Malcolm Gladwell on The Virtues of Obnoxiousness - The New Yorker Festival

here it's a real pleasure to be here and see you all I see some know your faces some of you I know I've been to one of my talks more than once which is a wonderful and courageous thing I'm reminded of Oscar Wilde's famous quip about remarriage that it was the triumph of Hope over experience suspect it applies here usually my parents come to this talk they are not here this year for a good reason you if you bestow your genes upon a child and you raise that child and you interact with that child for many years and then you attend seven or eight consecutive of that child's talks at The New Yorker festival I think you come to a place where you say I know where this is going and I think they I think they pretty much figured out what was going to happen so decided to stay home in Canada so their sickness went out and I had said I know that on the on the program had said that I was going to discuss the virtues of obnoxiousness I am NOT going to discuss the virtues of obnoxiousness as you know I it is a tradition of mine with the New Yorker festival that what I talk about never has anything in common with what I said I was going to talk about for a practical reason first of all and that is that they asked you to give this title like months ago I don't know it's like actually what I was going to eat that morning I mean how would I know in January what I'm going to talk about in and the other reason of course is that um it's really fun to come up with titles that sound like they would be interesting talks they have to be you know just kind of wacky enough that you want to show up but plausible enough that you think it would be a profitable use of your time and I I just love this notion of the verb I don't know what the virtues of obnoxiousness really are what they would be but at such time as I figure out what they are I would be more than happy to share them with all of you some future year so we're not talking about that we're instead going to talk about this question a question that's very much of the moment which is why do people people love in positions of apparent weakness choose to do battle with Authority choose to rebel to fight right why do they make that momentous decision and to examine this question I would like to tell the story of a woman named Alva Smith who is one of the great unsung heroes of the 20th century a woman who plays an extraordinarily important role in the history of the Suffragette movement in the beginnings of the 20th century and the question is why does she do that because on the surface of it Alva Smith is just about the most unlikely candidate for a radical that you could ever have and so that's the puzzle that I want to try and address today which is what compelled this unlikely figure to take up such an extraordinary cause and hopefully by answering that question we can gain some insight into all the other unlikely people who were in the last over the course of the last year have taken up these extraordinary causes might who have chosen to likewise do battle with Authority so Alva Smith actually has three names Alva Belmont is the name that she dies with Alva Vanderbilt is the name that she is most famous for and Alva Smith is the name she was born with and that's a good place to start she was she was born in Mobile Alabama her father was a cotton and when she's very young just before the Civil War her family moves to New York City where they fall on hard times and her father actually dies now Alva as a child was a force of nature she was this obstreperous headstrong child she would throw fits she was I'm governor bull she would whenever she felt that some little boy was looking down on her condescending to her she would fly into a rage and pummel the boy with her with her fists she was um she was very short she had a very severe face and really long hair one of her friends in an attempt to be nice said that she resembled a Pekinese I would say to the contrary that she resembled a pitbull I think that's more accurate description but she she certainly has the heart of a pitbull she is this kind of piece of work and she's a woman with enormous ambitions for herself and she realizes very early on as she's growing up in this poor but gentle family in New York City that in order to realize any of her ambitions she's going to need money so she starts to scour the eligible men of New York and her eye falls upon a young man named Willie Vanderbilt who is handsome and charming and a great athlete and a great bum devant and also happens to be the grandson of the richest man in the world Commodore Vanderbilt and she snags him and they get married and she buries him a daughter called Consuelo and then she sets out to put all of her husband's money and her own considerable energy in the cause of being the most conspicuous consumer in the history of conspicuous consumption and for those of you who have lived through New York in the last ten years you know that is a considerable accomplishment the first thing she does is she buys a hundred acres on Long Island and commissions an architect to build something nice in shingles by the water and then she decides that she needs a townhouse and so she buys the block of Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street and builds a house that in today's money would have cost about half a billion dollars and it's modeled on a French chateau it's very I wouldn't call it tasteful in fact in most of the biographies devoted to Alva Vanderbilt much of the attention is simply devoted to the house that she puts up they turn into essentially real-estate pornography I'm in short order but her Fifth Avenue house I love this phrase was described by one such historian as it was not a house so much as a weapon a battering ram to crash through the gates of society and then here's another favorite thing of mine this is a description of the interior of her Fifth Avenue house everywhere was everything walls of red African marble of stamped leather walls hung with blue silk brocade with red velvet embroidered with leaves flowers and butterflies enriched with cut crystal and precious stones ceilings of mahogany a bronze of colored glass of bamboo wainscoting of rosewood inlaid with mother-of-pearl and brass ebony inlaid with ivory polished ebony inlaid with satin wood and oriental Elizabethan English Renaissance French and Victorian touches in crowded rooms bursting with bronze stained glass marble mosaics and phrases then she decides that she wants a yacht and so she builds the largest yacht in the world ever 285 feet long and she calls it the Alva of course I don't know why no one got that then she wants a country cottage and she builds one in Newport Rhode Island and to give you a sense of it I won't go into any more detail you've got had enough I think but to give you a sense of it in order to construct this cottage she has to build a 10-ton derrick in Rhode Island Harbor because she's importing 500,000 and cubic feet of Italian white marble by the way for the facade so now she has the country house the city house the cottage and the yacht and she turns her eye to her daughter Consuela now Consuelo is this shy girl and Alva turns on her with every bit of her ferocity and decides that she wants to create something great of Consuelo and she raises her according to the very highest of expectations she is only allowed to speak French to her nanny she has to recite long poems and German she has to wear a corset with like a steel rod in it to make sure that her posture is absolutely perfect if she makes the slightest mistake in public she is ridiculed by Alva and as Alva grows into adolescence I'm sorry as Consuelo grows into adolescence Alva gets the idea that she wants her daughter to marry into English royalty now this is not at the time an odd notion in fact this was happening all the time in the late 19th century the wealthy heiresses of American robber barons were being married off in droves to the penurious sons of of English aristocrats in fact that process was known at a time as cash for class and so there was hundreds of these things but in typical form Alva decides sets her sights on the biggest prize of all which is the most eligible young man in England at a time who was Charles Richard John Spencer Churchill otherwise known as Sonny the ninth Duke of Marlborough the first cousin of Winston Churchill the ancestor of princess died and the heir to one of the largest private homes in the world Blenheim Palace the main house of which covers seven acres and which made Alba's monstrosity on Fifth Avenue looked like a hotel room but Abba goes to a dinner party with the Duke and she discovers that Lenin Palace is falling apart and the Duke doesn't have money to fix it and she sees an opening and nothing she realizes could be a better match for her daughter Consuelo now there are two problems with this idea the first problem is that sunny is not sunny he is in fact a deeply miserable man and to give you some sense of his character his second wife Emily Duncan used to sleep with a pistol by her bed hi in case sunny were to come to her in the middle of the night the second problem is that Consuelo is in