Playing To Win
Educating Extremists
Bad for Strategy, Bad for Society
The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly by Luigi Mangione, has observers perplexed. How could a seemingly well-adjusted, exceedingly well-educated Ivy League graduate allegedly gun down a father of two in cold blood? They are asking the wrong question, which I will discuss in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) called Educating Extremists: Bad for Strategy, Bad for Society. All previous PTW/PI can be found here.
The Expectation
The expectation for murders of this sort is that they are perpetrated by loners (most of whom are unintelligent and/or undereducated), angry at being cast out of mainstream society and seeking revenge. Often, the killer has lots of signs of mental illness to go along with that profile.
This is the opposite: a class valedictorian of the prestigious Gilman high school and double-degree graduate of University of Pennsylvania with lots of admiring friends (allegedly) murdered an unsuspecting man by shooting him in the back?
It is not a case of ‘despite’ but ‘because.’ The formal education system of America (and elsewhere I am sure, but I will focus on the education system that produced Luigi Mangione) educates extremists — and the more elite the education, the more effective it is at doing so.
The Modern Formal Education System
The modern formal education system is obsessed with science because science has advanced the world in many important and valuable ways. Science, in turn, is obsessed with the truth — determining what is the right answer so that we can declare anything other than that answer to be wrong, and act on what is right.
But, as I have written about before in Harvard Business Review and in this series, the father of science, Greek philosopher Aristotle, issued a warning about use of the method he created. By his description, his scientific method is only good for the part of the world where things cannot be other than they are. These are primarily the physical parts of the world where a set of laws govern always and everywhere. For example, objects accelerate towards the ground at 32 ft/s2 because the law of gravity governs always and everywhere. We are all going to die someday because of the law of human mortality. In this part of the world, you can be right and declare others to be wrong if they don’t agree with you. Though watch out if you are Ptolemy or Newton because someone may come along and demonstrate that you weren’t entirely right.
But that part is a small chunk of the world. The other part of the world, according to Aristotle, is the one in which things can be other than they are. That is the world of business, economics, politics — and pretty much every field that involves human being interacting with one another. These parts of the world are forever changing. In this part of the world, no truth about the future can be discerned today — no matter how much data we crunch because there is no data about the future, which may be different than the past. In that part of the world, the father of science warned against using science, and instead encouraged us to imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made.
Modern educators, because of their science obsession, ignore Aristotle’s warning and teach ever more subjects as having right/true answers versus wrong/false ones. This pushes students toward becoming extremists. Students feel compelled to get to the right answer — and then declare all other answers to be wrong. And others holding one of those wrong answers become seen in their eyes as either ill-informed (i.e. stupid) or ill-intentioned (i.e. evil).
The Elite Education System
The elite education system produces an accentuated version of this phenomenon. It enrolls the extreme right tail of the general intelligence (G) distribution and convinces its members that their super-high intelligence combined with their elite education makes them totally right beyond a shadow of a doubt. They are so smart and so well educated that when they arrive at an answer, it must be right.
I have this view not because I am jealous of people with elite educations; it is because I experienced the most elite of educations — an undergrad concentrating in economics from Harvard College (’79) and an MBA from Harvard Business School (’81).
During my time there, Harvard was the unquestioned #1 in the world for economics. In four of the first seven years (1969–1975) of the existence of the Nobel Prize in Economics, a Harvard PhD and/or Professor won it. The department was singularly a neo-classical Keynesian economics shop. But an alternative view of economics was emerging in Chicago, where the father of the monetarist school, Milton Friedman, would win the Nobel in 1976 (and eight more Chicago economists in the subsequent twenty years versus two for Harvard). That notwithstanding, we were taught that neo-classical Keynesian economics was 100% right. Our reading lists contained a few articles by monetarists, but from what I could tell that was only to be mocked and shown (using Keynesian logic) to be completely specious and beneath contempt.
By my time at Harvard, economics had migrated from the philosophical discipline of pioneers like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Malthus to a faux science with right and wrong theories and answers. It has gotten so faux that for a forecast of next year’s economic growth, I would prefer fifty randomly-selected American adults (as long as the list excluded anyone who had ever taken a course in economics) over the fifty so-called Blue Chip economists — if you want more on that, see my recounting of the pathetic track record of the Blue Chip forecasters in Chapter Four of When More is Not Better.
So, I was taught to be an extremist economist by the most elite economics department in the world.
Then I went across the Charles River for rinse and repeat in the discipline of business at the #1 business school in the world. To be fair, it wasn’t as extremist as my education at the College, but I was reminded repeatedly that I was among the best and brightest in the field and that if I employed the tools and techniques taught at the world’s greatest business school, I could be confident that my answers would be fully correct.
And for the entire six-year period, I was assured repeatedly that my views were extremely important because I was such an elite individual (which of course brings to mind Ali G’s hilarious tongue-in-cheek description in his 2004 Class Day speech of graduating Harvard seniors as: “You is the most cleverest students in America.”)
