Where’s Machiavelli?
Deconstructing Quotes
I’ll get to Niccolo Machiavelli on the left here later. I’m breaking a personal rule and posting some pictures that contain famous people instead of using my own photography. It’s for a good cause. I’m sitting in a cafe writing this because an image of Steve Jobs with a stupid quote has just popped up in my LinkedIn feed for the umpteenth time. The image is a lazy, silly thing to post into a feed. The lazy bit you will get, but will you be able to see why I think it’s silly? If not, it’s probably because like most people (including this writer) you are enamoured by the great achievements of Steve Jobs. However this image isn’t Steve Jobs. Unfortunately he happens to be dead. The image in question depicts Steve Jobs placed alongside an out of context quote. The statement may well have been clever in context, a competitive context — Apple v Microsoft. The creator of this jpeg has turned it into something completely idiotic. Let me explain….
The statement on your left is now not a criticism of Powerpoint per se. It’s a negative reflection on the use of slides containing images with text instead of explaining something purely verbally. That’s a ridiculous generalisation. It’s like saying people who create storyboards and/or direct movies cannot write books. Are the majority of movies formulaic and not particularly valuable? The answer is subjective, but I would say ‘yes’. Are the majority of Powerpoint or Keynote presentations unimaginative yawn fests? Again subjective, but I would say ‘affirmative’. In both cases that’s a function of the creative and productive forces behind the slides and the ‘actors’ presenting them.
So why is this particular image an unintentional comic parody?
Well….
This is something Jobs communicated verbally.
Think about it….
The image is the equivalent of a Powerpoint slide. It contradicts itself.
If Jobs were alive and saw an employee of his create that, it’s not unthinkable that he’d fly into a rage. It’s not Steve Jobs’ fault that he’s used in this way. It’s unlikely he would be so stupid. Our brains are wired to consume information visually. The inventive and creative outputs of Jobs himself revolve around visuals. He was all about creating intuitive screens. He led major innovations in 3D animation and hence visual storytelling. His quote is competitive and nothing else. Out of context and presented on the equivalent of a slide, it makes a mockery of his enormous intelligence.
“The frame, the definition, is a type of context. And context … determines the meaning of things. There is no such thing as the view from nowhere, or from everywhere for that matter.”
Noam Shpancer
Of course oft-times little nuggets of genuine wisdom are posted. In the minority of cases where these nuggets are not over-worn clichés, I would still argue that taking up a chunk of screen with a one liner is rarely good practice. If people must do that, why are they not posting Shakespeare or Socrates? And yes I know “the unexamined life is not worth living“ is frequently quoted, but it’s posted far too frequently and it’s often not ascribed to Socrates. Of course Socrates never wrote a word. We only hear the impressions of his words second hand through his admirer Plato. I digress.
Do people really think that Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and a few mega-wealthy individuals have some monopoly on great things to say? Is it really believed that the greatest minds in history have not said things that cause one to reflect on how we live and work? I’m sure these things are not believed. It’s because we regularly follow convention. We sometimes assume the wisdom of convention, the wisdom of the crowd. Both are contradictions. If wisdom were commonplace, it would have no currency. The fact that wisdom is used in place of insight when we discuss lean startup techniques and A/B testing is not the fault of the word itself. Wisdom by definition can never ever be commonplace, because wisdom is always relative and always elevated.
Shakespeare used the ‘mob’ in the play ‘Julius Caesar’ as a rather less insightful ‘character’. That may sound elitist but we’re all an easily swayed loud ‘mob’ or quieter ‘herd’ for most of the waking moments of our lives — this writer included. Life is too complex to spend every waking moment questioning things and marching against the tide. We’d all die prematurely of stress if we lived that way. Most people would describe me as someone who rarely marches to a common drum, but I’m self-aware enough to know that’s exactly what I do most waking moments of my life. Hopefully that’s not so true when I’m using a keyboard or a camera to create, but I’m sure even then that is reality some of the time.
“Know thyself.”
Delphic maxim. An aphorism with great merit.
