The modern cult of “thought leadership” as hard evidence of a society in intellectual decline
There is an old chestnut that’s increasingly occupying my attention these days: is the world really getting worse, or am I simply experiencing the standard hand-wringing despair of an older person increasingly incapable of adapting to modern views?
My heart tells me that things are objectively getting worse, but I am skeptical enough to be wary. True, I would never have imagined being at the point where George W. Bush didn’t seem all that bad, relatively speaking (at least he genuinely seemed to believe the nonsense he was declaring, and he wasn’t a wantonly cruel megalomaniac), but perhaps I’m losing my sense of judgment in such matters (as I’m sure my younger self would agree). It’s awfully hard to know for sure.
Aside from the fact that one of the few things that unites all past human societies is the constant old geezer lament of the moral laxity of today’s youth, the very notion of a decline logically implies that there was once a time that was somehow unequivocally, demonstrably, better. And it’s awfully hard to convincingly point to when that might have been. During the Vietnam War? The Cuban Missile Crisis? The Soviet Gulags? The Cultural Revolution? Nazi aggression? The Opium Wars?
But now, at long last, I think I’ve found a hard, incontrovertible fact to support the claim that Western civilization (always a tendentious notion, as Gandhi so famously pointed out) is clearly going in the wrong direction: the near-universal acceptance of the term “thought leader”.
It’s true that in the past some intrepid souls have gone to the trouble of questioning the phrase, and a laudable few have even openly mocked it (such as Daniel Brooks’ cutting New York Times op-ed), but that was all years ago now. These days, as our inboxes get deluged by tediously spammy emails assuring us that we’ve been specially selected to receive their offerings due to our impeccable thought leadership credentials, it’s simply unavoidable. The Thought Leader, it must sadly be concluded, is here to stay.
Wikipedia, ever the reliable source for penetrating the mysteries of our Zeitgeist, informs us that, “A thought leader is a person who specializes in a given area and whom others in that industry turn to for guidance” before adding, some perfunctorily, “As the term implies, a thought leader leads others in the thinking around a given topic.”
There is much to pick on here, from the insidious equivalence between the deliberately vague “area” (of “knowledge”, one can only presume) and “industry” which vividly demonstrates the term’s sulfurously incoherent business-speak origins to probing the specifics of those mysterious “guidance-turning” mechanisms, but for me all of that pales in comparison to its value as a clear signpost marking 1982 as the official beginning of the end of our collective mental faculties.
Why 1982? Well, that was the year that the BBC released its celebrated Horizon documentary, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, with the famous American physicist Richard Feynman. And a direct comparison of Feynman’s insights with the notion of a “thought leader” is extremely revealing.
“We get experts on everything that sound like they’re sort of scientific experts. But they’re not scientific; they sit at a typewriter and make stuff up… I may be quite wrong, but I don’t think I’m wrong. You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself.
“I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it, they haven’t done the work necessary, haven’t done the checks necessary, haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know: that this stuff is wrong and they’re intimidating people.”
And here we are, some 40-odd years later, in a society rife with self-proclaimed “thought leaders”, where no attention is paid to any sort of objective, demonstrable process to guarantee that they have any more understanding about the topic at hand (sorry: “industry”) than the rest of us.
Instead, their entire case for establishing themselves as “thought leaders” simply rests on their ability to convince people that they know something. In other words, like so much in our current age, knowledge is no longer regarded as a thing in itself that can be objectively appraised. The only thing that matters is whether or not one is sufficiently popular—whether sufficiently large numbers of others endorse what you’re saying.
That might be a reasonable way to run a podcast series or TV show, but it’s a particularly dangerous and inappropriate way to make meaningful judgments on anything requiring actual knowledge. And as it happens, there was nobody more sensitive to the dangers of conflating knowledge and human popularity than Richard Feynman. Here’s another excerpt from that same 1982 Horizon episode, where he explains his frustration with the official popularity contest associated with the National Academy of Sciences.
“When I became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, I ultimately had to resign because that was another organization most of whose time was spent in choosing who was illustrious enough to join, to be allowed to join us in our organization—including issues like, we physicists stick together because they’ve a very good chemist that they’re trying to get in and we haven’t got enough room for this other physicist. What’s the matter with chemists? The whole thing was rotten because its purpose was mostly to decide who could have this honor, okay? I don’t like honors.”
1982, then: that’s when the whole thing went irrevocably south. Of course, it was often much worse before. Back in 1931, for example, a collection of essays was published, One Hundred Authors Against Einstein, all united in their vigorous personal (and sometimes flagrantly anti-semitic) insistence that the theory of relativity was incorrect. A bemused Einstein was said to have remarked, “If I was incorrect, it wouldn’t have required 100 to say so: only one would have been sufficient.”
Nowadays, however, you’d definitely need that 100.
Howard Burton, September 23, 2024
Howard is the author of six non-fiction books on various topics and the creator of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
