By Malcolm Gladwell
I am not that fan of Mr. Gladwell. And while his arguments and stories in favor of the underdog and the less favored are entertaining to read, I don't personally consider them groundbreaking.
For sure, Mr. Gladwell has a lovely writting style. But that's it.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 7/10
Click Here to Read My Notes
I am not that fan of Mr. Gladwell. And while his arguments and stories in favor of the underdog and the less favored are entertaining to read, I don't personally consider them groundbreaking.
For sure, Mr. Gladwell has a lovely writting style. But that's it.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 7/10
Click Here to Read My Notes
David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants.
By “giants,” I mean powerful opponents of all kinds—from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression.
Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
And the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate: it can open doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.
The reason King Saul is skeptical of David’s chances is that David is small and Goliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength.
What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.
Arreguín-Toft then asked the question slightly differently. What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as David did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent.
We think of underdog victories as improbable events: that’s why the story of David and Goliath has resonated so strongly all these years. But Arreguín-Toft’s point is that they aren’t at all. Underdogs win all the time. Why, then, are we so shocked every time a David beats a Goliath? Why do we automatically assume that someone who is smaller or poorer or less skilled is necessarily at a disadvantage?
Having lots of soldiers and weapons and resources—as the Turks did—is an advantage. But it makes you immobile and puts you on the defensive. Meanwhile, movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, and courage—which Lawrence’s men had in abundance—allowed them to do the impossible, namely, attack Aqaba from the east, a strategy so audacious that the Turks never saw it coming.
There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources—and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.
We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser. Part One of David and Goliath is an attempt to explore the consequences of that error.
The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time, underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the 202 lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe-to-toe with Goliath the conventional way 152 times—and lost 119 times.
Underdog strategies are hard.
To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice.
We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.
Most people would have shrunk in the face of that kind of criticism. Not Ranadivé. It was really random. I mean, my father had never played basketball before. Why should he care what the world of basketball thought of him? Ranadivé coached a team of girls who had no talent in a sport he knew nothing about. He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.
The story of Vivek Ranadivé and the Redwood City girls’ basketball team suggests that what we think of as an advantage and as a disadvantage is not always correct, that we mix the categories up.
How do you teach “work hard, be independent, learn the meaning of money” to children who look around themselves and realize that they never have to work hard, be independent, or learn the meaning of money? That’s why so many cultures around the world have a proverb to describe the difficulty of raising children in an atmosphere of wealth. In English, the saying is “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” The Italians say, “Dalle stelle alle stalle” (“from stars to stables”). In Spain it’s “Quien no lo tiene, lo hace; y quien lo tiene, lo deshace” (“he who doesn’t have it, does it, and he who has it, misuses it”). Wealth contains the seeds of its own destruction.
The man from Hollywood was not the parent he wanted to be, because he was too rich. Hotchkiss is not the school it wants to be, because its classes are too small. We all assume that being bigger and stronger and richer is always in our best interest. Vivek Ranadivé, a shepherd boy named David, and the principal of Shepaug Valley Middle School will tell you that it isn
Alcohol is not inherently good or bad or neutral. It starts out good, becomes neutral, and ends up bad.
The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all.
The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.
That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.
We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.
“You know, there’s something about solving a math problem that’s very satisfying,” Randolph said at one point, and an almost wistful look came over his face. “You start with a problem that you may not know how to solve, but you know there are certain rules you can follow and certain approaches you can take, and often during this process, the intermediate result is more complex than what you started with, and then the final result is simple. And there’s a certain joy in making that journey.
Conventional wisdom holds that a disadvantage is something that ought to be avoided—that it is a setback or a difficulty that leaves you worse off than you would be otherwise. But that is not always the case.
You have to squint a little bit and maybe read the sentence twice, and you probably wonder halfway through who on earth thought it was a good idea to print out the test this way. Suddenly you have to work to read the question. Yet all that extra effort pays off. As Alter says, making the questions “disfluent” causes people to “think more deeply about whatever they come across.
There are two possible interpretations for this fact. One is that this remarkable group of people triumphed in spite of their disability: they are so smart and so creative that nothing—not even a lifetime of struggling with reading—could stop them. The second, more intriguing, possibility is that they succeeded, in part, because of their disorder—that they learned something in their struggle that proved to be of enormous advantage. Would you wish dyslexia on your child? If the second of these possibilities is true, you just might.
“If I could read a lot faster, it would make a lot of things that I do easier,” Boies said. “There’s no doubt about that. But on the other hand, not being able to read a lot and learning by listening and asking questions means that I need to simplify issues to their basics. And that is very powerful, because in trial cases, judges and jurors—neither of them have the time or the ability to become an expert in the subject. One of my strengths is presenting a case that they can understand.
