Bank robber rings, drug cartels, financial fraudsters, Cheetah extinction events, teen suicides, racial discrimination, college admissions fraud, the opiod crisis …you‘d be forgiven for thinking this was Netflix’s new roster for the year end. Until, that is, you realise this is only the index of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest work Revenge of the Tipping Point.
It is a sub-genre that has become characteristic of the writer. An intensely readable world of sociological occurrences that beg an explanation and get one. His unmistakable signature style is ever present with a buffet of clues that are meshed together with the storyteller’s favourite glue - a sense of searching suspense and silken synthesis.
Gladwell began, as most feature writers do, as the explainer of socio-cultural phenomena. From there he evolved into a storyteller of modern ideas to the current curator of things overlooked and unseen his podcast (Revisionist History) often professes.
Revenge is also a masterclass in marketing. By positioning it as a ‘forensic investigation’ of social epidemics, the author creates a self-interrogative revisiting of his first hit The Tipping Point. Written a quarter of a century ago, it sparked a rash of mentions that used it as an explanation and answer for how things had become the way they were across a number of fields. Of these, the inexplicable crash in New York’s crime rates captivated conversationalists and policymakers alike. The ‘broken windows’ theory was born. The idea that coming down harshly on even small misdemeanours (like a broken window) by the police would send a strong signal and deter greater crimes pervaded the popular imagination.
This is paired with Gladwell’s unexpected modesty in willing to challenge his own theories despite selling millions of copies. It is the equivalent of allowing us as readers a peek into a literary confessional box.
Stories as puzzles
Along the way, we are treated to a feast of stories positioned as puzzles. An entrenched but uncommon anti-vaccine stance unique to a chain of schools, a rampant money-laundering racket, a wave of daylight bank robberies. Disparate phenomena that Gladwell’s suggests are all driven by the same deep, unremitting and invisible forces. The identification and control of these forces, he suggests, grants those who can steer them an unnatural and often dangerous power.
One of these forces is a set of unspoken beliefs that permeate a community or sub-set of the population. An ‘Overstory’ - a term borrowed from the world of Forestry that describes the upper canopy of foliage that influences everything below it. From this percolate behaviours that, aided by social pressure and unspoken group norms, rapidly sucks into its vortex, entire sections of a community.
The ‘Overstory’ combines with two other aspects to act as a propulsive catalyst for social epidemics and the spread of everything from narcotics to the Novel Corona virus. Intersect this Overstory with a minuscule number of ‘superspreaders’ that act as an unstoppable force, throw in just the right proportion of participants and you get the famed ‘Tipping Point’ or threshold for social phenomena to spread uncontrollably. A reshaping of these variables can either counteract them or cause them to cascade.
The Covid era saw Gladwell revisit himself as a podcast host and founder of Pushkin Industries, a podcast production firm. This marked his foray into audiobooks like the Bomber Mafia and the creation of successive seasons of the engrossing podcast ‘Revisionist History’. In Revenge of, his penchant for podcasting peeks through in a writing style often punctuated with conversational asides. (Of course it does)
Journalistic influence
Gladwell’s initial experience as a New Yorker features journalist is also on full display. (I think you can guess what happens next.)
Each of the three main sections of the book presents a racy mix of unrelated artefacts juxtaposed and arrayed together. The precipitate reads like a living history of the world around us. The equivalent of a Jason Bourne-like journalist popping up at the site of various American cities to observe inexplicable occurrences manifesting unbidden and mysteriously. Different ideas ricochet around the pages before being reconciled to reveal a new framework with which to view the world.
Gladwell’s critics often rebuff his literary outings as over-simplifications that borrow obscure theories from social science and turn them into unreliable inferences. These reductive narratives risk invariably sacrificing rigorous examination and nuance for tantalisingly entertaining cocktail party pseudo-intellectualism.
His most prominent promotion of his latest book seems to grapple this allegation with a counter-intuitive manoeuvre. The Broken Windows theory was an erroneous conclusion he admits in his latest TED Talk. It may well have unjustifiably fanned the racial discrimination and targeting of young black men in New York. As a mea culpa it is a bold act of contrition. As a marketing move, it is brilliant. Who wouldn’t like to see a rare admission of misjudgment in a world where powerful celebrities will, more often than not, double-down on their assertions even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
On the other side of that oft-cited critique of Gladwell’s work are the millions of readers that have made him a bestselling author repeatedly. His books sweep the most compelling ideas born in the social sciences out from under the shadowy preserve of ivory tower academia and make them accessible. Looked at this way, books like Revenge rescue new ideas from the wasteful irrelevance they are so often embalmed in.
Under his pen, these arcane theories are turned into the ingredients of a detective novel. Smoothed with his newfound love for spoken stories (podcasting), the immensely readable results suddenly turn information into engaging and refined rhetoric that has resonated over a nearly three-decade long career. The result can sometimes look suspiciously like a set of facts moulded into a pre-decided ‘grand unified theory’.
What Gladwell cannot be accused of in his body of work or his latest outing, is encouraging the kind of apathy that avoids rethinking outmoded ideologies and mindsets. The cognitive jolt and the neural nudge Revenge of the.. provides, stimulates a much-needed engagement with social phenomena. The alternative would be to succumb to an intellectual inertia that risks strengthening our most stubborn prejudices instead of rectifying them.
(The reviewer is a corporate executive. These views are personal)
Check out the book on Amazon.
