Harold sees the value of being cavalier after realizing that all of the smartest and most dedicated people he knew from college were on incredibly conventional, though prestigious, career tracks:
You could almost draw a 2 x 2 matrix with the axes labeled “Courage” and “Capability” and see a vast yawning void where the right upper quadrant ought to be. I scratched my head about this puzzle for a long time, but no explanation was forthcoming.
So let’s tackle a different question: why is Donald Trump so interesting? I don’t mean his politics per se, but rather his personality. In a time when lots of politicians try to brand themselves an outsider to politics, he actually acts like one, for better or worse. He exudes an attitude of “I’ve already made it, I’m gonna do my thing, and maybe people will like it or not.”
And sure, he’s a billionaire, so it’s easy for him to do that sort of thing. But it’s notable that there are 536 billionaires in the US — just two short of the number of Congressmen and Senators — and almost all of them are fairly boring in their interests and activities. Trump, Soros, Musk, and Thiel are the ones that jump out as exhibiting, in very different ways, the sort of agency you’d expect from someone who’s already made it. Sure, most of us have day jobs and families to feed, so you’d expect us to veer closer to convention. But if anyone could be brashly unconventional, it would be billionaires. And yet that’s not what we observe.
My sense is that aristocrats were way more interesting, and this is not unrelated to their remarkable intellectual productivity. Darwin noodled around with naturalism after abandoning a career in medicine. Edward Gibbon wrote his famous Decline and Fall only after several equally ambitious failures, such as a panoramic history of Switzerland and a survey of contemporary English literature. These were not the equivalents of a grad student carefully publishing some cautious extensions of his PI’s work to get some guaranteed publications, they were bold, imaginative, and ambitious.
In a world where more people than ever could live materially quite comfortably, it seems notable that so few of our elites are demonstrating that level of ambition. It’s as though we had all the tools necessary to support enormous levels of human agency, and decided to just sit on them.
There are probably lots of causes for this shift, from changes in culture to differences in education. But one striking difference is that for past generations of elites, it was common to take a position as a military officer while growing up — whereas today, outside maybe Israel and a few other countries, it’s unheard of. Being a lieutenant in a cavalry regiment was as common then is going to grad school is today.
Part of this, sure, was carrying on the tradition of the nobility as being responsible for physical security. But part of it, too, is the sense that command over men in situations that matter fundamentally changes the way you see the world. As a leader, you have to be responsible both for planning and for execution. You have to closely monitor how the men under your command are behaving. And it forces you into a frame of mind where taking initiative and making decisions are the default, rather than the exception.
We don’t really have analogues of this anymore. Pretty much every prestigious career track involves not personal command but prolonged institutional subordination.
Putin seems to meet your ideal of aristocrats in action.
Interesting post. “Pretty much every prestigious career track involves not personal command but prolonged institutional subordination.”
This relates to the old distinction between “Line” and “Staff” positions, where Line positions involve decision-making authority and accountability for results, whereas Staff positions involve analyzing and recommending, but not deciding and dealing with the consequences.
I think a high % of recent college graduates (especially those with postgraduate degrees) today prefer the Staff roles: they would rather write recommendations of “Optimum Sales and Manufacturing Strategies for Universal Entities Corporation” than go run a sales region for that company, or (heaven forbid!) a manufacturing facility. If they are in government, they would rather write papers about “Transportation in the Year 2040″ than run the Atlanta Tower for the FAA.
Unfortunately, the historical policy that people need to have lower-level Line experience before being put in a higher-level Line job has eroded. There are too many cases in which a person who has spent years in Staff positions (with the exception of a couple of pseudo-jobs, like 6 months as a sales manager) get promoted into important Line jobs in which failure will have severe consequences. The ultimate example of this, of course, is Barack Obama.
In a bureaucracy, there is no upside for excellence, only downside for failure. Bureaucrats must CYA to survive, which usually means passing the buck to some rulership algorithm. Hence the smart money is on seizing the algorithm, which is currently done through advisory white papers. Even in the rare case the algorithm is held responsible for bad outcomes, between the nonpersonal algorithm not objecting to its demonization and the writer and adviser being able to blame each other, responsibility is successfully laundered.