October 27, 2021 • 28 mins
Ronald Young Jr. talks with Malcolm Gladwell (author of David and Goliath and the co-founder of Pushkin Industries) about what we can learn about surviving our current challenges by studying human behavior during past eras of stress and national threat.
Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, research by David Zha, booking by Lisa Dunn. Our managing producer is Sachar Mathias is the managing producer and Mia Lobel is the executive producer.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This is Solvable. I'm Ronald Young Jr. The rational
response to being asked to fight in a war is
to go crazy. That, of course, is the voice of
Pushkin co founder Malcolm Bladwell. And I invited Malcolm back
(00:37):
to Solvable because I've recently been thinking a lot about
something I read that he published back in twenty thirteen,
his book David and Goliath. The subtitle is Underdogs, Misfits
and the Art of Battling Giants. It's a book that
takes a closer look at events in which one outcome
is greatly favored over another and discusses why sometimes those
(00:58):
outcomes don't turn out as expected. This episode is a
little different from our typical Solvable and that we don't
exactly solve a problem here, but in the spirit of
the show, we're very optimistic in our discussion of a
big idea, and as you listen, you'll begin to get
a sense of exactly why we chose now to have
(01:18):
this particular discussion. Imagine you're living in Britain in the
late nineteen thirties. Germany is preparing to attack your country.
It's the start of the Second World War. The military
is mobilizing. Preparations are being made for mass casualties. You're
(01:40):
debating whether or not you should stay in the city
or move to the countryside until the danger has passed.
The British Military Command does a kind of projection of
what they think is going to happen, and they think
they're going to have six hundred thousand dead, one point
two million wounded, and mass panic. They think that no
one's going to go to work, which means that all
(02:01):
of industrial production in England will cease. They think that
the army will be useless because the army will be
spend all of its time trying to keep the civilians
like from going nuts. They really think it's over. The
fear and uncertainty in the air are palpable. But what
are you going to do? Can you still go to work?
(02:24):
What about friends of family? Will they be safe? What
is going to happen to all of you? And I
know these questions may feel familiar. It's just funny about
how a different circumstances in different times we have very
different responses to people who have this kind of psychological
(02:46):
reaction of invulnerability. They cannot be heroes or they can
be chumps. While our responses to the fear of an
impending battle and its immediate physical threats may be quite
different from our responses to the fear of a global pandemic.
There's a way in which they're actually kind of similar
community approach. We've fallen so in love with the language
(03:09):
of personal freedom and responsibility that we've forgotten the power
of collective appeals to community. Here's my conversation with Malcolm Gladwell.
We're going to examine the parallels and intersections of fear, vulnerability,
and responsibility when it comes to war and a global pandemic. Malcolm,
(03:32):
welcome back to Solvable. It's great to have you here
once again. Thank you. So I want to tell you
about the my earliest introduction to you. It was in
twenty thirteen and you were on the Ted Radio Hour
and you were giving an interview with Guy Roz about
your book David and Goliath, because you had just done
(03:55):
a Ted talk on that. Do you remember that, I do, Yeah, great.
I liked it because, you know, as a self proclaimed
church guy, you gave a very different definition to David
and Goliath, the battle what actually happened? And I love
this book. I bought it it's one of my favorites.
I think it's you know, a lot of people talk
about blank and outliers in the other books you wrote,
but David and Goliath is by far my favorite. And
(04:17):
I bought the book thinking I'm just gonna get all
these you know, insights about you know, underdogs and misfits
and all that, which I did, and I thought it
was gonna be purely based on David and Goliath. But
then I got to one chapter and it was chapter
five and a Canadian psychiatrist who wrote this book called
The Structure of Morale named J. T. McCurdy talks about
the bombings in Britain. Can you recount that? Yeah? Those,
(04:40):
So this is, by the way, thank you for the
kindroids about David and Glad. David and Glad happens to
be my favorite of all my books as well. So
this is something that has always not just fascinated me,
but puzzled people for a long time. Which was at
the start of the Second World War. The British knew
that the Germans had a fleet of bombers, and they
(05:04):
also knew the state of their defenses against bombers were
that there was nothing they could do to stop the Germans.