love with someone else she's in love with a young man named Winthrop Rutherford or wintry as he is known and he is an Adonis he is this handsome charming polo-playing bon vivant and he comes from one of the very best families in York and he meets Consuelo on a cruise to India and he fall in love he begins to woo her and on her 18th birthday she receives in a from footman her footman a single white rose and she knows it's from from wintry and then they go on a bicycle trip up Riverside Drive and of course Alva is along as a as a chaperone but as they come to one of those curves the two of them glanced each other and bike on ahead and Alva realizes something as a foot and bikes as fast as her little legs can carry her but when she finally turns the corner and sees them she sees that both of their faces are flushed and she realizes that something is happening that is standing in the way of her grand plans for Consuelo and so the next morning she ships Consuelo off to Paris and every letter that wintry sends she intercepts and destroys and then when the summer is over they go to to finish off the season in Rhode Island and wintry comes to Rhode Island to try and meet with Consuelo but Alva locks her daughter up like Rapunzel in the castle I won't let her out unless she's being accompanied by by some flotilla of armed guards and finally Consuelo is just having a kind of breakdown and she can't believe what's happening she's being denied the man she loves and so she summons up her courage and goes and she goes up the long stairwell along grand staircase to her mother's room and she enters her mother's opulent bedroom with with the cherub sconces holding the letter Hey and she says I'm engaged to marry wintry I have a right to choose the man I love and her mother just starts to scream at her and says you know you will be a duchess do you understand what that means and Consuelo goes silent and Alber interprets this correctly as as a sign of rebellion and she flies into an even greater rage because no one ever stands up to Alva Vanderbilt and she starts to scream at her daughter and to summon every invective that she can against wintry and she describes him every name in the book until finally Consuela realizes there's no hope there's never she's never going to be able to marry wintry and she concedes and on November 6 1895 New York City witnesses the greatest wedding has ever had before or since the marriage of one of the of an heir to one of the greatest fortunes in human history - one of the most powerful aristocrats in all of England and Alva hires 80 decorators to fill the st. Thomas's church on Fifth Avenue with with flowers and she puts on this blue satin sky-blue satin dress with a border of Russian sable and she has a bouquet of white roses and she marches up to the front of the aisle sons are by her side and you can imagine the scene I mean this is every single important famous person in America and England is there I mean this is a the paparazzi are out in force that the crowds are so large the police have to hold them back of every reporter in the country is there and there is a love at the front of the church standing there resplendent in this moment of kind of of Pride and power and she waits and she waits one minute then she waits five minutes since she waits ten minutes and Consuelo does not appear and then fifteen minutes and the crowd is getting restless and why isn't Consuelo appearing because she's at home sobbing inconsolably in the arms of her father and finally get her into shape and they clean up her makeup and they put her into the carriage and they take her to st. Thomas's church and she is marched up the aisle and the bishop pronounces the man and wife and elbow whisks the couple immediately to a back room where they sign a contract that guarantees an immediate cash payment of 2.5 million dollars to the Duke and an annual stipend of $100,000 and they climb into a carriage to go off on their honeymoon and the Duke turns to Consuelo and he says I don't love you I've never loved you I married you for your money you have two responsibilities to fix Blenheim Palace and to bear me an heir right and Consuelo at that moment turns back and looks and she sees her mother standing on a sidewalk in front of the church with a tear of joy going down her going down her cheeks because it's the greatest moment of Alba's life right the daughter of a down at the heels cotton merchants from Mobile Alabama has now married off her daughter into the highest reaches of English aristocracy this is her moment of greatest triumph or so she thinks because Alva story is about to get very interesting now I think you can see from that that Alva is a very unlikely radical right exceedingly rich people whose main indulgence is building enormous houses and marrying their daughters off to a mature royalty do not generally end up as insurgents of one kind or another put this in perspective this would be like if you know 10 years from now we wake up and we discover that Kim Kardashian is the head of the ACLU I mean it's it's unlikely right or if Julia Roberts were to disappear and suddenly turn up in Peru as a member of The Shining Path these are not things that we imagine happen in our lifetime it's a little bit of a stretch so how do we account for it well before I return to the actual story of Alva I think it's very useful to spend some time trying to understand the kind of theoretical basis for rebellion well for why people choose to turn and fight as opposed to be compliant with Authority now that's an enormous question obviously but the standard answer that has been given for a very long time by legal theorists and psychologists and sociologists is that Authority creates obedience through the use of deterrence right so if I if a country or a person in a position of authority or institution wants to get people to obey their Authority or obey the law what they do is they punish them for dissipate for obedience disobedience and reward them for obedience right deterrence assumes we are rational actors that what we do before we choose to behave is we weigh the relative costs and benefits is the is whatever I can gain by disobedience greater than the cost associated with our than the than the cost associated with disobedience right and if we think that on the cost is too great we don't disagree don't disobey our criminal justice system is completely organized around a principle of deterrence we observed that people lots of people were dealing drugs and so we created a penalty for drug dealing and when drug dealing persisted we raised those penalties right and when it still persisted we raised the penalties even greater our assumption was at a certain point the penalty associated with drug dealing will be so great that people will cease that activity that is classic deterrence thinking it also applies to countries if you're Israel and you're being attacked by people are on Hamas is shelling you right you respond by punishing Hamas and if they continue to fire at your settlements with missiles or what-have-you then you strike back even harder and your assumption is that there is a point where Hamas will stop fighting because the costs of fighting are too great now the flaws are not thinking should be obvious right we have now raised penalties for drug dealing to the point where you can spend more time in jail for dealing crack than you can for killing somebody in other words it's really really hard to imagine that we could raise the penalties any higher than we have and yet if you go into any bad neighborhood in any major city today you can still buy drugs okay not working and if you go to the Middle East you will find that to this day there are all kinds of people who continue to do bad things to Israel despite the fact that Israel has hit harder and harder and harder over the last couple of years so in response to this a group of psychologists quite recently have begin to argue that deterrence theory doesn't work it's not really the answer it's part of the solution but it misses a much broader truth and that is that people choose to obey the law and to comply with Authority not because they make a rational calculation about risks and benefits but they do so basis rather on the basis of whether they believe that justice is being administered in a legitimate manner the guy who's thought the most about this is the guy actually then why you called Tom Tyler who would really build a book called why people obey the law and he basically says look legitimacy is the real engine of compliance and that has three components we consider Authority legitimate when it grants us standing when it listens to us right when we have a chance to stand up and to be heard to voice our opinions the second thing that accounts for legitimacy is when the administration of law is neutral we perceive Authority as legitimate when it doesn't treat one group in a way that's radically different or better in another group and thirdly we consider Authority to be legitimate when the administration of the law is trustworthy and by that he means when you have a reasonable assumption that the way the world the law worked today is going to be the way that what the law works tomorrow but