The Disapproval of the Crowd by Alex Karp

Alex Karp is co-founder and CEO of Palantir. The essay is an excerpt from his book The Technological Republic.

The American artist Thomas Hart Benton, who painted murals in the early part of the twentieth century, declined to jettison his representational approach even as modernism seemed to be sweeping away forms of art that could be readily deciphered. He taught at the Art Students League of New York for years, and his most famous student, Jackson Pollock, seemed ambivalent about his teacher’s influence; the two had a long tangle of a friendship. In an interview with Art and Architecture magazine in 1944, Pollock offered a bit of begrudging praise for his former instructor, explaining that “it was better to have worked with him than with a less resistant personality.” Benton initially thought little of Pollock’s canvases, describing them as “paint-spilling innovations” and “scorned the idea of their possessing any long-term value.”

The modern enterprise is often too quick to avoid such friction. We have today privileged a kind of ease in corporate life, a culture of agreeableness that can move institutions away, not toward, creative output. The impulse—indeed rush—to smooth over any hint of conflict within businesses and government agencies is misguided, leaving many with the misimpression that a life of ease awaits and rewarding those whose principal desire is the approval of others. As the comedian John Mulaney has said, “Likability is a jail.”

The casual and unrelenting pressure to revert to the mean, to do what has been done before, to eliminate the wrong types of risks from a business at precisely the wrong times, and to avoid confrontation is everywhere and often tempting. But the culture’s move to accommodate the subjective reality of its students and employees has only inflamed the sense of grievance and affliction that some feel. The rise of trigger warnings and other forms of acquiescence behind which the left has zealously rallied for more than a decade has backfired spectacularly, by fostering a sense of harm that often does not exist. Richard Alan Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College, said in an interview that, beginning in 2016 or so, he began seeing an increase in reports of students alleging that they had been “harmed by things that were unfamiliar and uncomfortable,” and that the language they used, describing unease upon hearing comments in class, for example, “seemed inflated relative to the actual harm that could be done.”

This is a grievance industry, and it is at risk of depriving a generation of the fierceness and sense of proportion that are essential to becoming a full participant in this world. A certain psychological resilience and indeed indifference to the opinion of others are required if one is to have any hope of building something substantial and differentiated. The artist and the founder alike are often “the mad ones,” as Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road, “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.” The challenge, of course, is that some of the most compelling and authentic nonconformists, the artists and iconoclasts, make for notoriously difficult colleagues.

In the context of a creative endeavor, such as a technology startup or an artistic movement, the blank slate of human desire poses a fundamental challenge. We instinctively look to one another for guidance as to what is desirable, and as a consequence the intentions of others are often adopted wholesale and without reflection, left to grow within ourselves. Rene Girard, the French anthropologist, observed the conflicts and rivalries between monkeys that arise when one member within a group selects a single banana out of many, all of which are identical. “There is nothing special about the disputed banana,” Girard said in an interview in 1983, “except that the first to choose selected it, and this initial selection, however causal, triggered a chain reaction of mimetic desire that made that one banana seem preferable to all others.”

Our earliest encounters with learning are through mimicry. But at some point, that mimicry becomes toxic to creativity. Some never make the transition from a sort of creative infancy. Much of what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is, of course, something less—more an attempt to replicate what has worked or at least was perceived to have worked in the past. This mimicry can sometimes yield fruit. But more often than not it is derivative and retrograde. The best investors and founders are sensitive to this distinction and survive because they have actively resisted the urge to construct imperfect imitations of prior successes. The act of rebellion that involves building something from nothing—whether it is a poem from a blank page, a painting from a canvas, or software code on a screen—by definition requires a rejection of what has come before. It involves the bracing conclusion that something new is necessary. The hubris involved in the act of creation—that determination that all that has been produced to date, the sum product of humanity’s output, is not precisely what ought or need be built at a given moment—is present within every founder or artist.

For a startup, or any organization that seeks to challenge an incumbent, the sort of mindless conformity that dominates modern commerce—an unwillingness to risk the disapproval of the crowd—can be lethal. In 1941, Ralph Waldo Emerson published “Self Reliance,” his enduring broadside against religious dogmatism, in which he railed against individual weakness in the face of institutional pressure. “For nonconformity,” he reminds us, “the world whips you with its displeasure.” Emerson made clear that the desire to conform not merely to those around you but to one’s prior views on a subject can be just as limiting and indeed hobbling. The permanence of our thoughts and writing on the internet for all time—and the zeal with which the crowd confronts individuals who dare to venture into public life with perceived inconsistencies in their prior statements—only risk confining us further, into a straitjacket of our former selves. But Emerson is right to ask, “Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? . . . Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.” We count ourselves among those who have repeatedly fled, abandoning failed projects within days of a lack of progress being surfaced and deconstructing dysfunctional teams. At other times, we certainly have been more timid, proceeding far too cautiously to reverse prior judgments and investments, in both particular people and projects. But the public, investing and otherwise, is often far too unforgiving of retreats and pivots, of revisions to plans and missteps. Nothing of consequence is built in a straight line. A voracious pragmatism is needed, as well as a willingness to bend one’s model of the world to the evidence at hand, not bend the evidence.

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