The Thought Leader
The International New York Times | 16 Dec. 2013
Little boys and girls in ancient Athens grew up wanting to be
philosophers. In Renaissance Florence they dreamed of becoming
Humanists. But now a new phrase and a new intellectual paragon has
emerged to command our admiration: The Thought Leader.
Josh Haner/The New York Times | David Brooks
The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht
concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global
Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for
those not invited. Month after month, he gets to be a discussion
facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like
to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room
thinking bitter thoughts.
Many people wonder how they too can become Thought Leaders and what the life cycle of one looks like.
In fact, the calling usually starts young. As a college student, the
future Thought Leader is bathed in attention. His college application
essay, “I Went to Panama to Teach the Natives About Math but They Ended
Up Teaching Me About Life,” is widely praised by guidance counselors. On
campus he finds himself enmeshed in a new social contract: Young people
provide their middle-aged professors with optimism and flattery, and
the professors provide them with grade inflation. He is widely
recognized for his concern for humanity. (He spends spring break
unicycling across Thailand while reading to lepers.)
Not armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some, he
launches off into the great struggle for attention. At first his prose
is upbeat and smarmy, with a peppy faux sincerity associated with
professional cheerleading.
Within a few years, though, his mood has shifted from smarm to snark.
There is no writer so obscure as a 26-year-old writer. So he is suddenly
consumed by ambition anxiety — the desperate need to prove that he is
superior in sensibility to people who are superior to him in status.
Soon he will be writing blog posts marked by coruscating contempt for
extremely anodyne people: “Kelly Clarkson: Satan or Merely His Spawn?”
Of course the writer in this unjustly obscure phase will develop the
rabid art of being condescending from below. Of course he will confuse
his verbal dexterity for moral superiority. Of course he will seek to
establish his edgy in-group identity by trying to prove that he was
never really that into Macklemore.
Fortunately, this snarky phase doesn’t last. By his late 20s, he has
taken a job he detests in a consulting firm, offering his colleagues
strategy memos and sexual tension. By his early 30s, his soul has been
so thoroughly crushed he’s incapable of thinking outside of
consultantese. It’s not clear our Thought Leader started out believing
he would write a book on the productivity gains made possible by
improved electronic medical records, but having written such a book he
can now travel from medical conference to medical conference making
presentations and enjoying the rewards of being T.S.A. Pre.
By now the Thought Leader uses the word “space” a lot — as in, “Earlier
in my career I spent a lot of time in the abject sycophancy space, but
now I’m devoting more of my energies to the corporate responsibility
space.”
The middle-aged Thought Leader’s life has hit equilibrium, composed of
work, children and Bikram yoga. The desire to be snarky mysteriously
vanishes with the birth of the first child. His prose has never been so
lacking in irony and affect, just the clean translucence of selling out.
He’s succeeding. Unfortunately, the happy moment when you are getting
just the right amount of attention passes, and you don’t realize you
were in this moment until after it is gone.
The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention
comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity. By
his late 50s, the Thought Leader is a lion of his industry, but he is
bruised by snarky comments from new versions of his formerly jerkish
self. Of course, this is when he utters his cries for civility and good
manners, which are really just pleas for mercy to spare his tender
spots.
In the end, though, a lifetime of bullet points are replaced by
foreboding. Toward the end of his life the Thought Leader is regularly
engaging in a phenomenon known as the powerless lunch. He and another
formerly prominent person gather to have a portentous conversation of no
importance whatsoever. In the fading of the light, he is gravely
concerned about the way everything is going to hell.
Still, one rarely finds an octogenarian with status anxiety. He is
beyond the battle for attention. Death approaches. Cruelly, it smells
like reverence.
4 comments:
food for thought!
Theary baby!
Whatta hell you're posting this crab her for!?....Please post politics not crab that un-interesting,alright darling!????
++++++Love you+++++
Kmenhwahtt
8:32am, oh, want ms. theary to post more politics so people like you can fight khmer? shame on you, hater!
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TO ALL KHMER,
PLEASE TELL HUN SEN TO STEP DOWN ON HIS FACEBOOK PAGE.
https://fr-ca.facebook.com/pages/Samdech-Hun-Sen-Cambodian-Prime-Minister/111975152184324
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