Housekeeping
Summer Sale! Get 15% off id you subscribe before 12th June!
Everyone now has access to the GPTs I made for free. One gives advice on reading great literature (based on this blog). One you can ask all about Second Act. One gives you writing advice. And one gives life advice from Samuel Johnson. Try them out and let me know what you think!
My Western Canon salon series with Interintellect starts on 6th June. First, Shakespeare’s Inadequate Kings, but then Emma, and on to Goethe, Turgenev, Wilde.
My thanks to all of you who are reading Second Act and telling me how much you are enjoying it. It makes a good Father’s Day present… Amazon US. | Amazon UK.
Autonomy, partnerships, failure, mimesis.
Before today’s essay, I want to draw your attention to a series of essays I published with Entrepreneur First, a talent investor in London and San Francisco. Some of this is among my best work, certainly the fourth essay, which is my Emersonian response to the cult of Girard.
How do entrepreneurs succeed? Why do some people make breakthroughs? Do founders need the right idea or the right partner? How can you avoid the mimetic trap of being like everyone else? I tried to answer these in a series of pieces written for Entrepreneur First.
Are you trading your ambition for security? Too often, talented individuals settle for the normalcy of law, finance, or consulting — jobs that stifle innovative potential. Eric Yuan, Zoom founder, had to leave his corporate job to make his idea real.
Great ideas often emerge from the push and pull of productive partnerships. Look at the cautionary tale of Maurice Wilkins, the scientist who missed out on partnering with the right people – and lost the race to discover DNA’s double helix structure.
The ability to learn from failure is essential to success, as demonstrated by Katalin Kariko, the Nobel Prize winner. New research suggests that the start-up lore—fail fast, iterate, and learn from failure —is correct.
This all relies on a strong will. Being a mindless non-conformist is just as bad as copying other people. The example of Larry Page guides us to a solution: nurture your imagination to cultivate anti-mimesis.
On Civilization
Who now will speak on behalf of civilisation? We debate nothing more intensely than our societal values and but not enough about the question of civilisation and how to preserve and progress it. Elon Musk is perhaps the most impressive person alive, and instead of discussing his ambition to colonise Mars we spend our time bickering about the Twitter algorithm and the enshittification of everything. Perhaps the problem wasn’t the algorithm; perhaps the problem was the users.
We take so much for granted! “We are but too apt,” as Burke said, “to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced and possibly may be upheld.” We live in an age of miracles: free of so many of the diseases, pests, ignorances, and wants of the past. There is much that could and should be improved: but to summon the spirit to make those improvements, we have to feel the tremendous luck by which we arrived here. We have to feel also the great efforts of the past and recognise them in the heroes of today.
Civilisation is not fragile. It cannot be smashed in a second like a vase. But it is susceptible to leaks, rust, entropy. Societies can wither like unwatered vines. Just as our transport infrastructure will either improve and get worse, and just as that is, in turn, connected to the general prosperity of the nation, of our ability to pay for the upkeep, to innovate for the future, and to make the system productive, so are the thousand other conveniences that we use each day part of a nexus of susceptible parts, each of which needs to be admired to be sustained. And that is all reliant on people, on ideas, on what we choose to elevate into our highest regard. We have to want it; it will not simply arrive like the rain.
Today, though, the philistine supremacy is real. Taylor Swift is on the syllabus at Harvard! There is no vision of greatness here, no grand sense of the past that is part of the sustaining effort of building the future. We are privileged to be able to sit around and compare Swift to Wordsworth (heinous an activity though that may be); but her lyrics are nothing as to the astonishment of his. My God, I tremble at the thought that we are beginning to equate the two.
We trade these things off slowly, one by one, like an aristocrat still grand enough to sell parcels of land to fund his London lavishness. No one transaction ruins the family. But the world does not wait on our pleasures. The past recedes, the past recedes and fades. We choose between the weak nostalgia of admiring the pop culture of yesteryear or keeping in our sights the idea of a great society, one that can stand with Athens, Rome, Florence.
In his fifth review of Grote’s History of Greece J.S. Mill said this about Plato:
He judged them from the superior elevation of a great moral and social reformer: from that height he looked down contemptuously enough, not on them alone, but on statesmen, orators, artists—on the whole practical life of the period, and all its institutions, popular, oligarchical, or despotic; demanding a reconstitution of society from its foundations, and a complete renovation of the human mind.
Who do we have so looking down upon us now?
Civilisation is not fragile. Dear Henry, to judge by the dangerous return of antisemitism it is and how. I expect the fighters of freedom, democracy and free speech to come to the fore.