That’s “capitalization learning”: we get good at something by building on the strengths that we are naturally given.
Most of the learning that we do is capitalization learning. It is easy and obvious. If you have a beautiful voice and perfect pitch, it doesn’t take much to get you to join a choir. “Compensation learning,” on the other hand, is really hard.
But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.
An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer. That, too, is obvious.
But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, “agreeableness,” they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks—to do things that others might disapprove of.
Society frowns on disagreeableness. As human beings we are hardwired to seek the approval of those around us. Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.
As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Dyslexia doesn’t necessarily make people more open. Nor does it make them more conscientious (although it certainly might). But the most tantalizing possibility raised by the disorder is that it might make it a little bit easier to be disagreeable.
Dyslexia—in the best of cases—forces you to develop skills that might otherwise have lain dormant. It also forces you to do things that you might otherwise never have considered, like doing your own version of Kamprad’s disagreeable trip to Poland or hopping in the cab of someone you’ve never met and pretending to be someone you aren
Kamprad, in case you are wondering, is dyslexic.
And Gary Cohn? It turns out he was a really good trader, and it turns out that learning how to deal with the possibility of failure is really good preparation for a career in the business world. Today he is the president of Goldman Sachs.
The idea of desirable difficulty suggests that not all difficulties are negative. Being a poor reader is a real obstacle, unless you are David Boies and that obstacle turns you into an extraordinary listener, or unless you are Gary Cohn and that obstacle gives you the courage to take chances you would never otherwise have taken.
Too often, we make the same mistake as the British did and jump to the conclusion that there is only one kind of response to something terrible and traumatic. There isn’t. There are two
On Tuesday morning, I make teaching rounds, and sometimes the medical fellows say, ‘This patient is eighty years old. It’s hopeless.’ Absolutely not! It’s challenging, it’s not hopeless. You have to come up with something. You have to figure out a way to help them, because people must have hope to live.
Your father can commit suicide and you can suffer from a childhood so unspeakable that you push it to the furthest corners of your memory—and still some good can end up coming from that. “This is not an argument in favour of orphanhood and deprivation,” Brown writes, “but the existence of these eminent orphans does suggest that in certain circumstances a virtue can be made of necessity.
Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
Do you see the catastrophic error that the Germans made? They bombed London because they thought that the trauma associated with the Blitz would destroy the courage of the British people. In fact, it did the opposite. It created a city of remote misses, who were more courageous than they had ever been before. The Germans would have been better off not bombing London at all.
Losing a parent is not like having your house bombed or being set upon by a crazed mob. It’s worse. It’s not over in one terrible moment, and the injuries do not heal as quickly as a bruise or a wound. But what happens to children whose worst fear is realized—and then they discover that they are still standing? Couldn’t they also gain what Shuttlesworth and the Blitz remote misses gained—a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage?
“You have to realize, of course, that love doesn’t always save people you want to save. Somebody asked me once, weren’t you angry? And I said, no, I wasn’t, I understood her misery.
“There are things that either build you up or put you down. Jay and I have that in common.
Sometimes human survival demands that we commit harm in the cause of some greater good—and, Kogon writes, “the more tender one’s conscience, the more difficult it was to make such decisions.
Dyslexics compensate for their disability by developing other skills that—at times—can prove highly advantageous. Being bombed or orphaned can be a near-miss experience and leave you devastated. Or it can be a remote miss and leave you stronger. These are David’s opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable.
The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.
Rebellion and Authority became the blueprint for the war in Vietnam, and for how police departments dealt with civil unrest, and for how governments coped with terrorism. Its conclusion was simple: Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves “rationally,” that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly.…Consequently, influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, but rather a better understanding of what costs and benefits the individual or the group is concerned with, and how they are calculated. In other words, getting insurgents to behave is fundamentally a math problem.
Stella’s classroom, however, suggests something quite different: disobedience can also be a response to authority. If the teacher doesn’t do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.
And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.
You and I are sensitive to increased punishment, because you and I are people with a stake in society. But criminals are not.
A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive—and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.
The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.
It was not that the Viet Cong thought they were going to lose. It was that they did not think in terms of winning and losing at all—which was a profoundly different proposition.
An enemy who is indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all.