the whole thing's not going to be turned upside down the minute you turn your back right and if those three conditions are satisfied then people are inclined to go along with Authority now think about how radically different this idea is then the standard deterrence model that has ruled the way we think about Authority for so many years deterrence is all about a rational objective assessment of risks and benefits right you weigh all these things logically and you act accordingly legitimacy is to the contrary about a subjective response to the administration of law you act according to how you feel that you'd been treated or family different kind of response deterrence is about ends it's about about governing the actual people's actual is about the sanction that follows from an action right it's about what we're going to do to you if you do something where as legitimacy that means it's about how we choose to proceed in administering that sanction completely different thing again thirdly deterrence is what a economist would would call instrumental that is to say you make a decision about whether you are going to comply with the law based on an assessment of what's in it for you you assess your own self-interest whereas legitimacy is non-instrumental it's not about your own self-interest in fact one of Toddlers most powerful points is that people will go along with laws that are profoundly not in their self-interest if they perceive the law to be legitimate we will put up with a lot in society if we think we're being heard the administration of that onerous thing is neutral and there is some trustworthiness to the system now I could go on and on about the differences between these two models because they are profound but the single most important thing is that there is a thread that runs through all of the legitimacy argument and I think profoundly revises our notion about why people should choose to rebel and that is that it is when you deny people legitimacy that they rise up against you that that is the trigger that is the engine of rebellion there is no greater motivation for someone to stand up and fight than if you in some way compromise those three basic principles of procedural justice and that is what I think begins to explain the story of Alva Vanderbilt because she lived in a society that she came to realize fundamentally did not grant her legitimacy now that seems really hard to believe because here we have this woman who is building these massive yachts and his huge houses and living in bedrooms with with cherubs holding the letter right she doesn't sound like someone who has any argument to be made that she's some be somehow being denied basic principles of justice but the truth is that Alva belonged to this incredibly narrow and constricted vein of New York society she and the other wives of the rich in those years they they plan dinner parties and they ran households full of servants and that was it they weren't allowed to work they weren't allowed to vote they weren't allowed to participate in any kind of broader broader public cause they couldn't divorce their husbands I was unheard of they were supposed to stay at home and keep up a respectful appearance the men meanwhile could do whatever they chose right they could have jobs if they want to they left the home they could play all kinds of games they could hang out of their clubs they could have affairs I mean the way divorce worked in those years was a man could divorce a woman if he accused her of infidelity a woman could have divorced a man if she proved in infidelity in the part of her husband and if she could also prove that he had used physical cruelty against us against her right that's how fundamentally skewed this relationship was you know these men the men of that era could satisfy every whim and they did back in that JP Morgan had a in those years and he would invite all his friends onto the yacht and he would fill it with call girls and they would have a grand old time while the wives were locked up in their enormous houses on Fifth Avenue and Willie Vanderbilt Ava's husband was no exception he was the playboy of Playboy's he'd inherited this gigantic fortune he never did a lick of work he had one fare after another whether well Alva was forced to stay at home and play the dutiful wife and even as she appeared to be this triumphant society home hostess she was desperately unhappy and she would in fact later described the years leading up to consuelo's marriage as the worst years of her life she and Willie had begun to argue she had begun to hear about his affairs she had met a man that she really loved I mean Oliver Belmont and she'd fallen in love with him but of course she could never be with him men could have Affairs Lemmon couldn't have Affairs in those years and in a last-ditch attempt to save her marriage she takes her family on a cruise to to India and over the course of that cruise she discovers that her husband really is not is having an affair first of all with a French prostitute named Nellie Neustadter but also with Alva's best friend and it is this moment when her world just completely crumbles and she kicks him out of the house and she demands an avoid a divorce but of course that is something in those years that you simply cannot demand and she is vilified by New York society and the tabloids go crazy on her and the teams of lawyers are sent by the Venable family to try and talk her out of this rash act and she goes to her church in Newport and these people who she's known for 20 years and been friends with and invited to her house for dinner turned their backs on her ammonium and acknowledged her she's completely ostracized from New York Society but she feels she has no choice because her position is impossible later in her life she writes her memoirs and is this extraordinary line when she describes the plight of women in that era and she says it was considered religious dignified and correct for the wife to withdraw into the shadows while her husband paid the respects to the sunshine this is the line that breaks my heart she was supposed to get her sunlight by proxy through the husband and that phrase that heartbreaking phrase sunlight by proxy I think puts helps to put a lot of her behavior into perspective right here is this brilliant ambitious driven woman and in today's world she would have been captain of industry she would have been an entrepreneur she'd have started some great startup she would be running some great social cause she would be doing something on a grand scale but in 1900 none of those options are available to her right so what does she do well she does the only thing she can do which is she builds big houses right that's the only thing that's left to a woman of that era who has ambition and drive and and and imagination so she puts all of that energy into building one house after another on an extraordinary scale she is a woman who needs a project that's her only project right she's totally frustrated she lives in a world that will not let her take take step I take a single step outside of her home so she says all right I'll build the greatest home I can it also puts her seemingly inexcusable behavior over her daughter's marriage I'm into perspective Winthrop Rutherford at the time he met Consuelo was 33 years old Consuela was 18 Winthrop Rutherford was from one of the best families in New York a family that was described in the society press at the time as best known for wearing expensive clothing he was a guy who spent his entire time playing golf and polo when she looked at him she saw a carbon copy of the same disastrous man she married and when she thought about her daughter living her life with this guy she thought about him about can she thought that it would condemn her daughter to a life of misery and uselessness in the hands of this indolent philandering brainless fool right and she loved her daughter how could she let this happen meanwhile what was the Duke sure he was another indolent brainless philandering fool but at least he was a brainless indolent philandering fool from another country a country far away from the close claustrophobic world of New York a place where she would have independence standing as the Duchess of Marlborough a society that was far more open to women a place where she actually could do something with her life now in our to our modern ears that sounds incredibly cynical we want her to go we want Consuelo to be allowed to go with the man she loves right and she was in love with wintry Rutherford but a hundred years ago in all of his eyes love was a luxury that her daughter she could not afford for her daughter Consuelo was her great hope and she wanted to save her daughter and she could not let her daughter squander her life the way that Alba felt she had squandered hers so in that moment when Consuela was pulling away in the carriage and she looks back at her mother and that tear of Joy's going down her mother's cheek it's not a tear of joy it's the furthest thing from joy because Alba realizes in that moment what and what an excruciating bargain she's made with the world you know she has had two alien ate her own daughter in order to save her daughter she has divorced