So the first thing they did, of course, was they
a lot of children who lived in London were moved
to the countryside. The second thing they did was they
got the fire trucks ready for what would be you know,
(05:25):
all kinds of all kinds of the normal things. More
than that, they became convinced that the devastation would be
such that the population of London would panic, and so
they did things like they converted a whole series of
buildings on the outskirts of London to psychiatric makeshift psychiatric hospitals,
(05:45):
because they figured so many people will be traumatized, they
assumed that some incredible percentage of the population of London
would flee the city. They really worried that the war
would be over, panic in London would be such and
would spread the rest of the country and people would
see that the Germans could just come and bomb at will,
and they thought, you know, this could be this could
be it for us. They were terrified from top to bottom.
(06:09):
So the bombing comes in the fall of nineteen forty,
the famous blitz, right, and it lasts about eight months,
and the Germans come, you know, not every night, but
there's one stretch where they come for fifty seven consecutive
nights and they drop tens of thousands of tons of
(06:30):
high explosive bombs on London. They damage a million buildings,
they wipe out much of the East End, and the
panic never comes, and nobody can believe it. They're like,
what happened? Why is everyone? In fact, not only does
a panic not come, but like after a little while,
(06:50):
people get so over it that they start going back
to their business and you know, they go to where
or they go to the pubs at night, they party,
they do all the things young people are on in
the streets. And as you can imagine, every psychiatrist, social scientists,
psychologists in England at the time is like driving around
(07:13):
London saying, I am witnessing something that makes no sense. Right,
we've terror the Germans have terrorized the population of London.
And there's like kids playing you know, football in the streets,
and there's couples like going dancing at night, and there's
people dancing drinking in pubs and the bombs are falling.
(07:37):
It's this completely bizarre event to kick off the war.
And so this British psychiatrist comes along. J. T. McCarthy,
the guy you mentioned the top, and he tries to
explain what happened, and I think that's what that's the thing.
It sounds like that drew your eye to that chapter. Yes, yes,
(07:57):
And that's what gets me because when I read this,
I thought about it all the time. When I first
read this, and this was back in twenty thirteen, I
thought about it all the time. And I remember he
divided them into three groups to direct hits, and those
are the people that are dead, people that just didn't
make it through the bombing. Then there were near misses.
Those were people who were experiencing the devastation of the
(08:19):
bomb but did not experience death, or even people who
were close to someone who experienced the devastation of the bomb,
family member, whatever. Then there were the majority of London
experience what he called remote misses, which is mean you
heard about the bomb a few feet over, you felt
the rumbling, you felt the building shake, but you didn't
(08:39):
experience any devastation. And one are the quotes that you
wrote the book was that the morale of the community
depends on the reaction of the survivors because the majority
of the community is experiencing remote misses. They have this
experience of feeling invulnerable as opposed to the people who
experienced near misses, who they actually have a higher sense
(09:00):
of fear or a higher sense of actual danger when
the bombs fall. Yeah. So yeah, he does this thing
which is in retrospect. I think it's incredibly brilliant. He
says that your reaction to a traumatic event is a
function of your proximity to it. So you're right, there's
(09:22):
the people who are most proximate to a traumatic event,
other ones who are killed by it. They're presumably the
ones who are the most terrified at the moment before
they died. But they're dead, right, Yeah, they can't spread
we don't know how they felt. They can't spread their feelings.
They have no impact. They're gone. Right. Second group near
miss is they're the ones who the bomb drops in
(09:43):
the other room and they crawl out of the wreckage.
Those people have traumatized, Like there's no doubt about that. Like,
that's that's like, that's like you're in a car accident
and your car is totaled and they take you out
with the jaws of life. M right, that's that's your
that's your near miss, right, that'll stay with you. Has
that ever happened to you, by the way, run You're
(10:03):
ever in a car accident like that? No, I have
not either. I know some people who have a man
that like dead stays with you. That's like some serious
I actually have a personal near miss story, which is
I when I was a kid, And funny enough, this
is not traumatic for me, but traumatic for my father.