In David and Goliath, I’ve tried to persuade you to see the world as Konrad Kellen saw it—to look at the shepherd and the giant and understand where power and advantage really lie. It matters, in a hundred specific and practical ways. It affects the decisions we make as parents, the schools we choose to attend, and the way we fight wars and battle crime. It shapes the way we understand creativity and entrepreneurship and the way the oppressed seek to take on bullies and tyrants.
Understanding the power of the underdog requires an effort. It requires standing up to conventional wisdom.
By “giants,” I mean powerful opponents of all kinds—from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression.
Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
And the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate: it can open doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.
The reason King Saul is skeptical of David’s chances is that David is small and Goliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength.
What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.
Arreguín-Toft then asked the question slightly differently. What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as David did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent.
We think of underdog victories as improbable events: that’s why the story of David and Goliath has resonated so strongly all these years. But Arreguín-Toft’s point is that they aren’t at all. Underdogs win all the time. Why, then, are we so shocked every time a David beats a Goliath? Why do we automatically assume that someone who is smaller or poorer or less skilled is necessarily at a disadvantage?
Having lots of soldiers and weapons and resources—as the Turks did—is an advantage. But it makes you immobile and puts you on the defensive. Meanwhile, movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, and courage—which Lawrence’s men had in abundance—allowed them to do the impossible, namely, attack Aqaba from the east, a strategy so audacious that the Turks never saw it coming.
There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources—and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.
We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser. Part One of David and Goliath is an attempt to explore the consequences of that error.
The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time, underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the 202 lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe-to-toe with Goliath the conventional way 152 times—and lost 119 times.
Underdog strategies are hard.
To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice.
We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.
Most people would have shrunk in the face of that kind of criticism. Not Ranadivé. It was really random. I mean, my father had never played basketball before. Why should he care what the world of basketball thought of him? Ranadivé coached a team of girls who had no talent in a sport he knew nothing about. He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.
The story of Vivek Ranadivé and the Redwood City girls’ basketball team suggests that what we think of as an advantage and as a disadvantage is not always correct, that we mix the categories up.
How do you teach “work hard, be independent, learn the meaning of money” to children who look around themselves and realize that they never have to work hard, be independent, or learn the meaning of money? That’s why so many cultures around the world have a proverb to describe the difficulty of raising children in an atmosphere of wealth. In English, the saying is “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” The Italians say, “Dalle stelle alle stalle” (“from stars to stables”). In Spain it’s “Quien no lo tiene, lo hace; y quien lo tiene, lo deshace” (“he who doesn’t have it, does it, and he who has it, misuses it”). Wealth contains the seeds of its own destruction.
The man from Hollywood was not the parent he wanted to be, because he was too rich. Hotchkiss is not the school it wants to be, because its classes are too small. We all assume that being bigger and stronger and richer is always in our best interest. Vivek Ranadivé, a shepherd boy named David, and the principal of Shepaug Valley Middle School will tell you that it isn
Alcohol is not inherently good or bad or neutral. It starts out good, becomes neutral, and ends up bad.
The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all.
The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.
That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.
We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.
“You know, there’s something about solving a math problem that’s very satisfying,” Randolph said at one point, and an almost wistful look came over his face. “You start with a problem that you may not know how to solve, but you know there are certain rules you can follow and certain approaches you can take, and often during this process, the intermediate result is more complex than what you started with, and then the final result is simple. And there’s a certain joy in making that journey.
Conventional wisdom holds that a disadvantage is something that ought to be avoided—that it is a setback or a difficulty that leaves you worse off than you would be otherwise. But that is not always the case.
You have to squint a little bit and maybe read the sentence twice, and you probably wonder halfway through who on earth thought it was a good idea to print out the test this way. Suddenly you have to work to read the question. Yet all that extra effort pays off. As Alter says, making the questions “disfluent” causes people to “think more deeply about whatever they come across.
There are two possible interpretations for this fact. One is that this remarkable group of people triumphed in spite of their disability: they are so smart and so creative that nothing—not even a lifetime of struggling with reading—could stop them. The second, more intriguing, possibility is that they succeeded, in part, because of their disorder—that they learned something in their struggle that proved to be of enormous advantage. Would you wish dyslexia on your child? If the second of these possibilities is true, you just might.
“If I could read a lot faster, it would make a lot of things that I do easier,” Boies said. “There’s no doubt about that. But on the other hand, not being able to read a lot and learning by listening and asking questions means that I need to simplify issues to their basics. And that is very powerful, because in trial cases, judges and jurors—neither of them have the time or the ability to become an expert in the subject. One of my strengths is presenting a case that they can understand.
That’s “capitalization learning”: we get good at something by building on the strengths that we are naturally given.
