In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, there was an essay by Jennifer Szalai titled Hannah Arendt Is Not Your Icon. I was vaguely aware of Arendt as a public intellectual of the mid twentieth century, someone who was both philosopher and journalist. The only thing I really knew about her was that she had witnessed the trial of the Nazi official Adolph Eichmann and written a book on it, Eichmann in Jerusalem, subtitled a report on the banality of evil. Eichmann, it turned out, was not a fire-breathing monster, but a bloodless bureaucrat. He was dispassionately doing logistics work; it just so happened that his work was orchestrating the extermination of millions.
Until now, when I’d heard any reference to Arendt’s banality of evil, it had been as a notable discovery that Arendt had made as witness to the trial. And so I was surprised to read in Szalai’s essay how controversial Arendt’s ideas were when she originally published them. As Szala noted:
The Anti-Defamation League urged rabbis to denounce her from the pulpit. “Self-Hating Jewess Writes Pro-Eichmann Book” read a headline in the Intermountain Jewish News. In France, Le Nouvel Observateur published excerpts from the book and subsequently printed letters from outraged readers in a column asking, “Hannah Arendt: Est-elle nazie?”
Hannah Arendt, in turns out, had told the wrong story.
We all carry in our minds models of how the world works. We use these mental models to make sense of events that happen in the world. One of the tools we have for making sense of the world is storytelling; it’s through stories that we put events into a context that we can understand.
When we hear an effective story, we will make updates to our mental models based on its contents. But something different happens when we hear a story that is too much at odds with our worldview: we reject the story, declaring it to be obviously false. In Arendt’s case, her portrayal of Eichmann was too much of a contradiction against prevailing beliefs about the type of people who could carry out something like the Holocaust.
You can see a similar phenomenon playing out with Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite, about the convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. The reception to Lewis’s book has generally been negative, and he has been criticized for being too close to Bankman-Fried to write a clear-eyed book about him. But I think something else is at play here. I think Lewis told the wrong story.
It’s useful to compare Lewis’s book with two other recent ones about Silicon Valley executives: John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood and Sarah Wynn-Williams Careless People. Both books focus on the immorality of Silicon Valley executives (Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos in the first book, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan of Facebook in the second). These are tales of ambition, hubris, and utter indifference to the human suffering left in their wake. Now, you could tell a similar story about Bankman-Fried. In fact, this is what Zeke Faux did in his book Number Go Up. but that’s not the story that Lewis told. Instead, Lewis told a very different kind of story. His book is more of a character study of a person with an extremely idiosyncratic view of risk. The story Lewis told about Bankman-Fried wasn’t the story that people wanted to hear. They wanted another Bad Blood, and that’s not the book he ended up writing. As a consequencee, he told the wrong story.
Telling the wrong story is a particular risk when it comes to explaining a public large-scale incidents. We’re inclined to believe that a big incident can only happen because of a big screw-up: that somebody must have done something wrong for that incident to happen. If, on the other hand, you tell a story about how the incident happened despite nobody doing anything wrong, then you are in essence telling an unbelievable story. And, by definition, people don’t believe unbelievable stories.
One example of such an incident story is the book Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks over Northern Iraq by Scott Snook. Here are some quotes from the Princeton University Press site for that book (emphasis mine).
On April 14, 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot down two U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopters over Northern Iraq, killing all twenty-six peacekeepers onboard. In response to this disaster the complete array of military and civilian investigative and judicial procedures ran their course. After almost two years of investigation with virtually unlimited resources, no culprit emerged, no bad guy showed himself, no smoking gun was found. This book attempts to make sense of this tragedy—a tragedy that on its surface makes no sense at all.
…
His conclusion is disturbing. This accident happened because, or perhaps in spite of everyone behaving just the way we would expect them to behave, just the way theory would predict. The shootdown was a normal accident in a highly reliable organization.
Snook also told the wrong story, one that subverts our usual sensemaking processes rather than supporting it: the accident makes no sense at all.
This is why I think it’s almost impossible to do an effective incident investigation for a public large-scale incident. The risk of telling the wrong story is simply too high.
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