When I was a kid, I was going hiking with
(10:24):
my father in the winter on this gorge went in Canada,
and I'm about seven, and there's a sheer sheet of
ice down the side of the gorge that runs all
the way to a frozen not a frozen over, but
a freezing cold, fast moving river. I slip slide down
the side of the gorge and come to a halt
(10:47):
six inches from this fast moving rapids river. Where had
I gone six more inches, I would be dead. Of course. Wow.
My dad never got over that. He like, you know,
he had to repel down the ice and like I'm
just sitting there six inches from the water on the ice,
(11:07):
right that was for him, that's a near miss, like
and he would talk about that, you know, forty years later,
like it had just happened, right, He's not the remote
miss though, is the category that really interested in McCurdy
And he said, if the bombs across a street and
you survive, your response is not trauma but exhilaration. It's
(11:31):
like you get a new lease on life. Can I
read you from McCurdy? Absolutely, when we had been afraid
that we may panic in an air aid, and when
it has happened, and when we have exhibited to others
nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe.
The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief
(11:52):
and feeling of security promotes a self confidence that is
the very father and mother of courage. By the way,
how much do you low the way these guys right, Oh, brilliant,
there's no what what like practicing site today. They would
write that in some gobble. It's like some academic and gobbledegook.
And he's talking about the father and mother of courage.
(12:14):
I love that. You know the rest of that passage,
I think it starts you started in the middle, but
it starts with we are all not merely liable to fear,
but we also are prone to being afraid of being afraid,
which I always love, because I've realized that most of
their ways in which that I've I've ever been afraid
of always been the anticipation that was really killing me.
(12:36):
I think I've very much embraced this ideology because the
idea of getting through the fear is kind of what J. T.
McCurdy gets at when he talks about what happens with
the British. He's basically saying, like, they got through the fear,
and because the majority of them went through remote misses,
it's all of a sudden like I don't even need
to be scared anymore. Yeah, yeah, though I walk through
the value of death. Oh there goevil, for thou art
(13:00):
with me. That Tiblical line is about this very phenomenon
that what it says is that the function of religious
faith is to turn a near miss to a remote
a remote miss. Right. It's not that the danger is removed,
there's you're still walking to the valley of death. But
the idea is that God's with you, so you know,
(13:20):
it's it's not as it is no longer an occasion
for panic and fear. It's something that you can see
to the other side of. Oh. Absolutely, that's my church moment. Too. Hey, hey,
we in here man, it's Tuesday. So so let me
ask you this. So we're at we're at the end
of the bombing. Um, how does the courage of the
English factor into the German plan? Because their goal was
(13:43):
to break the English and when it didn't happen, how
did courage factor into that plan? Well? So this actually
I talk a little about this in UM the bombom mafia.
Oh nice, like the plug. Yes, that it's super interesting.
The Germans also assume that the British will crumble. That's
(14:05):
why they're doing this thing. No one had ever done
this in the history of warfare, before large scale aerial
bombing of civilian populations. It was considered to be first
of all, no one had bombers before. But in you know,
in the in the wars of the nineteenth century, you
fought armies. You didn't you didn't slaughter civilians. But the
(14:26):
Germans were like, oh, we think that if we bomb
the civilians, we'll bring the entire country to its needs.
We won't even have to fight their army. Doesn't happen, right,
Brits come through, Fine, then what do the Brits do?