A few historically great minds are of course quoted regularly e.g. Albert Einstein and Sun Tzu. For some reason people regularly quote Sun Tzu. However they will not quote (as a rule) Niccolo Machiavelli. The reason being that ‘Machiavellian’ is a pejorative adjective inappropriately ascribed to one of the great minds of the Italian renaissance. People are afraid to associate themselves with him. In my view Machiavelli’s quotes are very close in spirit to Oscar Wilde. They are, after all, the arch pragmatists. Yet we love to quote the loveable rogue we perceive Wilde to have been. And perhaps there’s an inherited guilt associated with his horrendous treatment. In fairness, a carefree gay Irish genius with a big mouth was never going to fare too well in Victorian England. His fate was all too predictable. He’s now one of the most loved and quoted writers in the English-speaking world. Time rewrites ‘who’ we are perceived to be, but never accurately. When we disappear, it seems hugely probable we definitively disappear and only impressions remain. However some people leave valuable impressions that echo through time.
Wilde and Machiavelli are two of the most quotable people in history. Sun Tzu also had a way with one liners and wrote about the art of war and martial strategies. I guess that’s more acceptable in an age where we see 9 year old girls being taught how to handle uzis on television and where we collectively yawn as crowded civilian areas are bombed. Ah yes. We ‘contextualize’ things in very creative ways when it suits us.
It doesn’t matter what these guys wrote about — thay all contributed valuable ideas, sometimes beautifully expressed. Even people who could be described as intellectual thugs should not have their great works obscured because of their ill-judged personal sympathies — Heidegger and Wagner would be great examples of that. Certainly reprehensible in some of their affiliations, they were nevertheless men of genius that left deep and valuable footprints behind them.
Machiavelli did not have such shameful sympathies, yet a pejorative adjective makes him persona non-grata. Few adjectives have evolved so unjustly as ‘Machiavellian’. Another one would be ‘gaudy’ which evolved from one of the most inventive and original artists in history, Antonio Gaudi. I wonder how many people know that Gaudi invented the underground car park? If you’ve ever been to Barcelona long enough to take some of it in, you’ll know that few architects have left such a transformational and unique signature on a major city. Machiavelli’s and Gaudi’s ‘crimes’? They were too many decades ahead of their time. Only death and mature reflection would bring their memories fame. Another digression.
Steve Jobs inspired with the breadth of his achievements. Branson continues to inspire with his. Quoting them ad nauseam is not appropriate to a network like LinkedIn where we are supposed to be adding value in areas like business, science, technology, the arts, many other areas of learning and life itself. The world is full of smart entrepreneurs with interesting things to say and history is enriched by the writings of the greatest minds whose words have withstood the acid test — time itself. Appealing to people through lazy one liners accompanied by familiar images will always get a reaction and boost your Klout score. However smart people will rarely be interested because such actions carry little clout.
Very few people write original content. Even fewer write about things they care about. It was shocking to see a brigade of people rush with disrespectful haste to create really badly written pieces on how the talented but tragic Robin Williams is supposed to teach us lessons on life. That’s a topic for another day, but the connection is using a media figure inappropriately to get attention.
A huge percentage of LinkedIn users curate (choose and post the work of others). Taken as a whole they are many times more important than the small number of us who attempt to write things that have value. Curators, not writers and photographers and graphic artists, decide what you see in your feed. As a curator of material, you are immensely important. So all I ask is think twice before you post an image of someone with a one-liner. Pose yourself this question:
“Am I probably adding real value to a significant percentage of my connections?”
If the answer is probably “no”, then you are polluting their feeds and that’s not a trivial matter. Let’s keep LinkedIn well above where Twitter is right now. Let’s carefully, thoughtfully post valuable, insightful (and if possible entertaining) articles. Let’s enrich the lives of our connections and/or give them a new perspective on something that may interest them.
After all connections are people we’re supposed to care about.
“I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.”
Niccolo Machiavelli
“It is the custom to be shocked by him, and he is certainly sometimes shocking. But many other men would be equally so if they were equally free from humbug.”
Bertrand Russell (on Machiavelli)
“’Exactly so!’ declared the little man, rubbing his hands together as if it pleased him. ‘I am a humbug.’”
L. Frank Baum
written by Stephen Cummins
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Originally published at www.linkedin.com.
