Success is, in fact, more often than not, a function of some sort of absence.
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“Success in all endeavors requires the absence of specific qualities: 1) To succeed in crime requires absence of empathy. 2) To succeed in banking you need absence of shame at hiding risks. 3) To succeed in school requires absence of common sense. 4) To succeed in economics requires absence of understanding of probability, risk, and second-order effects. 5) To succeed in journalism requires an inability to think about matters that have even an infinitesimally small chance of being relevant next January.”—Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We often imagine that people who are exceptionally good at something are endowed with special strengths, extraordinary talents, or rare virtues. However, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb quite rightly maintains, this isn’t always (or even usually) the case. Success is, in fact, more often than not, a function of some sort of absence.
But I’ve long since noticed that these very same people frequently fail to see a great deal that the rest of us mere mortals do see.
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Success at seeing through camouflage is a case in point. We now know that there’s an upside to colorblindness: the colorblind can see through many kinds of camouflage. Because they’re not distracted by colors, they can often see the contours of a thing—it’s outline—with unusual clarity. Even so, despite this upside, being colorblind is, on balance, a net handicap to the colorblind individual. They’re missing out on a great deal.
I’ve always been amazed by people who know how to cut through the crap with ease, people with extremely well developed bullshit meters, people who are exceptionally good at discerning the real motives behind actions, people who always seem to know what’s really going on. People, in short, who are exceptionally cynical. But I’ve long since noticed that these very same people frequently fail to see a great deal that the rest of us mere mortals do see.
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These are people who can put on and take off “cynical glasses” more or less at will.
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Cynics often sneeringly maintain that whatever they can’t see or experience isn’t real (e.g., true love, genuine altruism, empathy, divinity, spirituality, transcendence, communion with nature, etc.). And this leads me to suspect that those who are especially good at seeing through bullshit pay dearly for their gift. I suspect that being able to see past nuance comes at a cost. The ability to rapidly reduce complicated moral questions into simple either/or propositions is probably a function of an absence. To wit: the moral clarity of most cynics is probably a function of some sort of emotional colorblindness.
Of course there’s another kind of cynic, a rarer kind, which, for lack of a better term, I’ll call the occasional cynic. These are people who can put on and take off “cynical glasses” more or less at will. Cynicism is, for them, merely a way of looking at things, one perspective among many. They can even, at times, look at something from a number of different perspectives at once, much as the mystic philosopher Martin Buber contemplates a tree inI and Thou (1923):
“I contemplate a tree. I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground. I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air—and the growing itself in its darkness. I can assign it to a species . . . . I can overcome its uniqueness . . . . But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. . . . This does not require me to forego any of the modes of contemplation. There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number included and inseparably fused.”
By John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2nd edition)
This post originally appeared on Committing Sociology. Reprinted with permission.
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