Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What Trump and Idealists Have in Common

‘Making a difference’ could be the idealistic theme of my generation’s collective ethos - at least among those of us who survived the drug-culture of the 60’s and 70’s with intact minds. It is my generation’s term for religious faith. The world had been opened to us by cheap access to good education, a long post-war economic boom, a range of radical new philosophies and more or less guaranteed employment. Belief - in oneself, in society, in the perfectability of life - was the route to success and fulfillment.

We had choices. And the right people appeared to be demonstrating how to exercise power around the world - environmental improvement (Jane Goodall), human rights (Martin Luther King), the status of women (Betty Friedan), the Church (Pope John XXIII). This was concretely personal not abstractly intellectual inspiration. Anything was possible for individuals with the courage to put themselves on the line; or at least for those with the determination to get others to put themselves on the line they had laid out.

So we had an obvious moral duty: to improve the world. Our parents worked at corporate jobs in order to earn a living. Not us. We had corporate careers in order to make the world a better place. Ours was an enlightened self-interest which took the old-fashioned idea of vocation seriously. Our lives had to mean something. By which we meant we had to dedicate ourselves to a cause, something beyond ourselves as the gurus of the time phrased it. And that we did with diverse passion - in business, politics, and academia.

For example, we simply presumed we would always have enough to eat. The question was how to make sure others did as well. Hence the popularity of things like the Hunger Project (which seriously aimed to eliminate global food deprivation entirely within 20 years) and Monsanto’s GM research. The world remained corporate, but it was no longer exploiting us; now we were exploiting it for the betterment of humanity. And, by the way, we made good money at it. But we were ‘adding value’ not just being avaricious, self-justifying social drones.

Such smug bastards have always existed but perhaps never before or after in such naive density which made our conceits part of the air we breathed. We could afford these conceits because we were buoyed up, sustained, and insured by a social and economic system that wanted us to act based precisely on the basis of this ideology of ‘making a difference.’ We were an elite - the beneficiaries of a system we neither understood nor created. But our conversations and associations were almost solely with other members of the elite who spoke the same language of ‘vision,’ and ‘commitment,’ and ‘human potential.’ ‘Making a difference’ became the late 20th century’s post-industrial version of the 19th century’s technological Progress, a sort of moral neo-liberalism of the soul.

Not until decades later did the real consequences of our visions, and commitments, and potentials, show themselves - a more economically divided, a less environmentally sustainable, a more intensely politically fragmented and militarily hostile world than we could have ever imagined. The point of Anand Giridharadas’s book is “to understand the connection between these elites’ social concern and predation, between the extraordinary helping and the extraordinary hoarding, between the milking—and perhaps abetting—of an unjust status quo and the attempts by the milkers to repair a small part of it. It is also an attempt to offer a view of how the elite see the world, so that we might better assess the merits and limitations of their world-changing campaigns.”

‘Making a difference’ remains an abiding meme among today’s cultural elite. Giridharadas quotes a recent McKinsey & Co. recruiting brochure, soliciting candidates who desire to:
Change the world.
Improve lives.
Invent something new.
Solve a complex problem.
Extend your talents.
Build enduring relationships.
This is a more laconic but still an accurate replica of the pitch I received to join ‘The Firm’ in 1976. It is also a paraphrase of similar documents produced by companies like Goldman Sachs and hundreds of others from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And it is in one form or another what every applicant to Harvard, or Stanford, or for that matter Oxford or Cambridge will be urged to consider. ‘If you are the best, you’ll want to be among the best’ is the bait that is hard to resist (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

‘Making a difference’ is a subtle and destructive ideology, a spiritual rather than social or economic ideology and therefore far more convincing. Giridharada through his personal case studies shows how and why. ‘Making a difference’ is an insidious ideology because it taps into the best human impulses: empathy, charity, mercy. It then uses these to justify the acquisition of personal power - political, intellectual, organisational power. And since the first rule of power is the necessity to maintain power, it, not the virtues which motivated its acquisition, is the essential ideological thread. ‘Feed the world’ becomes indistinguishable from ‘Eliminate political resistance to the commercial bonanza of genetically modified crops.’

Giridharada‘s kind of journalistic and academic melange is intriguing and produces some eye-opening observations about the paradoxes of power-seeking, especially among those with a social conscience. He certainly establishes the credibility of his thesis that: “the powerful are fighting to ‘change the world’ in ways that essentially keep it the same.” Nonetheless, I find it lacking. It doesn’t get to the core of our arrogance about the world on our affect on it. Our presumption that good intentions, backed by appropriate intellectual and practical skills will result in improved flourishing for humanity (or the planet) isn’t just ill-advised, it is evil.

Sometimes the extent of this evil can only be captured in religious terms. ‘Making a difference’ is, at it turns out, a rather ancient Christian heresy not just a mistake in judgment. It’s called Pelagianism, the belief that it is possible to contribute to salvation - of oneself or of the world - unaided by something called grace. Whatever grace is and where it comes from - divine gift, genetic legacy, intellectual insight, or even cosmic luck - it can never be presumed upon.

Pelagius, the eponymous monk whom Augustine targeted as arch-heretic, suffered neither from inadequate intellectual vision, nor lack of passionate conviction. His fatal flaw was a lack of humility, a lack we don’t normally associate today with grave sin. And yet, as Giridharadas notes, we have such an obvious example in our midst that hubris is indeed evil: “Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of a culture that tasks elites with reforming the very systems that have made them and left others in the dust.” ‘Making a difference’ is code for an ambition to power no matter who it comes from.

To make the distinction between the good (my) and bad (his) use of power is nonsensical. Power is itself corrupt as as well as corrupting just as Lord Acton suggested. The human compulsion to power is the authentic Original Sin - can’t live with it, can’t do without it. But recognising it for what it is when it pops up among us is essential for healthy living. ‘Making a difference’ means ‘I want to make a grab for power’ when spoken by a young person. By the time he or she has said it, it’s probably too late to do anything about it. They’re doomed. Just as Augustine claimed, it appears that Original Sin gets passed along in mother’s milk.

Postscript: I consider myself a social liberal. But I have a sensitive nose when it comes to many apparently liberal causes because they not infrequently stink of power-grabbing. This suspicion I share with the French conservative thinker, Bertrand de Jouvenel, who mistrusted all idealists as a matter of course. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

Postscript 30Jul20 on the personal cost of idealistic ambition: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/ar...

View all my reviews