Most of the learning that we do is capitalization learning. It is easy and obvious. If you have a beautiful voice and perfect pitch, it doesn’t take much to get you to join a choir. “Compensation learning,” on the other hand, is really hard.
But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.
An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer. That, too, is obvious.
But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, “agreeableness,” they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks—to do things that others might disapprove of.
Society frowns on disagreeableness. As human beings we are hardwired to seek the approval of those around us. Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.
As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Dyslexia doesn’t necessarily make people more open. Nor does it make them more conscientious (although it certainly might). But the most tantalizing possibility raised by the disorder is that it might make it a little bit easier to be disagreeable.
Dyslexia—in the best of cases—forces you to develop skills that might otherwise have lain dormant. It also forces you to do things that you might otherwise never have considered, like doing your own version of Kamprad’s disagreeable trip to Poland or hopping in the cab of someone you’ve never met and pretending to be someone you aren
Kamprad, in case you are wondering, is dyslexic.
And Gary Cohn? It turns out he was a really good trader, and it turns out that learning how to deal with the possibility of failure is really good preparation for a career in the business world. Today he is the president of Goldman Sachs.
The idea of desirable difficulty suggests that not all difficulties are negative. Being a poor reader is a real obstacle, unless you are David Boies and that obstacle turns you into an extraordinary listener, or unless you are Gary Cohn and that obstacle gives you the courage to take chances you would never otherwise have taken.
Too often, we make the same mistake as the British did and jump to the conclusion that there is only one kind of response to something terrible and traumatic. There isn’t. There are two
On Tuesday morning, I make teaching rounds, and sometimes the medical fellows say, ‘This patient is eighty years old. It’s hopeless.’ Absolutely not! It’s challenging, it’s not hopeless. You have to come up with something. You have to figure out a way to help them, because people must have hope to live.
Your father can commit suicide and you can suffer from a childhood so unspeakable that you push it to the furthest corners of your memory—and still some good can end up coming from that. “This is not an argument in favour of orphanhood and deprivation,” Brown writes, “but the existence of these eminent orphans does suggest that in certain circumstances a virtue can be made of necessity.
Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
Do you see the catastrophic error that the Germans made? They bombed London because they thought that the trauma associated with the Blitz would destroy the courage of the British people. In fact, it did the opposite. It created a city of remote misses, who were more courageous than they had ever been before. The Germans would have been better off not bombing London at all.
Losing a parent is not like having your house bombed or being set upon by a crazed mob. It’s worse. It’s not over in one terrible moment, and the injuries do not heal as quickly as a bruise or a wound. But what happens to children whose worst fear is realized—and then they discover that they are still standing? Couldn’t they also gain what Shuttlesworth and the Blitz remote misses gained—a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage?
“You have to realize, of course, that love doesn’t always save people you want to save. Somebody asked me once, weren’t you angry? And I said, no, I wasn’t, I understood her misery.
“There are things that either build you up or put you down. Jay and I have that in common.
Sometimes human survival demands that we commit harm in the cause of some greater good—and, Kogon writes, “the more tender one’s conscience, the more difficult it was to make such decisions.
Dyslexics compensate for their disability by developing other skills that—at times—can prove highly advantageous. Being bombed or orphaned can be a near-miss experience and leave you devastated. Or it can be a remote miss and leave you stronger. These are David’s opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable.
The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.
Rebellion and Authority became the blueprint for the war in Vietnam, and for how police departments dealt with civil unrest, and for how governments coped with terrorism. Its conclusion was simple: Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves “rationally,” that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly.…Consequently, influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, but rather a better understanding of what costs and benefits the individual or the group is concerned with, and how they are calculated. In other words, getting insurgents to behave is fundamentally a math problem.
Stella’s classroom, however, suggests something quite different: disobedience can also be a response to authority. If the teacher doesn’t do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.
And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.
You and I are sensitive to increased punishment, because you and I are people with a stake in society. But criminals are not.
A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive—and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.
The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.
It was not that the Viet Cong thought they were going to lose. It was that they did not think in terms of winning and losing at all—which was a profoundly different proposition.
An enemy who is indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all.
In David and Goliath, I’ve tried to persuade you to see the world as Konrad Kellen saw it—to look at the shepherd and the giant and understand where power and advantage really lie. It matters, in a hundred specific and practical ways. It affects the decisions we make as parents, the schools we choose to attend, and the way we fight wars and battle crime. It shapes the way we understand creativity and entrepreneurship and the way the oppressed seek to take on bullies and tyrants.
Understanding the power of the underdog requires an effort. It requires standing up to conventional wisdom.