without remorse, indeed, I suspect, without consciousness of lying at all.

Although idealists have to be enthusiastic salesmen, they are not mere evangelists who tout the advantages of their ideal, while staying silent about its possible defects or adverse consequences. Idealists are true believers. Unlike typical salesmen they do not present half truths, distortions, overstatement, and tendentious arguments knowing them to be such. They believe firmly in everything they say. They are compelling, even for hard-bitten venture capitalists. The guy Holmes recruited to do the engineering was mesmerised by her take of difference-making: “Edmond, who went by Ed, felt himself drawn in by the young woman sitting across from him who was staring at him intently without blinking. The mission she was describing was admirable, he thought.”

The ideal consumes idealists, including their awareness of reality. In their own minds they do not lie, they convince - themselves as much as others - in order to further the ideal. Lies are aspirational statements not false claims. Their repetition is constructive truth, an embodiment of hope, and a demonstration of that very Christian virtue of faith. So from the start of Theranos, Holmes was faking the results of her diagnostic devices through high-tech trickery - believing, much like Bernie Madoff (another idealist), that the breakthrough was at hand. She was selling nanobot snake oil to West Coast money men at the same time as Goldman Sachs (an exceptionally idealistic firm, just ask them) was pushing its sub-prime portfolios into German pension funds. Same product - efficiency - just different labels, one procedural, the other financial.

In short idealism is not merely a neurosis; it is a sociopathology. Idealists don’t simply have ideals; they seek to impose them on the rest of us - at a profit. Idealism is an infection spread from mouth to ear to mouth. As both a philosophy and a practical ethic it is the secular residue of the Christian idea of faith. It may not move mountains directly but it certainly can generate the cash to develop the machines which can. And idealism justifies anything for those who have it; it makes the idealist immune from self-criticism, and indifferent to the consequences of his actions. Idealism certainly gets things done in a world which expects and respects it. But what it gets done is rarely discussed.

In business the consequence is constant low-level deceit punctuated by not infrequent criminal fraud; in politics the consequence is extremism and ultimately terrorism; in religion, fundamentalism and doctrinally-justified inhumanity. Idealism, like its progenitor of faith, is something we culturally value. The central question that Bad Blood raises is not legal, or organisational; nor is it essentially about the moral code of Silicon Valley. It is about whether this legacy of what we glibly call Christian civilisation is a salvific virtue or a destructive vice.

Postscript: It is also clear that idealists have no shame: https://gizmodo.com/disgraced-therano...

View all my reviews