The Brits don't learn their own lesson. They have just
been through an experience where they where people have proven
to be a lot tougher and more resilient than they
(14:47):
would have imagined, and then they turn around forget that
and try the same failed experiment on the Germans. And
when confronted on this question the head of the British
Bomber Command, his answer was basically, well, I don't think
Germans are as tough as English people, which is like
such an obnoxious British thing to say. He couldn't wrap
(15:09):
his mind around the fact that we were dealing here
with something fundamental about human beings, which is that our
powers of courage and resilience, even foolhearty powers of courage
and resilience, are just way more considerable than we would
have imagined. We're not rational actors. Rationally, if you are
living in London during the Blitz of nineteen forty, you
(15:32):
should leave London? Are you kidding me? They're like, there's
just no reason for sticking around, and you have people
stick around. They're not rational. Yeah, it makes me think
of the earliest days of the pandemic. Yeah, if we
talk about the fear that I had early on and
the way that I feel now we know that those
feelings are markedly different, because, like, if you go back
(15:54):
to the British and everything you said about what the
British thought was going to happen to them and the
ways in which they prepared at the beginning, very similarly,
a lot of us were doing that same things at
the beginning of the pandemic. But it feels like in
this case, especially if we start looking at the COVID statistics.
So at the time of this taping, out of a
population of about three hundred twenty million Americans, yeah, over
(16:19):
forty million Americans have been affected by COVID nineteen and
of that over forty million, about seven hundred and twenty
thousand have died. So it's about a two percent mortality rate,
which means the majority of us have been experiencing remote
misses here. Two hundred and eighty million people are fine,
I'm one of the two hundred and eighty million. I
don't think I got it, or if I got it,
(16:40):
I didn't even know I had it. So like you're you,
You're right, the overwhelming number of Americans are people who
had remote misses here. Yeah, I think that. Unfortunately, because
there were so many remote misses that there was a
higher amount of preventable deaths that probably could have been
missed if the people that had remote misses had continued
(17:01):
the same practices. Now, I don't want this to become
a conversation of everybody getting basket to get immunizations. You know,
I understand that those are personal decisions, and I've done
both because I feel like responsible for my community. But
a lot of people haven't. And I think it's because
of this phenomenon of invulnerability. I e. COVID has come.
It did not get me, it didn't get the majority
(17:23):
of us. So we're good. Yeah, you don't have to
be Yes. It's funny. I think it's a perfect illustration
of what McCarty is talking about. Let's compare two actors here.
There is the person in East London in nineteen forty
joining the Blitz who has observed five people on their
street had their houses destroyed by German bombs, and you know,
(17:48):
five of them died, but their house is still standing
and their whole family is still alive. McCurdy would say,
is that person is a remote miss and they're like, whatever,
I'm fine, I survived, And they're the ones who are
going to the pub, and they're the ones who are
going dancing on a Saturday night, And those are the
(18:08):
ones who just went about business as usual. Now, that
person's response to the Blitz is probably best termed as
irrational in that they're not out of the woods. The
Germans are still coming night after night, but their psychological
interpretation of their experience is one of invulnerability. How is
that person any different from the person who declines to
(18:31):
get vaccinated today? I think it's exactly the same. Yeah,
only only one difference. The person joined the Blitz who
act at all, and we know whose response was I'm invulnerable,
I'm fine, I'm gonna go back to work is considered
to be heroic and a hero. The unvaccinated person today
(18:52):
is considered to be a social shame now for good reasons.
But it's just funny about how a different circumstances, in
different times, we have very different responses to people who
have this kind of psychological reaction of invulnerability. They cannot
be heroes or they can be chumps. So the reason
(19:13):
why I think that is, and you can help me
with this, but the reason why I think that is
is because bombing feels more random than avoiding COVID. Avoiding
bombing feels more random than avoiding COVID because with COVID,
there's a lot of people that can do a lot
of things, right, Like, there's studies that show that wearing
a mask helps prevent the spread of COVID. There's studies
(19:35):
that show that getting immunized helps prevent the spread of COVID.
There's studies that show that social distance helps prevent the
spread of COVID. All of these things that help prevent
the spread. And there's people that at every juncture have
avoided those three things and still not gotten sick. And
I think those people that are in the remote miss
category are somehow bolstering the numbers of people that feel
(19:58):
invulnerable in a way that's actually spreading harm in a
way that the bombing does it. Yeah, necessarily, because it's
still you could go to the pub and you could
still get bombed, even though you're not afraid, but you
could still get bombed. Yeah. The other aspect of this
is what is your social responsibility here? You could argue
that in nineteen forty during the blitz, you are actually
(20:19):
not reacting with panic. Is a fulfilling your social responsibility,
that it's a good thing that you behave in that
mildly irrational way because you're in the middle of a war.