I graduated into an economy featuring the then new-to-the-world phenomenon of ‘stagflation,’ which was supposedly impossible according to the economic theory I had been taught. At that point, I realized that I had to relearn economics on my own and read a wide variety of economic theories to piece together a more useful understanding, one that needed to be forever tested and refined as the world changed.
Polarization
There is much despair about the polarization of views in America, as if it is a plague visited on us from above. Nope. We created it, nurtured it, and built it. We taught our students to get the right and true answer by scientific means and then to defend it against all the stupid/evil people who think otherwise, and if necessary, take extreme actions. And the most extreme indoctrination of extremism occurs at the elite educational institutions. On this point, I have created an Addendum to this piece with a case example of the impact of elite education on extremism.
Bad for Strategy
This is all bad for strategy, which is part of the can be other than it is world. In business, things are consistently other than they were in the past. Change never stops. In this world, it is impossible to create a great strategy for the future by analyzing the past and doing what the analysis says. Most strategy is useless, in substantial part because the strategy discipline is disproportionately filled with people from elite educational institutions who are inclined to be certain that their brilliant scientific analyses make their strategies unquestionably right.
Bad for Society
It is equally bad for society broadly. It is always possible to marshal faux scientific data to support your answer and then dismiss answers other than your own as ‘unscientific’ and therefore dangerously wrong, even if they crunched other data in equally scientific ways. Milton Friedman wasn’t looking at nothing. Nor were the subsequent eight Chicago Nobel economists. They were looking at other data and making other inferences.
But extremists don’t pay attention to any of that. They believe that they are right, and, if in possession of an elite education, that they are super smart.
If you want to see extremism in vivid color, just read the Mangione manifesto. He sees himself as absolutely, positively right. He stated his facts and drew his conclusions without a hint of reflection. There is no other interpretation but his — because he was educated to be an extremist. And as an extremist, he felt no qualms or remorse about shooting an unarmed man in the back — because he declared his target to be evil.
Let me be clear. This in no way justifies a single iota of what he (allegedly) did. It was criminal and morally abhorrent. There are legitimate and illegitimate ways of settling differences in an advanced society and his was clearly the latter.
Does it Have to Be This Way?
No, it doesn’t. The education system has in its power the ability to reverse polarization. It just needs to train students to do something productive — as opposed to utterly destructive — with opposing views. I have written two books (the conceptual foundations, the practical tools) and numerous articles on the topic.
I try to never give advice that I don’t utilize myself and did so when I interrupted my career to serve as Dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto for 15 years as public service to my home country. I made it the goal of the school to produce the opposite of extremists by teaching what I call Integrative Thinking. I sought to produce integrators who looked at opposing views as gold mines of logic and data missing from their own view, and to utilize those insights to build creative resolutions of the tension between opposing views and models.
Students loved what we labeled A New Way to Think and flocked to Rotman from around the world. But professors had zero interest — and I mean zero — and eliminated it from the curriculum as soon as possible after I stepped down.
Happily, it still exists in an initiative called I-Think that I sponsored and now Chair. It teaches Integrative Thinking to K-12 students. Thousands of kids each year, as young as kindergarten, learn and love it. By watching them each year, I have come to believe that thinking across opposing models is a natural inclination that we beat out of students by the time they get to middle school. It doesn’t have to be so.
Practitioner Insights
Of course, I shouldn’t paint with a universal brush. Some educators don’t attempt to train extremists — some proportion of those even dedicate themselves to the opposite. Good for you! And some students reject extremist indoctrination — for some reason I did.
But I can confidently say that those teachers and students are in the minority. Most readers of this series were likely trained to be extremists to one extent or another. I was — for sure and big time. The best thing you can do is recognize the extremist aspects of your training — and realize that within yourself, you have all the power necessary to be better.
You can get started by auditing the truth every single time you are presented with it. The first question to ask is whether the truth in question pertains to a part of the world in which things cannot be other than they are. Just ask yourself the question: am I sure that nothing about the context in which this truth operates will ever change? My estimate is that it will be the case less than 10% of the time.
If your answer is yes, then you still need to audit the method by which the person came to this truth. Was the method truly scientific? If it was, you can safely believe in the truth. My estimate is that it will be the case less than half of the time. (For those counting, we are down the truth being true 5% of the times it is asserted.)
If the answer to your first question is no, then reject the idea of the truth because in the part of the world that can be other than it is, there is no truth about the future that can be discerned today — other than that there is no truth. There can and always will be forecasts about the future, opinions about the future, notions about the future, imagination about the future. And those are all fodder for figuring out what path to take into the future to create a better one.
If another person’s point of view is in opposition to yours, explore it — not to demolish it, but to gain nuggets from it. The more it conflicts with your point of view, the more likely they are to be golden.
Work on building your skills in mining for nuggets and working to generate creative resolutions of tensions — to imagine new possibilities for the future that are worth trying. That is the only way to advance the world in the part of it that can be another way. And that is a hell of a lot better than shooting someone in the back!