her husband because he has humiliated her and as a result has been cast out on the society that she has been a part of for her for her entire adult life she is now facing a world that is empty and hellish but she doesn't turn back and fold and why not because she does not accept society's judgment of her as legitimate they haven't given her standing right a woman is invisible in 1900 she no has listened to her no one's treated her with any any dignity no she's been expected to be quiet and turn way while her husband runs around town with high-class French call girls and her own best friend and has that judgment been passed with neutrality no it only applies to women men can do whatever they want she has been denied on every level that principle basic fundamental rules of legitimacy and she is in that moment in the same position that all radicals are at the earliest point of their transformation and that is that she's angry now I think this notion of legitimacy and the kind of anger that comes from the denial of legitimacy is an incredibly useful way of understanding a lot of the turmoil that we see in the world around us today I mean to use to pick just one random example think about what's happening in Europe right now with Greece Greece is on the verge of insolvency and has the potential to pull all of Europe down with it and why is Greece in such dire straits because among other things Greeks don't pay their taxes right they don't pay their taxes and it's very easy to look at them and roll your eyes and say you know you guys are completely amoral you've gotta get your act together in this country ninety five percent of us pay our taxes you should look to us for and do what we do right I mean it's very easy for us to feel morally superior but why don't the Greeks pay taxes because correctly they perceive their tax system as illegitimate does their tax system provide them with standing right does it listen to them no at least when we think our tax system is unjust we can stand up and be heard we can say this is outrageous we can elect people to Congress who say it accelerations that further I can tell from my reading of American politics that's all we do is elect people of Congress who say the tax system is outrageous you can't do that in in Greece right or is our system neutral well at least it promises neutrality and when it isn't neutral I mean really is neutral but at least when it is and we can stand up and say it's not neutral right hedge fund guys pay 15% right and we are actually jumping up and down in anger at that is the system in Greece neutral not even remotely one set of rules for the rich though you'd even know how they're getting treated compared to you and is it trustworthy our system is for all of its flaws supremely trustworthy the tax system today bears a logical and real and significant relationship to the tax system of yesterday and will bear a real relationship to the tax system of tomorrow we can plan for the future knowing this is the way it's going to work there is nothing trustworthy about the tax system of Greece so why would they pay their taxes why would they pay their taxes we wouldn't pay our taxes if we were denied those three things legitimacy is at the core in this strange way of this entire crisis that's sweeping Europe or think to give up a kind of personal thing think about it why is it so extraordinarily dangerous and more than dangerous why is it so extraordinarily harmful to be raised by an abusive alcoholic parent well is it because parents like that are impose physical violence on children in part it's a horrible thing to be beaten up by your parents but parents of abusive parents rarely kill their children and those wounds will heal eventually that's not the only reason why that's not the true reason why that kind of abusive relationship is so extraordinarily harmful the real reason is that the authority that an abusive alcoholic parent exerts over a child is fundamentally illegitimate right that's why it's so corrosive does the child have standing are they listened to and they treated with any kind of dignity can they voice their side of the argument no when a when a good parent punishes a child the parent listens to the child's side of the case and makes a judgement right that does not happen in the case of an abusive parent just comes out of left field our abusive parents neutral do they treat all children within a family the same way no absolutely not single out a child for there very often they pick on one I mean there's all kinds of games that are played can you imagine how unbelievably disruptive that is to a child does it trustworthy not furthest thing from trustworthy peace of parent could be all sweetness in light one moment and be a holy terror the next that complete lack of predictability is one of the reasons why that kind of damage lasts for a lifetime but I think you can look at this in virtually every major enduring pathological conflict you can look at and you can see some kind of argument of legitimacy at the core i've been reading recently a lot of histories about about other troubles in Northern Ireland but why did that why did an outbreak of violence in Belfast and Londonderry in 1969 and 70 last for 30 years and the reason is very simple and that is the British moved into British I moved into Northern Ireland and they operated under a principle of deterrence that when the when the both sides of Protestants but larger the Catholics would do something wrong they would crack down and when that wrongdoing continued the British would crack down even harder and the cycle went on and on and on and on right and the IRA wouldn't stop and why wouldn't they stop because it wasn't about two turns it was because on a fundamental level they believed that the status quo in Northern Ireland denied them legitimacy they had no voice right the Protestants were dominating all of the conversations the situation in northern Iran was not treating them with neutrality there was one set of rules for the Protestant majority in another for the Catholic minority and was it trustworthy no it wasn't trustworthy every five minutes the system changed no wonder they wouldn't stop they were indifferent to this rising level of British deterrence because that wasn't the issue the issue was that there was no legitimacy in the system and the crucial moment in the history along his - the troubles in Northern Ireland is the hunger strikes right of the late 1970s and they start because Margaret Thatcher in her wisdom decide that she will no longer treat captured IRA prisoners as political prisoners they'd always been treated as political prisoners which means you are treated in a certain way like you're a like you're a captured prisoner in in war or something you're by a separate set of rules and Thatcher decides in the mid 70s that anyone who is any IRA terrorist who is caught is going to be treated like an ordinary criminal and she said listen if you set bombs and shoot people you're a criminal right and that change is what triggers that extraordinary outpouring of anger on the part of the Catholic community why because they know they are doing all kinds of things that are unseemly they know they're killing people they know they're planting bombs and know they're shooting people but the most crucial thing for them is that they don't believe they're ordinary criminals they believe they're doing all of those horrible things in the name of a political cause and for the actor who is intervening in Northern Ireland to deny them that one thing that simple claim to legitimacy is outrageous and what happens in response to Margaret Thatcher's eat it well it horribly backfires you start that's when you get the hunger striking it Long Kesh prison remember Bobby Sands in the world the attention of the entire world is riveted by this man who was standing in defiance of the British Army and the tide of sympathy which had been with the British turns and it turns in favor of the IRA and at the height of the hunger strike as Bobby Sands lies wasted and delirious in his cell remember he runs for Parliament for British Parliament and he's elected and the British are forced to deal with this extraordinary contradiction that they have denied the political status of these people even as they have been elected as standing members of Britain's own Parliament and that is a moment when the British that's a hit from which the British never really recover they can no longer prosecute the war in northern island in the same way after they have been exposed as denying the Catholics and Northern Ireland legitimacy you could I could go on about that I mean you can look at Afghanistan and see this whenever you hear about the effectiveness of here about the drone attacks on terrorists in Afghanistan what we're always told by the CIA or the Pentagon is about their effectiveness about how good we're getting at targeting terrorists how many we kill how few tear a few civilians we kill and that's what's trumpeted right it's a deterrent we think we're getting a better and better deterrent to the use of drones that's not the issue it's not about deterrence it's about legitimacy and the question is are our actions in Afghanistan perceived