Malcolm Gladwell’s Need for Critical Thinking

I read The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell in 2000 when it first was published and was immediately hooked. Eagerly, I devoured each of his succeeding books with great anticipation and was never disappointed. That is, until last week when I read Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.

Gladwell’s earlier books were fascinating. They told stories, easily comprehended and retold. I used many of them in presentations and lectures I would deliver on the application of Complexity Theory to Health Care and Organizational Performance. There was an intellectual curiosity I found enjoyable and, frankly, infectious.

While the storytelling was still there, I sensed that they seemed more like parables than stories. They seemed to have a definite ulterior purpose and a moralizing that was absent from his earlier work.

His TED talk on the book was an atonement for being the impetus for the New York City “Windows and Graffiti Cleanup” that led to the “Stop and Frisk” policing that many people, including him, thought was responsible for the drop in the crime rate in the city. He discussed the 2013 ruling in the Floyd vs City of New York case in which the policy was declared unconstitutional. The policy was discontinued, and crime statistics did not go up, serving as prima facie evidence that Stop and Frisk had no bearing on crime. Completely ignored were other possibilities such as downgrading felonies to misdemeanors or refusing to prosecute crimes completely. Equally concerning was the continuing decrease in reporting crime because of the revolving-door justice system.

My biggest concern, however, is Gladwell’s discussion of public health issues and their inescapable connection with Critical Thinking. In the first part of the book he describes the dangers of monocultures: genetic homogeneity in cheetahs, bank robberies in Los Angeles, corruption in South Florida (into which he interjects the fact that Donald Trump lives there), suicides in a small town and vaccine hesitancy in the Waldorf Schools. He points to the low vaccine rates of children attending the Waldorf Schools and ties it to…wait for it…Critical Thinking! He quotes students:

What Waldorf does for you is, it definitely gives you this total curiosity about the world. There’s kind of this Waldorf effect of being so eager to learn and curious about everything, instead of it being mashed down and packed into boxes.

And:

The thing with Waldorf is that they teach you how to learn. And not only do they teach you how to learn, they teach you how to want to learn, creating this desire and ability to find the answers that need to be found and to seek out the information that you need.(p 45)

I would call these incredible positives. I think the Malcolm Gladwell of 2000 would have as well, but not so the Malcolm Gladwell of 2024:

There is something wonderful about the way Waldorf fosters in its students a sense of curiosity about the world. But you can see how this idea can give people permission to wander off in some strange directions.

Patients who vaccinate their children are people who agree to defer to the expertise of the medical community. Can I tell you precisely how a vaccine works and what happens to my children’s immune systems when they are given a shot? No. But I realize there are lots of people who know more about this subject than me, and I trust their judgement. There is something about being part of the Waldorf community, by contrast, that encourages people not to default to the judgement of experts. It gives them the confidence to sort these kinds of difficult subjects for themselves. (pp 45-46, emphasis added)

The type of thinking Gladwell espouses depends upon absolute faith in the honesty and scientific integrity of the “experts.” When these are compromised, catastrophic results can, and did, result from this misplaced faith in experts. Only true Critical Thinkers were spared the consequences, many of which are only now beginning to become manifest.

Gladwell goes into great lengths exploring the physical factors that increase the likelihood of aerosolizing viral particles and identifies obesity and viscous saliva as key predictors of “spreaders.” He poses the problem of what to do about these people and what actions could be done to “prioritize interventions to block transmission.” He also exposes the high probability that a single “index patient” was responsible for the spread of the C2416T mutation of the Covid virus from the Marriott Biogen meeting to over 300,000 individuals.

Unsaid in all of this is the complete lack of attention to effective treatment of this disease! Gladwell spent his entire discussion on the measures to identify and stop transmission and no time on possible treatments that went unutilized! Absolutely no mention was made of the remarkable success of Drs. George Fareed and Brian Tyson in treating 7,000 Covid patients. When treated early with pharmaceutical and nutraceutical agents there were NO deaths. Even when treated late, only a few deaths resulted. Or did he consider the multiple other studies describing the need to treat Covid early, in the viral replication phase, instead of “following the advice of the experts” to self-isolate, sicken at home with no treatment and wait until it was too late? 

Hopefully, the upcoming change in administration will finally mean that the truth behind the Great Ethical Collapse with Covid will be made public.

My final disappointment with this latest work of Malcolm Gladwell comes from his own words, given in an interview with The Guardian:

Right after the 2016 election Gladwell predicted that President Trump would be in jail within a year, something that Gladwell’s mother likes to remind him of at least once a week. Suffice to say, he no longer wants to make political predictions. “Every time I think something [Trump] says is going to be the end of him, I’m proved wrong.”

Gladwell is supporting vice-president Kamala Harris in the upcoming presidential election. “I have a strong partisan rooting interest in the fact she’s half Jamaican, as I am,” he says. His mother, Joyce, comes from the same small town as Harris’s father. “All the Jamaicans in my life are beside themselves with excitement,” he says.

There you have it, in his own words. This man whom I thought a giant in the world of Critical Thinkers is shown to be a political Tribalist. While there may be other reasons for his support of Kamala Harris, the one he mentions in the interview is the fact that both he and Harris have Jamaican roots. No mention of policies. No mention of issues. It is the triumph of Postmodernism where nothing of real substance matters, only ideology and tribal allegiance.

My hope is that the recent mandate election will represent a true Tipping Point in the 2000 meaning, back to the world of ideas, issues, and true Critical Thinking. We need to learn from mistakes, not blindly repeat them.