Malcolm Gladwell’s new vision of the world ahead of us: Our lives ‘can be tipped’

By 1978, nearly three decades after the end of the Second World War, only one Holocaust museum existed in the entire United States — in Los Angeles.

History books from the post-war period barely mentioned the Holocaust, and the term itself appeared rarely in newspapers or magazines. As a result, most Americans, including many younger Jews, had no knowledge of the atrocity.

But suddenly, Malcolm Gladwell writes in his new book, “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” something changed.

Two NBC executives, Paul Klein and Irwin Segelstein, created a miniseries called “Holocaust: The Family Weiss Story,” an unflinching look at the horrors of the Holocaust.

The show aired over a four-day period in 1978 and became a huge hit, reaching half the households in America.

Many Americans, who had never learned about the Holocaust, were shocked and horrified.

In Germany, when the translated version aired the following year, it caused a social and cultural reckoning.

German youths disavowed their Nazi elders, and the government enacted new laws to target Nazi war criminals.

The show also helped many Jews in America come to terms with their collective trauma. “What ‘Holocaust’ did was give permission for the world to talk about something that had until that point been considered off limits,” says Gladwell.

Today, Holocaust museums stand in almost every major city in America.

All because two guys made a TV show.

“Revenge” comes more than two decades after Gladwell’s first book, “The Tipping Point,” whose simple-sounding thesis — that little things can make a big difference — helped it become a best-seller.

“Look at the world around you,” he wrote at the time. “It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push — in just the right place — it can be tipped.”

Gladwell’s new book explores how individuals can use power and influence to shape our “overstories”—the collective narratives we tell ourselves as groups or as a society — and in so doing steward policies and perspectives.

For something to tip, in other words, it needs a tipper. “If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who where and when to push has real power,” says Gladwell.

Borrowing from the language of epidemiology, he says “social epidemics” can be spread by people for good and for ill.

A tipper, we later learn, can be anyone: a TV producer, college admissions dean, sociologist, pharmaceutical CEO, an unscrupulous doctor or everyday citizen.

Gladwell also investigates the importance of place in shaping our stories.

Communities, he argues, reinforce and strengthen our ideas of self.

The book is brimming with fun and insightful anecdotes that help to reinforce Gladwell’s thesis:

Casper and C-Dog were prolific bank-robbers in Los Angeles who orchestrated 175 robberies in a two year period, Gladwell tells us. They inspired copycats and kick-started a crime wave: in 1992 alone, LA experienced a robbery every hour of every day. Casper and C-Dog, in Gladwell’s telling, were “superspreaders” who created a contagious story about LA as a gangster’s paradise.

Miami went from sleepy southern town to drug capital in 1980, thanks to three shocks: an influx of drug money, criminal justice corruption, and Castro opening Cuba’s borders.

The city’s history as a drug nexus in the 1980s shapes its later reputation as the Medicare fraud capital of America. In defense of Miami, the city is known for much more than that, something Gladwell omits.

Sometimes, individuals shape history without knowing it.

In February of 2020, the biotechnology company Biogen hosted a meeting at the Marriott in Boston. Employees flew in from all over the world, including one person who had contracted COVID and was slated to speak to a packed house. This one ‘superspreader’ we later learn, was responsible for more than 300,000 people getting sick.

This is what Gladwell calls the “law of the few.”

Gladwell then turns his attention to those who knowingly try to shape the world around us.

Consider the case of the Lawrence Tract, Gladwell says, a small housing development in racially segregated 1950s Palo Alto, Calif., whose founders sought to strike a perfect balance of roughly one-third each between black, white and Asian-American residents.

Calling this golden third rule a “universal law” he provides many other examples wherein hitting one-third representation led to desirable outcomes: mixed neighborhoods, corporate boardrooms, elite schools and so forth.

Gladwell clearly thinks social engineering can be a good thing, though it can go wrong — and he cites university admissions as an example.

But Gladwell’s beef isn’t with race-based systems such as affirmative action as its commonly understood — quite the opposite.

Targeting the scholastic obsession with filling varsity sports rosters, he says: “instead of admitting underprivileged students with lower academic credentials, athletic affirmative action admits privileged students with lower academic credentials,” noting that most athletes at school like Harvard are white and upper-middle class.

In another far more pernicious example, he asks if the opioid epidemic was the result of widespread malpractice by unscrupulous doctors.

No — in fact, most doctors acted honorably.

But a tiny group of them, helpfully identified by consulting firm McKinsey as “super-core” for the benefit of Purdue Pharma sales reps, wrote nearly all the prescriptions. One “superspreader” doctor, a favorite of Purdue, maker of OxyContin, wrote 319,560 prescriptions over a decade, before ultimately losing his license.

Gladwell does his best work examining how mass media shapes, informs and can even re-write the stories we tell ourselves.

He starts with the striking example of the Holocaust. In another example, he credits the sitcom “Will & Grace”for changing perceptions of gay people in American society, opening the door to gay marriage.

Before “Will & Grace,” Gladwell says, homosexuality was a problem to be solved in films and TV, with the story told from the straight character’s point of view. The gay character was a foil to the straight protagonist.

With “Will & Grace,” something changed. The main character, Will, worked as a corporate lawyer and lived a normal and full life- and he was gay. By depicting gay life as normal — generic even — the show allowed Americans to see a whole group of people in a different light. “Gay marriage tipped,” he says. “That surprised us. It shouldn’t have.”

Gladwell is nothing if not thought provoking. One is left wondering if in today’s fragmented media environment, whether a film or TV show could have the same impact as “Holocaust: The Family Weiss Story”or “Will & Grace.”

We no longer have the monoculture of the 1970s. And because of social media, we’re mostly confined to self-reinforcing echo chambers.

Like any good Gladwell book, “Revenge of the Tipping Point” will leave you pondering his theories and asking more questions than he answers. Will the recent surge of investment in electric vehicles lead to a tipping point away from gas-powered cars?

Could Hollywood create a “You’ve got Mail” for A.I. or cryptocurrencies that changed our view of those technologies?

Could we even see a tipping point in our politics and the emergence of a third party in the US?

And who, in these and countless other instances, is doing the tipping?

Alex Tapscott, author of “Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier” and managing director of the Digital Asset Group, a division of Ninepoint Partners LP