By: Cameron MacKenzie
I’m a lit nerd, so lately I’ve been reading a few books by V.S. Naipaul, who died a couple of years ago. Naipaul was a British writer who won the Nobel Prize back in 2001. He was, by many accounts, an abhorrent human being, but a masterful writer. He’s dead now, so his personality matters a little less. But I think that his death marked the end of a certain type of public figure.
Naipaul was old school. He believed literature was Serious, and that Serious Men did it. And to effectively practice that occupation, the Serious Man had to reflect, loudly and often, on the State of Things. Naipaul, in his books, interviews, essays, reviews, and sundry public announcements, consistently told society what it was, where it went wrong, and how it could be better. Writers don’t do this anymore, and if they do, nobody cares. But when I ask myself who gets everyone's attention with their proscriptions for society now, my heart sinks a little bit.
For one thing, it’s not any kind of artist. It’s not any religious figure, and it’s certainly not anyone who participates in the bloodsport of politics. I think you’ve got to say that the only figures in our present culture that inspire both respect and fear, the only figures that tell us who we are and tell us who we can be, are businessmen. It’s Musk, Buffett, Dimon, Gundlach, Bezos. It’s Mark and Sergei, Larry and Satya.
These are the guys (and they’re all guys–wonder why) who can look deep into our souls (or search histories) and know us for who we truly are. And we listen. We listen because for some reason we like this figure, we expect this figure, and we need this figure. Joseph Campbell used to say that if you want to understand what a culture values, look at the tallest buildings. First we built churches, then we built statehouses, then we built banks. Of course, outside of Dimon none of these guys work at a bank anymore, so perhaps we've ascended to a higher plane of subservience, where technocrats promise world-changing advancements so long as we refuse to tax them and still buy everything they sell. That seems to have been the case now for over a decade, but this iteration of the jig might just be up.
In the past year or so the attacks on these men have intensified to a surprising degree. Zuckerberg has become a pariah, Bezos a laughingstock, Musk a clown, Buffett, an old man who's lost his fastball. The Peter Isherwell character played by Mark Rylance in the recent film Don't Look Up pokes a huge hole in the messianic-nerd-narcissist figure that has somehow come to dominate our collective trust since Steve Jobs put on a turtleneck. Satire may very well be the tool of the oppressed, but we should start to ask ourselves how we got so far down this rabbithole that we're only now beginning to question the power of these obviously silly men.
When I think about Naipaul now, when I think about artists and those formerly important Serious Male Writers, I’ve got to say that they burned up their own discipline. Thanks to their arrogance, their overarching pronouncements, their over-intellectualized diagnoses of society, people stopped listening.
Of course the men in charge now have something those writers have never had: money. The bigger question for us might be whether we will continue to allow these men to tell us what the future holds when the market, as it will inevitably do, turns south.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.