What I've read, Winner Takes All.

I've been reading as much as I can recently, and I've found that the amount one wishes to read will never equal reality. Furthermore, as a writer I like to interact with what I see, read, experience, and sometimes that takes a long time per book (or trip/experience). Note that recent piece I had published on the Theaters of War (ToW) was about a reading I attended 2 years ago.

I'm getting old and Slow, you say? 

Maybe

 But it's been a good way for me to absorb, react and write about my world. It also helps in terms of deeper thoughts. Take the piece on ToW. Just recently, after reading my short piece and wondering about it, I think I've come to something of an epiphany about it all. It helps to visit and revisit thoughts. 

This is why I don't sign up for 100 books in a year kind of thing. It just wouldn't work for me. Sure I could do it, but like many things in our world, quantity doesn't equal quality.

Anyhow. So this piece is about the book Winner Takes All . It's a good book and worth reading, though it didn't make the cut for my favorite books of the 2018. The book takes a look at the idea of elites in our society, especially the philanthropic work and the idea of what good actually gets done. 

It's a brave book and certainly one that's needed for today's world, though I think that in the end it doesn't seem to go far enough.  

Let me break it down. The book does a good job of tearing apart the incestual world that I had long ,true to my contrarian soul, thought of as nothing more than grift. Things like TED talks and conferences where people who want to do good, necessarily meet up with very rich people to get that done. 

This means that any one who wants to do good (in this world of philanthropy) must necessarily suck up to the powerful who have a vested interest in making sure that the world stays a certain way (with all its iniquities and inequalities and hierarchical ways). Essentially what ends up happening is that the "ideas" created to solve problems are necessarily ones that will never change the status quo. 

So the people advocating for tax cuts etc are being kowtowed to for money and they will never ever give money to something that will undermine how they got most of their money. 

The same goes for the lecture circuit like TED and the like. You do some incisive lecture that tears into the status quo and you  don't get invited again. You kiss ass to the corporate sector, don't focus on systemic issues (or if you do, claim there's some easy solution that will overcome centuries of oppression) and you'll be fine. So don't join a union, pop a pill. Or actually, don't change the status quo stand up straight.

I went to Columbia and this kind of thinking, where the people think one only need to change the size of their smile to "win" is endemic in the elite circles of the world. Sure, it works for some people, but when there are larger systemic issues at play, it's mainly useless. 

Well, not useless for the plutocrats of our society as energy not spent taking down a system that benefits them is something they want.

To that end, this kind of thinking is inherently conservative (even if many of those who run in this specific set of crowds are socially liberal in terms of rights for some marginalized folks) as it does blame people for being poor and does accept that bootstrapping is a valid way of getting people out of poverty. 

Indeed, it's easy to like these plutocrats as they seem to have their hearts in a better place than some other plutocrats. Take the Koch brothers, for example, and how they are actively trying to undermine many levels of government for the good of some mad libertarian vision of the world.  (if you want a good book on that topic, Democracy in Chains is a solid one).

That gets us into the problem with the book. He's looking at liberal plutocrats (and their courtesans), the world that naturally forms around them, and he's not giving us many numbers to prove the stupidity of the situation (or the inherent falseness of their acts of "giving"). Furthermore, he's not looking deep enough into the conservative plutocrats who do a lot of damage as well.* 

 I sense that another problem with the book is that it should dive a little more into the details at hand (like I said above, numbers would be nice).  Also a lot of the beginning seems to linger without making the incisive point (made later) about how the plutocrats are looking to seem helpful but don't want to change the status quo. I would also say it's much more sinister than that: that they don't help outside of the social status gained from that. 

Nevertheless, the book is good enough that I recommend it to you and think it's valid as it gets the main idea about much of the rich liberal world right (the don't be negative thinking that we see in the media as well).

Hell, just writing this review** makes me think about the ToW piece I did and how that is in fact another way of packaging some "don't change the status quo" thinking in the cover of classical literature.


endNote: I should say that the reviews on Amazon are a whole different beast. It's very interesting to see how some people who claim to be a part of the system that Anand criticizes make the mistake of claiming this is a solutionless book. Sounds familiar. I imagine if Anand had told people that they just need to pop certain pills or gave some pseudo-scientific reason for why they should stand straight before usurping the system, they would have liked him better. So it goes. 




* This is even if I understand that the book can only hold so many ideas before becoming useless. 

** And yet another aside, just writing on a blog, even one as scatterbrained as this post, makes me realize the biggest issue with Twitter is that it doesn't allow for the thinking and discovery that comes with long form writing (typing or longhand). No, really. This may be near "get off my lawn" territory, but it's not. Give it a try and let me know.


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