You have to fight, I mean, you have to sacrifice.
Social responsibility in terms of a contagious disease is the
(20:41):
opposite that behaving with caution and being appropriately fearful is
part of the way that we end diseases. So you
end a war by being irrational, you end up pandemic
by being rational. I love that. Right. You can even
go further and just say that no soldier in wartime
(21:04):
can do their job without being irrational. It's nuts, right,
say more, Well, you can't. You're asking someone to go
out and like risk their life for some I mean
meaningful cause, but like it's still abstract to them. Like
the rational response to being asked to fight in a
war is to go crazy and get like sent to
(21:28):
a psychiatric hospel for the That's actually the rational response.
But people don't see that, you know, I'm glad they don't.
They go through some experience in wartime believe that they
are a in the remote miss category and that's where
courage comes from. But so then it's courage irrational. Of course,
it is Yeah, the rational thing, under any circumstances to
(21:52):
run knowing that I guess the question that I'm really
kind of that we're kind of like kind of circling.
Is understanding when courage is helpful, Yeah, and courage needs
to be restrict yeah, Or making it clear to people
(22:13):
who don't behave appropriately during a pandemic that the behavior
that they're exhibiting is not courageous. It may feelgeous or
come from the same psychological place as wartime courage, but
it's not. It's and I This has been one of
my frustrations with the messaging around things like vaccination in
(22:35):
this country is that it's been too much about the
self and not enough about society. The argument should be
very simple. When we say to someone you should get vaccinated.
The wrong argument is you should get vaccinated because it
could save your life. Well, most people are. They have
a remote misattitude about that. It's like saying you should
(22:56):
leave London because it will say their life. Now, I'm
not leaving London as my home. The right answer is
you have an obligation to other people who are more
vulnerable than you to get vaccinated. I thought, you know
things the other day that the single most powerful thing
that I read about the reason to get vaccinated were
(23:17):
these personal testimonies from nurses who are describing what they've
been through working in intensive care units during COVID, that
seeing people die day and day out, working in these
insane shifts, being completely burnt out. We are asking of
people who you know, at the not the bottom of
(23:38):
the healthcare food chain, but pretty close to it. We're
asking them to perform these unbelievably heroic acts. And if
you don't get vaccinated, you're making the life of this
group of unbelievably heroic people a whole lot harder. Why
would you do that? Right? That's the argument, Right, So
(24:01):
let's take it off the plane of let's acknowledge these
people feel invulnerable. Yes, you feel invulnerable. Fine, it's not
about that, though. It's about you're making someone else's life miserable,
and that's not what we do when we're in a
civilized society. Can you think of some examples of times
(24:21):
where community successfully went from eye to we in ways
that we can learn from in trying to do that
in this moment? Now? Yeah, well there's a bunch of examples,
but one simple one would be One of the things
that turns the corner on smoking is the introduction of
the idea of the dangers of secondhand smoke. We've been
(24:43):
telling the smoker for a generation that they are endangering
their own life, and we had very limited success in
getting people to stop smoking under those circumstances. And then
the conversation shift and we literally stopped talking about not
talking exclusively about the smoker, and we started talking about
the people around the smoker, and it became a matter
(25:04):
of collective responsibility. Right. I'm old enough to remember when
you could smoke into of an airplane. They had a
smoking section the back of an airplane. That stopped not
because we were trying to prolong the lives of the
people smoking in the back of airplanes, but because everyone said, oh,
wait a minute, what about all the non smokers. It's
about creating a safe environment and congenial environment for them.
(25:26):
That was a huge shift and really successful, because you know,
it was a way of reaching smokers and to say
you couldn't smoke, but you can't smoke in the back
of the airplane. They may have felt invulnerable when it
came to the individualized risks because most smokers do not
die of lung cancer a lot too, but not most
of them. Right, So it's for most people it's a
(25:47):
pretty remote miss category. Do you think that that messaging
is the only way to truly win the war during
this pandemic? Because again, knowing the majority of us have
experienced remote missus. But now we're all making personal decisions
as to how we're going to engage with the community
and how we're going to be protective of those around us.