subjectively by Afghanistan ease as legitimate and the answer is they aren't in fact the great fact that is rarely trumpeted by the CIA when they give you their statistics on drone attacks is it as the number and lethality and accuracy of our drone attacks has increased so have the number of terrorist actions by the Taliban against American forces in Afghanistan it's not working why because we haven't addressed this much deeper and more important issue when you deny people legitimacy they fight so back to alva here is this rich and profoundly unhappy woman who has been denied legitimacy and her salvation comes strangely enough in the form of her daughter Consuelo in the years of her marriage to Sonny Churchill Consuelo is transformed she bears him two sons as she put it an heir and a spare and then she leaves him and she does this she leaves him with such Grace and such dignity that all of London society rallies around her and not around sunny at the same time she develops the social conscience she becomes this extraordinary figure reformist figure in of an England of the early 20th century and she becomes this tall and charismatic woman who's an electrifying public speaker and she is just transformed into one of the most significant public figures in England of that era and in 1908 she returns to New York for the first time and she gives a very famous speech at the Waldorf Astoria and what Consuelo had discovered is that England in the earlier 20th century was a farmer open place particularly for women than America England was far more accepting of the fact that a woman could play a real role in public policy and in a long history of women who had stood up from positions of privilege and spoken out against what they perceived as injustice and been heard and what Consuelo does in her famous speech at the wall of a story is essentially make an argument to all of the assembled society ladies of New York City that they need to learn from their British counterparts that they are wasting their lives right that they have been marginalized by the sexist codes of their day and she says that the quote she says the necessity to adjust herself to man to be judged by his individual standard and to confirm her whole personality to his ways of thinking has robbed women of the power strength and influence she could have exerted as a United and independent majority it's a call to arms right basically she says to all of these powerful women of New York you're behaving like slaves now as she says this who is sitting in the audience her mother Alva and you can only imagine how she feels she had sent her daughter off to England in tears 15 years before taken her away from the only man she ever loved because she felt that by only by leaving New York City could Consuela be saved and now Consuelo is back in New York at the podium at the Waldorf Astoria and she saved she truly has been saved and Consuelo and Alva talked afterwards and Consuelo says to her you know in spite of everything I'm glad I married and it's as if Alva has been offered absolution and the weight of all of that guilt that she's been carrying around on her tiny shoulders is lifted now long afterwards she goes with her daughter to a speech on electron women's suffrage and women of course in the United States of that era and in most developed countries in the world had no voting rights are very very limited built voting rights and Alva listens to this lecture about suffrage and her life is just absolutely transformed it's a mess it's something she'd never thought about before and suddenly it makes perfect sense and she realizes that if women are going to undergo the kind of transformation that her daughter Consuelo had spoken about at the wall of historia this is going to is how it's going to happen the only way to restore legitimacy to the place of women in society is to allow women to stand up and to be heard in the electoral process then she looks around at the state of the women's suffragette movement at that moment and she realizes this in chaos nothing's happening only four states have passed suffrage laws and they're totally marginal Wyoming Idaho Utah and Colorado right and then it all been happening happened 20 years ago the program is entirely stalled it has no money no visibility no energy no strategic direction and those are all four things that Alva has in spades right so she just barges in as she would this little pit bull of a woman and she takes it over takes all of her millions of dollars and she moves them the headquarters of the suffragette movement if you can believe it at that moment was in Warren Ohio and Alva says this is crazy and she moves it to a big place on Fifth Avenue right and then she turns her cottage in Rhode Island which used to be full of the most ridiculous bacchanals and and pointless balls into a kind of conference center for the emerging suffragette movement and she brings in women from all over the country to listen to lectures and to plan strategies I went a group of female garment workers in New York really the very poorest of the poor on working in the most outrageous conditions they go on strike and course the employer sends in all kinds of goons to beat them up who comes to their aid Alva comes to the rain she goes all the way downtown she's a march through downtown this little woman right all comes go behind her protesting the treatment of these of these workers and when they're all arrested and taken to the courtroom who sits in the courtroom all night long with them Alva does and when the judge gets up on the stand and tries to pronounce some kind of sentence Alva glares at him with a full force of her power and the judge just kind of says all right and let everybody go right and who is the first person to stand up and say that black women belong in a suffragette movement it's Alva right and she invites the the black women black woman's League to join the movement and she gives them office space next to hers and when the movement grows really conservative and people start to worry that oh maybe we're antagonizing men and maybe we should maybe we should back away from a constitutional amendment and try and do this in Peaceville in a piecemeal way who stands up and says no Alva you know what she says she says why are we worried about antagonizing men men never worry about antagonizing men and her argument carries a day and throughout the long years of the First World War when the suffragettes were picketing the White House every day and all kinds of people said you know what it's not really appropriate we're fighting a war we shouldn't be making cause we shouldn't be making arguments for our cause in the middle of this kind of conflict who is the woman who says no this is every bit as important to some war were fighting in Europe it's Alva she puts every ounce of her domineering dictatorial outrageous manipulative ambitious personality into this cause and what happens in 1920 the 19th amendment the United States is passed promising full and universal suffrage to every woman of voting age in the United States Alva wins in the end the lesson of that victory applies as equally to our day today as it does to her time a hundred years ago it applies to the Arab dictators who saw their lives fall apart you this spring and it applies to the United States when we kidnap and torture people and spirit them off to unknown locations and the lesson is that at the end of the day the powerful are judged not by their ends but by their means and if you deny people legitimacy they will one day by one means or another come back and defeat you one last thing Alvah dies in January of 1933 from a stroke and her funeral is held in st. Thomas Church on Third Avenue where Consuelo and sunny got married years before and 20 of the most country's most prominent feminists serve as pallbearers and the congregation sings three hymns one by Harriet Beecher Stowe then the suffragette battle zone which is the march of the women and then finally a hymn composed by Alva herself and the hymn is is a perfect summary of the life and the character of this strange and wonderful and extraordinary woman it's all about how when Alva goes to heaven when she arrives at the pearly gates I should be damned if she was going to let some man called Saint Peter stand in judgment of her and it begins I'll just give the first four lines no waiting at the gates of paradise no tribunal of men to judge the Watchers of the tower proclaim a daughter of the king thank you we have we have time now for some questions I would be delighted to take any questions that you have let me put on my glasses I can see you anywhere and I think there's some mics have come down for those who can line up at the mic and we can here's my yeah sure but there so is this on okay if yeah oh this wonderful thing you just talk about the fight for legitimacy the underdog and yet do you not decry the favor of the underdog in a recent appearance you may they were on radio where oh oh yes this is a but that's a very very minor and trivial thing I was referring to my radio lab thing yes well I was it I was I did a thing with you know Robert Krulwich radio lab was a wonderful God he was doing a on he was doing a radio show