Delusions of the Rich and Powerful: A Selection from Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All (2019)

“You are worth nothing without society because there can be no hedge fund managers, nor violinists, nor technology entrepreneurs, in the absence of a civilizational infrastructure that we take for granted. . . . If the streets weren’t safe or the stock markets weren’t regulated, it would be harder to make use of one’s talents. If banks weren’t forced to offer a guarantee of guarding your money, making money would be pointless. Even if your children attended private school, public schools very likely trained some of their teachers, and publicly financed roads connected that island of a school to the grid of the society. Then there is the fact that absent a political system of shared institutions, anyone could dominate anyone. Every person with anything precious to protect would be at constant risk of plunder by everybody else. . . .

A king presides over a multitude of truths. But a rebel, who takes no responsibility for the whole, is free to pursue his singular truth. That is the whole point of being a rebel. It is not in the rebel’s job description to worry about others who might have needs that are different from his. . . . It takes a certain acceptance of one’s own power to see oneself as facing moral choices. . . .

Pishevar’s refusal to own up to his power was not an isolated occurrence. Such modesty is a defining feature of Silicon Valley, an epicenter of new power. ‘They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings,’ writes Danah Boyd, a technology scholar. She came of age among hackers and renegades and then grew frustrated with their failure to accept victory. They now owned the tools of modern power. But the group’s self-image as ‘outsiders,’ a hangover from the sector’s countercultural origins, left it ‘ill-equipped to understand its own actions and practices as part of the elite, the powerful,’ Boyd argues. And powerful people who ‘see themselves as underdogs in a world where instability and inequality are rampant fail to realize that they have a moral responsibility.’ . . .

It can be disturbing that the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself. . . .

Maciej Ceglowski, the founder of a start-up called Pinboard, made waves in the Valley and beyond when he gave a talk comparing VCs first to the landed lords of feudal England, then to the central planners who once ran his native Poland:

‘There’s something very fishy about California capitalism. Investing has become the genteel occupation of our gentry, like having a country estate used to be in England. It’s a class marker and a socially acceptable way for rich techies to pass their time. Gentlemen investors decide what ideas are worth pursuing, and the people pitching to them tailor their proposals accordingly.

The companies that come out of this are no longer pursuing profit, or even revenue. Instead, the measure of their success is valuation—how much money they’ve convinced people to tell them they’re worth. There’s an element of fantasy to the whole enterprise that even the tech elite is starting to find unsettling.

We had people like this back in Poland, except instead of venture capitalists we called them central planners. They, too, were in charge of allocating vast amounts of money that didn’t belong to them. They, too, honestly believed they were changing the world, and offered the same kinds of excuses about why our day-to-day life bore no relation to the shiny, beautiful world that was supposed to lie just around the corner.’ . . .

For people to question . . . private, plutocratic social change . . . is not to deny the good it is capable of doing, any more than to question monarchy is to say that kings always botch up the economy. It is to say that it does not matter what kind of a job the king is doing. It is to say that even the best he can do is not good enough, because of how it is done: the insulation, the chancing of everything on the king’s continued beneficence, the capacity of royal mistakes to alter lives they should not be touching. Similarly, to question the doing-well-by-doing-good globalists is not to doubt their intentions or results. Rather, it is to say that even when all those things are factored in, something is not quite right in believing they are the ones best positioned to effect meaningful change. To question their supremacy is very simply to doubt the proposition that what is best for the world just so happens to be what the rich and powerful think it is. It is to say you don’t want to confine your imagination of how the world might be to what can be done with their support. It is to say that a world marked more and more by private greed and the private provision of public goods is a world that doesn’t trust the people, in their collective capacity, to imagine another kind of society into being.”—Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2019)