(26:07):
So I guess the big greater question I'm asking is
how do we take this information and use it to
end the war on COVID? Yeah? We stop. And to
my mind, the great frustrating thing in public discourse in
this country around a whole series of issues is we've
fallen so in love with the language of personal freedom
(26:29):
and responsibility that we've forgotten the power of collective appeals
to community. We don't use that language anymore. No one
ever says, it's not about you, it's about it's about
your service to others. Right, It's like the I mean,
since we're being churchy today, the whole the whole message
(26:50):
of the New Testament is about, like, you're do one
too others as you would have to do it. I mean,
not even a New Testament, the Old Testament too. The
whole message is about some awareness of your place in
a community, right, It's not about you. That is the
single most powerful, you know, message in human history. And
(27:11):
we've like, well, suddenly get into these arguments where it's well,
one side saying well, it's my personal choice and freedom
and the other person the other side. I was saying, well,
you need to be a rational actor and stop with
the eyes already, Like enough with I I love it.
I love it, Ronald. When we get churchy, Let's get
churchy every time we do these. Yeah, don't pass with me, man,
(27:34):
I'll come with you with scripture every time. Yeah, I'm
the one who quit scripture, not you. I was waiting
for you to come back at me. I'm like I'm
doing I walked in the Valley or Shadow of Death.
I got crickets on your end. Malcolm, thank you so
much for being with us again. It's always a pleasure
of ue on the show. Thank you, Ronald, Always a pleasure.
(27:59):
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of David and Goliath and
the co founder of Pushkin Industry. He also hosts one
of our sister podcasts here at Pushkin Revisionist History available
everywhere you get podcasts, and you should check out his
new audio book, The Bomber Mafia. Solvable is produced by
Jocelyn Frank, research by David Jah, booking by Lisa Dunn.
(28:21):
Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer
is Mia LaBelle. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening.
Pushkin. This is Solvable. I'm Ronald Young Jr. The rational
response to being asked to fight in a war is
to go crazy. That, of course, is the voice of
Pushkin co founder Malcolm Bladwell. And I invited Malcolm back
(00:37):
to Solvable because I've recently been thinking a lot about
something I read that he published back in twenty thirteen,
his book David and Goliath. The subtitle is Underdogs, Misfits
and the Art of Battling Giants. It's a book that
takes a closer look at events in which one outcome
is greatly favored over another and discusses why sometimes those
(00:58):
outcomes don't turn out as expected. This episode is a
little different from our typical Solvable and that we don't
exactly solve a problem here, but in the spirit of
the show, we're very optimistic in our discussion of a
big idea, and as you listen, you'll begin to get
a sense of exactly why we chose now to have
(01:18):
this particular discussion. Imagine you're living in Britain in the
late nineteen thirties. Germany is preparing to attack your country.
It's the start of the Second World War. The military
is mobilizing. Preparations are being made for mass casualties. You're
(01:40):
debating whether or not you should stay in the city
or move to the countryside until the danger has passed.
The British Military Command does a kind of projection of
what they think is going to happen, and they think
they're going to have six hundred thousand dead, one point
two million wounded, and mass panic. They think that no
one's going to go to work, which means that all
(02:01):
of industrial production in England will cease. They think that
the army will be useless because the army will be
spend all of its time trying to keep the civilians
like from going nuts. They really think it's over. The
fear and uncertainty in the air are palpable. But what
are you going to do? Can you still go to work?
(02:24):
What about friends of family? Will they be safe? What
is going to happen to all of you? And I
know these questions may feel familiar. It's just funny about
how a different circumstances in different times we have very
different responses to people who have this kind of psychological
(02:46):
reaction of invulnerability. They cannot be heroes or they can
be chumps. While our responses to the fear of an
impending battle and its immediate physical threats may be quite
different from our responses to the fear of a global pandemic.
