LET'S pull a Malcolm Gladwell on his own new book. What is the overstory? My pious old father would have said if a cow gives good milk, treat her udder with respect. The overstory is American sequel culture. Think Sharknado 1-6. Better yet, Johnny Depp.
The reason we watched The Curse of The Black Pearl and Dead Man's Chest and At World's End and On Stranger Tides and Dead Men Tell No Tales is that there was a common denominator: Johnny Depp at his manic best. Yeah, yeah, all Pirates of the Caribbean franchise movies are good, but our Johnny made us acolytes.
By analogy, one can already surmise the coming success and triumph of Malcolm Gladwell's Revenge of the Tipping Point in bookstores, airport hawkers' corners, and the airier sphere of Audible. It's going to be massive, you know. In a year's time too, though, you'll find it in second-hand dealerships on Saturday markets. But now you want to give it significance. If ever there were a book written for a particular moment, it's Revenge of the Tipping Point.
In The Tipping Point (2000), Gladwell explored how small things can lead to a “tipping point", when an idea, trend, or behaviour suddenly starts spreading rapidly, like an epidemic. Minor influences create massive shifts, a concept that has influenced marketing, public policy and the social sciences. The book focuses on the factors that cause ideas or behaviours to “tip" into widespread popularity or sway and explores the roles of couplers (people with wide social networks), mavens (knowledgeable people who share information), and salespeople (persuasive individuals) in driving social change. Gladwell illustrated this concept with examples from various fields, including fashion, business, and crime prevention.
To quote my father again: The moment an innocent little fart suddenly turns into a dump.
Now, in 2024, Gladwell is taking stock again. He has already admitted over the years that he may have exaggerated cause and effect at the time. Why would he revisit the tipping point concept now? The simple answer is that the relatively simple problems of the 1990s have had a lot of sequels since that can be fruitfully examined to show that the phenomenon did have a tipping point.
What counts in his favour this time around is that the concept of the tipping point is already established. He no longer had to look for the couplers and the mavens, so to speak. They're already so much a part of the larger social media order that they're not truly unique anymore.
Sometimes this leads to bizarre revelations. The opioid crisis in the US is directly related to the regulatory environment. The states where the law obliges medics to make up all prescriptions in triplicates, one of which is preserved by the state's oversight bodies, have suffered a minor impact from the opioid crisis. States where there was no such legislation have been engulfed in it, with enormous death rates.
Gladwell, a Canadian, is not slow to impress on one the fundamental stupidity to be found in Americans' behaviour. And, of course, also the ever-present crooks who are ready to corrupt any system. Philip Esformes, who was convicted of the largest Medicare scam in US history, was part of a very distinguished family in Chicago. Then he moved to Miami and created a whole economic substrate of people, whether they were poor or wealthy, who used medical care to milk the system for as much money as possible.
Esformes was convicted, but his one neighbour in Miami made sure his punishment was mitigated: Donald Trump.
Gladwell had no shortage of material for this new look at the triggers of change. Covid and the Americans' incredible ability to accept any conspiracy theory as the sacred truth is a small part of this book. One reads with the book with great interest, even if you sometimes feel that you don't quite understand where Gladwell is going with his arguments. I constantly got the feeling that Gladwell was a behaviourist who got lost in journalism. He is also a gentle soul, never sinking into the cynicism that journalists sometimes need to hedge themselves against the extremes of human behaviour they write about.
I am thinking here in particular of the way in which Gladwell described the astounding role played by the Waldorf schools in the great California measles outbreaks of the past decade and a half. He writes with restrained judgment. He describes how parents who should know better watch their children go through great suffering because they apply Rudolf Steiner's approach according to their own prejudices. Their children have to take the pain, their consciences are Steiner-clean.
At one point, Gladwell says that too often one gets the feeling that all he is writing about will one day make a great film. That is his only errant reasoning: Hollywood has been doing this for years. I'm convinced that we watch American TV and movies because it makes us feel superior.
How useful is Revenge of the Tipping Point to South African readers? Good intellectual entertainment, sure enough. But look at what he manages to do with the overstory approach. With this book in hand, you can understand the collapse of South African systems.
Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is published by Little, Brown Book Group and costs R423 at Graffiti.
♦ VWB ♦
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Kerneels Breytenbach is a former publisher and journalist from Cape Town. He also authored the short story collection Morsdood van die Honger, the novels Glimlag, Piekniek by Hangklip, Ester, and Hond se Gedagte, and the cookbook Die Lekkerste Lekker. He often writes for magazines about food and restaurants, and as a journalist has also become known as an expert on pop music.
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