Letter to The Editor of the New York Times by Fred M. Sander, published on December 19, 2008.
To the Editor:
David Brooks summarizes the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “Outliers”: “Exceptionally successful people are not pioneers who created their own success, he argues. They are the lucky beneficiaries of social arrangements.”
Mr. Brooks counters this view with the alternative hypothesis of the power of an individual’s will and capacity to focus imaginatively.
This merely restates an old question of whether leaders create their followers or the reverse.
I think this is a false either-or dichotomy. The debate would benefit from complex examples:
Did Barack Obama create an electorate, or did an electorate (deeper cultural forces) select Mr. Obama?
Did J. Robert Oppenheimer rise to Promethean stature in the context of the discoveries of modern physics just when we needed to confront and defeat Germany?
And on a current darker note, did the man charged in a Ponzi scheme flourish in a culture deeply patterned by cultural greed?
Fred M. Sander
New York, Dec. 17, 2008
The writer is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical School.