There's a way in which they're actually kind of similar
community approach. We've fallen so in love with the language
(03:09):
of personal freedom and responsibility that we've forgotten the power
of collective appeals to community. Here's my conversation with Malcolm Gladwell.
We're going to examine the parallels and intersections of fear, vulnerability,
and responsibility when it comes to war and a global pandemic. Malcolm,
(03:32):
welcome back to Solvable. It's great to have you here
once again. Thank you. So I want to tell you
about the my earliest introduction to you. It was in
twenty thirteen and you were on the Ted Radio Hour
and you were giving an interview with Guy Roz about
your book David and Goliath, because you had just done
(03:55):
a Ted talk on that. Do you remember that, I do, Yeah, great.
I liked it because, you know, as a self proclaimed
church guy, you gave a very different definition to David
and Goliath, the battle what actually happened? And I love
this book. I bought it it's one of my favorites.
I think it's you know, a lot of people talk
about blank and outliers in the other books you wrote,
but David and Goliath is by far my favorite. And
(04:17):
I bought the book thinking I'm just gonna get all
these you know, insights about you know, underdogs and misfits
and all that, which I did, and I thought it
was gonna be purely based on David and Goliath. But
then I got to one chapter and it was chapter
five and a Canadian psychiatrist who wrote this book called
The Structure of Morale named J. T. McCurdy talks about
the bombings in Britain. Can you recount that? Yeah? Those,
(04:40):
So this is, by the way, thank you for the
kindroids about David and Glad. David and Glad happens to
be my favorite of all my books as well. So
this is something that has always not just fascinated me,
but puzzled people for a long time. Which was at
the start of the Second World War. The British knew
that the Germans had a fleet of bombers, and they
(05:04):
also knew the state of their defenses against bombers were
that there was nothing they could do to stop the Germans.
So the first thing they did, of course, was they
a lot of children who lived in London were moved
to the countryside. The second thing they did was they
got the fire trucks ready for what would be you know,
(05:25):
all kinds of all kinds of the normal things. More
than that, they became convinced that the devastation would be
such that the population of London would panic, and so
they did things like they converted a whole series of
buildings on the outskirts of London to psychiatric makeshift psychiatric hospitals,
(05:45):
because they figured so many people will be traumatized, they
assumed that some incredible percentage of the population of London
would flee the city. They really worried that the war
would be over, panic in London would be such and
would spread the rest of the country and people would
see that the Germans could just come and bomb at will,
and they thought, you know, this could be this could
be it for us. They were terrified from top to bottom.
(06:09):
So the bombing comes in the fall of nineteen forty,
the famous blitz, right, and it lasts about eight months,
and the Germans come, you know, not every night, but
there's one stretch where they come for fifty seven consecutive
nights and they drop tens of thousands of tons of
(06:30):
high explosive bombs on London. They damage a million buildings,
they wipe out much of the East End, and the
panic never comes, and nobody can believe it. They're like,
what happened? Why is everyone? In fact, not only does
a panic not come, but like after a little while,
(06:50):
people get so over it that they start going back
to their business and you know, they go to where
or they go to the pubs at night, they party,
they do all the things young people are on in
the streets. And as you can imagine, every psychiatrist, social scientists,
psychologists in England at the time is like driving around
(07:13):
London saying, I am witnessing something that makes no sense. Right,
we've terror the Germans have terrorized the population of London.
And there's like kids playing you know, football in the streets,
and there's couples like going dancing at night, and there's
people dancing drinking in pubs and the bombs are falling.
(07:37):
It's this completely bizarre event to kick off the war.
And so this British psychiatrist comes along. J. T. McCarthy,
the guy you mentioned the top, and he tries to
explain what happened, and I think that's what that's the thing.
It sounds like that drew your eye to that chapter. Yes, yes,
(07:57):
And that's what gets me because when I read this,
I thought about it all the time. When I first
read this, and this was back in twenty thirteen, I
thought about it all the time. And I remember he
divided them into three groups to direct hits, and those
are the people that are dead, people that just didn't
make it through the bombing. Then there were near misses.