which talked about my other things about underdogs and favorites and cheering first why we share so passionate for sports teams and I pointed out that for reasons that I don't understand I had never cheer for the underdog in a sports contest I cheered for the favorite because this is I mean this is a separate thing it's because the psychological pain of the favorite losing is greater than the psychological pain of the underdog losing the underdog doesn't think he's going to win right so if you if he loses he's like oh oh yeah I wasn't in any way the favorite losers are like oh my god and so as a kid I would watch time we were watching the Olympics I was a huge track and field spin and I would want you know Dwight stones in the high jump in 1972 the greatest high jumper of all time in a 76 rather nobody was close to and then he lost in the final because it rained and I literally I was disconsolate I was like all I could feel I was like his pain I felt his pain so deeply I was like I can't do this I can't watch the favorite lose I mean and so from then on I was always my heart gone out to the to the one with all the advantages but this is that's a secret that it doesn't leave a legitimacy that just has to do with my own idiosyncratic reading of sports contests hi I was wondering if you could comment on the principle of legitimacy in regards to the current financial crisis that we're all experiencing well yes the this goes to two there are two elements of you think of the three elements of legitimacy trustworthy neutrality and standing this one is about the last two it's about neutrality and it's about trustworthiness that we have I think that what has caused such enormous rage among most of us is that to those two principles were profoundly violated that it was we perceived that there was one set of rules for these bankers who who engaged in fundamental risky activities to no consequence whereas when we engage in fundamental risky activities there are consequences right so we felt that was violated and we also felt that there was the system was no longer trustworthy that there was not a clear set of consistent principles that are that we use as a society to adjudicate these kinds of crises right that's what we it was the very ad hoc nature of it that I think we were objecting to it would be one thing if someone had stood up at the beginning of all that and said here is what we think is going to happen and here are the principles on which we will act right if that had happened I feel you'd feel differently but instead if you read accounts on I've read too many of them of the financial crisis it's going to blow by blow accounts what is always amazing to me is is they're you know they're there no one slapped you anyone who picks up on this you me these accounts and like it's always you know it was Thursday and Paulson hadn't slept since Monday you know what they go on another and you realize this isn't but this goes this question of trustworthiness it's not like a bunch of thoughtful people sat around and put on some clear principles for action no a bunch of like guys in a hotel room didn't sleep for three days and came up with a bailout package what do bailout packages look like when they are conceived by people who haven't slept for three days right I know what the things I do look like when I haven't slept for three days you know so I mean this feeds into this notion that what went on was not in keeping with fundamental principles of legitimacy right it was on the back of an envelope so I think you're absolutely right to make that connection a smaller scale that is on the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday and just the tea party in general where it seems to be the same types of emotions yeah yeah the there is a well there are there is nothing wrong with the X so one way to look at say the Brooklyn Bridge the Occupy Wall Street people is that they are the fact that we let allow people to do that is a crucial part of authority being legitimate so we allow they are giving we allow them to give voice to their opinion and part of that means they must be treated with dignity so the details of the interaction between protesters and police are enormous ly important right that it's not wrong to send police out to keep those kind of demonstrations in orderly that's absolutely chitta minutes well that's fine but it is very important that that process that relationship between those who must keep order and those who are giving voice to their grievance proceed in a respectful dignified way and it's very important that police are properly trained in that activity that's not to say it can always be done perfectly and that's not to say they did it badly in this instance I don't think I executed to judge that but I do think this is a crucial thing that we have to remember that this is that that is a very very tricky thing that's got to be done properly I one of the reads one of the simple reasons that the northern island troubles got out of control is that they brought over a bunch of 18 year old soldiers who had been in conflicts real wars all around the world in Africa in the Middle East they brought them to their own country did not train them at all in how to deal with essentially their peers right and so these guys acted like soldiers and it's really inappropriate to act like a soldier around your own people right and that the Catholics were like in Belfast you know it's been much of the summer in Belfast they couldn't believe it like here's guys you're we're citizens of the same country and you're walking down the street with a machine gun and you're pointing it at me like what it that's just so outrageous like they hadn't worked out and the British weren't malicious or they just hadn't thought it through so I wouldn't my first thing about protests is that we need to think really hard about what is the most respectful way to deal with people as they voice their concerns the tea party I have somewhat less sympathy for if only because I mean I respect the right to be angry but I can't figure out why I mean of all the people in America to be angry you know entitle up in middle class white people from the south strikes me as like you guys are way down the list I think there are a lot of other people I think have more so yeah it is one of the is one of the distinctive developments of our time that we have entered an era where it is considered okay for rich people to whine is not and find me a time in history where really rich people have been allowed to win I don't care that they're really rich but I really do object to their whining yes a thing sure I you made reference early on to the drug dealers as a group that carried on the trade because they felt they had been denied little missing do you think that given legitimacy they would stop dealing drugs what about a financial motive yeah no I think that the drug dealing thing wasn't I don't I'm not sure the legitimacy argument applies as squarely there that is simply an illustration of the failure of the deterrence model so it says there are many things we can do to stop drug dealing but ratcheting up penalties has limited usefulness past a certain point so it does have usefulness in the beginning if you have no penalties for drug dealing people who drug deal way more than they do I'm not saying we should have no penalties but I'm saying that we have pursued a very single-minded strategy towards drug dealing that is now reached the point of negligible returns I don't know I you know in a very very broader way if if marginalized inner-city communities felt they had a legitimate position within society would they do would they deal fewer drugs probably but that's a much broader argument I think I was just using it net narrow sensitive it illustrates the poverty of the deterrence model at a certain point sure of the three characteristics that you talked about do you think one of them are more likely to spark an outburst over the others that's interesting ah you know I changed my mind on this all the time but if I had to rank them it strikes me that neutrality is if I had to say that if I could only pick one I would pick neutrality it's the one that is the easiest in some ways to violate and it's the one that makes us it is what makes us most upset that where one group is clearly and unreasonably favored over another and I don't know whether we do we spend enough time thinking about the consequences of a lack of neutrality in various so I mentioned taxes before tax is a great example that you're you have typically have a on the one hand we feel that a progressive taxation model is fair in the sense of those who have more should give more so that's a sort of violation of neutrality right we're asking wealthier people to accept the fact they're being treated differently so that's one way in which we need to address that issue right it's it's problematic we'd to explain to them the reasons why we think that's appropriate and then but then when that principle is violated in a different way where we feel that those who have positions of power are escaping a tax burden at all then I think we have that also is going to create all kinds of social turmoil and you get you know look