On Civilization

Autonomy, partnerships, failure, mimesis.

Housekeeping

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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.

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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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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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.