I see many parallels between Malcolm Gladwell and Dennis Prager. They’re excellent at promoting profound insights into life that often fall apart upon examination.
Malcolm has a new book out — David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.
Feb. 18, 2014: Dennis: “Your mind, I have a certain identification with it. You look at something and you find patterns. That’s the way my mind works.”
Malcolm: “I think that people in the position we’re in, doing the job we’re doing, that’s our value, right? Most people are information rich and theory poor. They don’t have the time or the inclination to make sense of [life], to put patterns together.”
Dennis: “But without patterns, you don’t understand life.”
Malcolm: “Yeah.”
Dennis: “It’s something you can train yourself to do, but it is also a gift. They asked Schubert, how did you come up with all these melodies? And he said, ‘They just come into my brain.'”
“Thanks to you, I got to love the [story of] David and Goliath even more. It gives tremendous substance to the story in the Bible. All these little details, you make sense of.”
“Just for that story alone, you have to read [his book] David and Goliath. It begins with a brilliant analysis of why the story is so telling in its details.”
Malcolm: “Why are we so constantly fooled by things that don’t matter?”
Dennis: “That’s why I resonate to this theme of yours. At a very early age, I came to a conclusion I have never wavered from — the staggering exaggerated importance given to brains and raw intelligence. I realized in high school that the ones with the finest brains were often the most confused, the least capable of dealing with life kids in the grade. I have learned from my listeners, who come from all walks of life, more than I learned from my professors at Columbia.”
Malcolm: “Yeah. That does not surprise me. You talk to people in the business world, I’m always curious about hiring, and the good ones, that’s all they talk about. They hire character.”
Dennis: “I’m getting the chills. I raised my kids with that theme. I told them, ‘I don’t care about your grades. I care about your character.’ And they got crappy grades. Character is king.”
“I feel like a kindred spirit with you.”
“Malcolm Gladwell teaches what isn’t taught. He has an original mind. It is a joy to read him.”
John Gray writes in The New Republic about Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath:
There is nothing remotely challenging, for most of Gladwell’s readers, in this story; it is the sort of uplift in which they already believe. The dominant narrative for the last three centuries has been one in which the power of elites and rulers is progressively overcome by the moral force of the common man and woman who sticks up for what is right. Far from being a forbidden truth, this is what everyone thinks. Here we can glimpse one of the secrets of Gladwell’s success. Pretending to present daringly counterintuitive views to his readers, he actually strengthens the hold on them of a view of things that they have long taken for granted. This is, perhaps, the essence of the genre that Gladwell has pioneered: while reinforcing beliefs that everyone avows, he evokes in the reader a satisfying sensation of intellectual non-conformity.
One of the features of Gladwell’s genre is a repeated effort to back the stories he tells with evidence from academic sources—a move that has attracted some of the most virulent attacks on his work. Yet Gladwell has more in common with his academic critics than either he or they realize, or care to admit. Academic writing is rarely a pursuit of unpopular truths; much of the time it is an attempt to bolster prevailing orthodoxies and shore up widely felt but ill-founded hopes. There are many examples of academics who have distorted fact or disregarded evidence in order to tell an edifying tale that accords with respectable hopes…
Speaking to a time that prides itself on optimism and secretly suspects that nothing works, his books are analgesics for those who seek temporary relief from abiding anxiety. There is more of reality and wisdom in a Chinese fortune cookie than can be found anywhere in Gladwell’s pages. But then, it is not reality or wisdom that his readers are looking for.
Here are some Steve Sailer articles showing why you
can’t trust Malcolm Gladwell: Here
Here
Here
Here
Here
Here