at Greece that's what happens when you neglect this people just stop paying their taxes and if people stop paying your taxes you know we forget just how I'm going on under the buffets because my accountant is actually in the audience and he would appreciate all this but it's no look nothing works if people don't want to pay their taxes if they don't want to be fair everything falls apart right I don't care what else is going on in their society and that's you know that's is that's it and so when people have llege system they have to be they have to be listened to and dealt with and questions about neutrality have to be kind of discussed intelligently or you end up in these irresolvable crises so you mentioned that authority figures ignore lack of legitimacy at their peril but surely regimes with no trace of legitimacy have existed for hundreds of years throughout human history Czarist Russia the Roman Empire I mean yeah many times and you can say well well they ended eventually but but doesn't everything yeah can you speculate a bit about what conditions might lead the lack of legitimacy to sort of lament something like yeah yeah it's not yeah and and women were pressed for thousands of years right so yeah this is not a this isn't the whole explanation for why these things happen but I guess the question would be at moments where there is a potential for a challenge to the status quo what sets people off and what's the kind of trigger and I think that but more than that on a deeper way of answering I've asking a question is what compels them to keep fighting in the presence of enormous deterrence and that is if they feel truly aggrieved on this legitimate level on this question of legitimacy but you're right it is a much broader question of we can't we can't explain every conflict in the world simply by applying this model but we can start to understand why people persevere and the way they do that's what's what's fascinating about Syria and Libya right is the extent to which the public has persevered even when you would you know normally or to think they would have folded there but they haven't I mean they keep coming back and back and back and what you're seeing is the kind of pent-up anger of years of being treated without legitimacy oh hey it seems that a lot of what you're saying about legitimacy can also be seen as boiling down to a concept of identity that when someone's identity as they've constructed it either an Irish revolutionary or a citizen is threatened they'll do almost anything to either rebuild that or fight back can you talk about how you feel identity relates to this yeah I mean it's a very interesting question I the and I hadn't thought about it through that lens before but if you imagine so the the one the the I spent as I said a lot of the summer in Belfast and reading about about Northern Ireland and the question of when you try to understand the psychology of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland I think it does ultimately get very bound up in this question of identity that they cannot understand in their own eyes they are a culture and a people equal deserve equal standing with the Protestants and yet they are being they're being that that that is being that fact is being fundamentally denied on every level by the existing administration this is a not going to answer your question but I can't resist this here's my favorite fact but the IRA favorite story ever it goes to the question of who they think they are in you know how the Irish love a good story right well when I was in Belfast this summer talking to former IRA terrorists if you want to call them that freedom fighters we want to call them incredible numbers of them were had either published a novel or working on a novel right it's weird so I was talking to as one guy he told me the following story true story back in the 40s an IRA leader was suspected of collaborating with the English and so he is kidnapped by his fellow IRA guys taken to a remote cabin in the mountains of you know kill something another kill Marni or kill barfi or Valley Murphy whatever they you know that and they interrogate him and he confesses and they capture him by the way in June confesses almost immediately and it's agreed that he will write out his confession in longhand he will write a written confession so he starts to write his confession in June and he is still writing it in July and he's still writing in August and when he finally escapes in September it's still unfinished now what I love about this is this is a society a culture in which first of all it is considered legitimate to work on your confession for three months by the person confessing and to your captors are fine with two they're like well you know where's Billy well he's still he's on page you know 20 cities and he's doing rewrites right now you know it's it's like I just thought it was like so fantastic like if you're going to be embroiled in a controversy the group of terrorists how great to be with a group of terrorists who have such respect for the written word you know if I was going to be forced to be you know given a bottom line half Shining Path you know I think I go with the IRA I'd say like actually and I'm sure the cottage by the way probably beautiful like up on some Greendale and they would stop for a pint in the afternoon I haven't answered your question but I have I have told a story that I'm very pleased to have told I have a question on a different topic but I guess it's sort of related about a year ago you wrote a piece for The New Yorker called the revolution won't happen on Twitter or something like that yeah and the popular press recently well maybe six months ago has led us to believe that a lot of the Arab Spring did happen on social media so I'd like to hear your thoughts yeah well the the popular press has stated correctly that Twitter and other forms of social media were methods of communication used by those involved in the brain and that's that's beyond dispute it was absolutely the issue was whether those methods of communication were in any way could be considered significant causes or enabling forces in those revolutions and that argument to my mind is still unproven so the last study the most recent study I saw on this actually was one that pointed out that the moments of greatest revolutionary activity in Egypt occurred during those periods when the internet was shut down by the government so when they couldn't communicate that way that's when they all actually got out in the streets and started to make real progress so you know that I with observations like that need to be assimilated into the argument they seem to back my original claim more than they do the the technical optimists but it's reasonable to assume that people will make use of whatever the most advanced technology is when they revolt in the French Revolution the printing press was used to make all these pamphlets which were distributed but I don't know whether we can say that the printing press was the reason for the French Revolution and it's funny you know I also don't think that the claim I think there was a good deal of understandable excitement about social media in the early days of Arab Spring but I think that that's understandable and I think people are now have a much more kind of conservative reading of its role and I don't hear much talk about social media and Syria and Libya to the same extent right so it's a kind of I mean I think we're we're all settling in to a much more nuanced understanding 19th century a lot of the women didn't rebel and we're accepting of their situation because they believed it to be legitimate yeah and so the question for me then is how do you incorporate that sort of analysis or cultural hegemony analysis into your model here because the question is why do individuals become rebellious while the rest accepting their lot yeah yeah yeah I don't know whether it goes to that earlier question I don't know whether you can use this to construct a kind of a broad unified theory of of rebellion but I think you can always try to understand the individual psychology of this woman because what's interesting about rebellions of any kind is that you have there's sort of two complementary narratives there is the grand kind of macro narrative about the time and the belief systems and the and then there is a second narrative that's about about the actual people who take the risks to make the revelry and I was interested in this talk in that second narrative or not and but the first is I think you're addressing you're talking about the first and that's a much more complicated and probably at the end of the day more interesting mode of analysis but I do I'm always drawn to so was the guy in the Civil War Thaddeus Stevens if you ever read about Civil War you there's a lot of literature about the macro reasons but then you end up talking thinking about and looking at these individuals who do these really interesting things like fatiah Stevens is this guy who's a lot like Alva Vanderbilt he's the habla Vanderbilt of the Civil War he's this kind of ornery difficult obnoxious guy who basically after the war he's in Congress he's the guy who says as the everyone wants to kind of cut the South a break he's like no and he's a pushes for the kind of maximum freedoms for african-americans and he's a guy who's like he's living with a black woman in Pennsylvania in the 1860s I mean this takes a lot of balls right and so you know he's not the does fattie of Steven's explain this a Warner does he explain what help service no no but it's really interesting to understand there's a guy who really also thought that he was being treated legitimately by the world and just took that anger out on the system in a way that so I just I like to I think it's important sometimes when we talk about these things not to forget these many narratives because they cast a light on on the kind of motivations of the actors sure I was wondering if you can comment on how you know voters here can have adequate and an equal representation when you know politicians have like presidential candidates for example have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in order to get elected yeah well you know this goes to and this was the subject of my talk last year but it goes into the same thing which is that when you get the single most significant change in our society American study of the last five years has been economic inequality right this was a country that until the 60s had a very very small gap between rich and poor if you think about these things are measured by you compare the distance between the 20th percentile and the 80th percentile right so you're they'll always be super rich people they'll always be very very poor people but let's look at the two ends of the middle and the two ends of the middle and the 50s are this far apart the two ends in the middle today are this far apart right and when that happens what you've describing is a consequence and that is that big powerful prizes get contested by people who have access to all of the resources that are concentrated at one end of the equation and that is a very troubling thing for a democracy right that's that's the kind of thing that leads to a lack of neutrality and a lack of standing because all of a sudden when there's this much gap between the 20th and the 80th it's easy to get your voice heard and it's easy to to enforce neutrality when there's this much gap it's not easy anymore because the person over here has fundamentally different set of has much more powerful and but I main different set of interests than the person over here so I think that these are all kind of I it's what worries me about our current situation on a slightly different note I'm interesting interested to hear your take on the former mayor of Bogota Marcos who employed beyond these legitimacy issues really central to his plot was employing methods of shame so he had trouble with traffic safety and pedestrian problems so he sent out a bunch of mimes into the street to shame people had problems with people not paying taxes and at the end of his term people were voluntarily paying more taxes because if these kinds of tactics so how how can we use those yes no but the mime idea but no I know a little bit about him at that nest lobby is really really interesting and it goes to sort of my point at attending to the kind of people's subjective understanding of their behavior is sometimes more important than their objective but it also you know if I might the what's interesting about that is that it points out how narrow our repertoire of options are so you have someone who is doing something wrong and you have a whole series of things you can do to try and convince them to do it to do something right and we tend to choose from an incredibly narrow set of series of choices so why not I mean this guy is someone who has a lot of imaginations it's actually adds 100 things I can do I'm going to try a whole series of things that are we tend to think really narrowly in terms of deterrence so what are the options associated with deterrence deterrence is a is affected by three things celerity how quickly you punish bad behavior certainty the likelihood of punishment being met of a bit mysterium it by punishment and severity whence you captured someone and convicted them how harshly do you sanction them we don't even use all three of those things when it comes to deterrence we have almost no interest in celerity right we like anything we drag it as long as we can certainty is a joke the likelihood of being caught by dealing drugs in any major American city in a single encounter it's like one in you know I forgot number twenty five hundred it's not that you know what we care about is society is only severity that's all if you look at how Congress addresses crime they just play with the severity thing over and over again and of those three severity is the weakest right we're not even doing deterrence properly what you really want is total certainty and total celerity if I said to you if I catch you're dealing drugs you will almost certainly be arrested and you will be in jail within two weeks that's a whole different even if you're running in jail for a year a whole different story now we say probably not going to catch you in fact my odds of catching you or less than 1% but if I do you're away forever right that's like not you know it's like it's like saying my chances of being caught for jaywalking or one in a million but if I am caught I'm going to be sentenced to jail for 20 years I'm still going to jail walk JJ walk right so like this this the reason s is just a lovely example is that it's someone who it makes us understand there's so many more things we can do to ensure compliance than we do it is make it back to last year's talk but I'm curious to know what is the narrative that you see now Malcolm that causes people who have let's say poor people or people without a lot of legitimacy and standing to want to support a system which encourages this great gap between rich and poor well I'm ok you know I have no idea your pastor wrong guy I mean yeah I don't know why people are so psyched about the status quo maybe they're not but uh yeah kind of why there isn't more I've you know I was in London a summer during the riots and by virtue of the fact that I that I found my apartment online without really having a sense of where it was I was in the middle of the rise came home from dinner and cars were burning much to my surprise so as I sat there and watched large mobs of people going from Street to Street I wondered well what are the odds of this happening in New York and couldn't come up with a good reason about why I wouldn't happen here because if anything we have the same set of problems even worse and so yeah I wouldn't be surprised at all if you know if unemployment rate hits 10 percent and it you know all kinds of things happen you a certain point they'll remember this the last time we had levels of income and equality and social and and at the cent and at the same level we have now in the kind of end of the Gilded Age this country came very close to a revolution there were bombs on Wall Street they were somebody went up to JP Morgan's house and like shot up I mean it was all kinds of stuff and that's why the wealthy classes that era got so panicked because they thought oh my god it's ending I mean we have to kind of get our act together and and you know there's no guarantee that that won't happen again we shouldn't be we shouldn't sit here and smugly assume that it's just an English thing right that's last question then I I think we your model it sounds like it's breaking it down to a question of administrative justice in terms of legitimacy in England but doesn't the doing you think it really comes down to you know eventually it you know my question of shared value of beliefs because for example something mentioned the Roman Empire for you know as a as an example well why did the Jews revolt under under the Romans it wasn't because they felt like they were not they were being treated differently they were actually being treated quite the same as all other nations their God was recognized they you know there was the rule was clear you you know you pay your taxes you honor the Roman gods will on of yours and will leave you alone but in that case you really it comes down to I do not you know share you know that you know I it's not that I'm not that they're not being treated differently it's that we just cannot you know we cannot live under this system yeah see that seems to me it's that would pass the test that you're that that has been given but at the same time it didn't it doesn't explain them yes no I think you're right that there you go specialist logically there are there are a much broader list of reasons for why these kinds of rebellions Amin happen and what I'm doing is zeroing in on one specific aspect that applies to many interesting cases but by no means by no means but yeah so as with is the case with all my writing you should be careful not to apply it to rigorously - out of the real world or your own life you you

Channel: The New Yorker

Views: 172,842

Rating: 4.7100272 out of 5

Keywords: 2011 Festival, Malcolm Gladwell, legitimacy, obnoxiousness, festival, nyer festival

Id: xPsfgEk00kU

Length: 85min 0sec (5100 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 22 2014