Those were people who were experiencing the devastation of the
(08:19):
bomb but did not experience death, or even people who
were close to someone who experienced the devastation of the bomb,
family member, whatever. Then there were the majority of London
experience what he called remote misses, which is mean you
heard about the bomb a few feet over, you felt
the rumbling, you felt the building shake, but you didn't
(08:39):
experience any devastation. And one are the quotes that you
wrote the book was that the morale of the community
depends on the reaction of the survivors because the majority
of the community is experiencing remote misses. They have this
experience of feeling invulnerable as opposed to the people who
experienced near misses, who they actually have a higher sense
(09:00):
of fear or a higher sense of actual danger when
the bombs fall. Yeah. So yeah, he does this thing
which is in retrospect. I think it's incredibly brilliant. He
says that your reaction to a traumatic event is a
function of your proximity to it. So you're right, there's
(09:22):
the people who are most proximate to a traumatic event,
other ones who are killed by it. They're presumably the
ones who are the most terrified at the moment before
they died. But they're dead, right, Yeah, they can't spread
we don't know how they felt. They can't spread their feelings.
They have no impact. They're gone. Right. Second group near
miss is they're the ones who the bomb drops in
(09:43):
the other room and they crawl out of the wreckage.
Those people have traumatized, Like there's no doubt about that. Like,
that's that's like, that's like you're in a car accident
and your car is totaled and they take you out
with the jaws of life. M right, that's that's your
that's your near miss, right, that'll stay with you. Has
that ever happened to you, by the way, run You're
(10:03):
ever in a car accident like that? No, I have
not either. I know some people who have a man
that like dead stays with you. That's like some serious
I actually have a personal near miss story, which is
I when I was a kid, And funny enough, this
is not traumatic for me, but traumatic for my father.
When I was a kid, I was going hiking with
(10:24):
my father in the winter on this gorge went in Canada,
and I'm about seven, and there's a sheer sheet of
ice down the side of the gorge that runs all
the way to a frozen not a frozen over, but
a freezing cold, fast moving river. I slip slide down
the side of the gorge and come to a halt
(10:47):
six inches from this fast moving rapids river. Where had
I gone six more inches, I would be dead. Of course. Wow.
My dad never got over that. He like, you know,
he had to repel down the ice and like I'm
just sitting there six inches from the water on the ice,
(11:07):
right that was for him, that's a near miss, like
and he would talk about that, you know, forty years later,
like it had just happened, right, He's not the remote
miss though, is the category that really interested in McCurdy
And he said, if the bombs across a street and
you survive, your response is not trauma but exhilaration. It's
(11:31):
like you get a new lease on life. Can I
read you from McCurdy? Absolutely, when we had been afraid
that we may panic in an air aid, and when
it has happened, and when we have exhibited to others
nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe.
The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief
(11:52):
and feeling of security promotes a self confidence that is
the very father and mother of courage. By the way,
how much do you low the way these guys right, Oh, brilliant,
there's no what what like practicing site today. They would
write that in some gobble. It's like some academic and gobbledegook.
And he's talking about the father and mother of courage.
(12:14):
I love that. You know the rest of that passage,
I think it starts you started in the middle, but
it starts with we are all not merely liable to fear,
but we also are prone to being afraid of being afraid,
which I always love, because I've realized that most of
their ways in which that I've I've ever been afraid
of always been the anticipation that was really killing me.
(12:36):
I think I've very much embraced this ideology because the
idea of getting through the fear is kind of what J. T.
McCurdy gets at when he talks about what happens with
the British. He's basically saying, like, they got through the fear,
and because the majority of them went through remote misses,
it's all of a sudden like I don't even need
to be scared anymore. Yeah, yeah, though I walk through
the value of death. Oh there goevil, for thou art
(13:00):
with me. That Tiblical line is about this very phenomenon
that what it says is that the function of religious
faith is to turn a near miss to a remote
a remote miss. Right. It's not that the danger is removed,
there's you're still walking to the valley of death. But
the idea is that God's with you, so you know,
(13:20):
it's it's not as it is no longer an occasion
for panic and fear. It's something that you can see
to the other side of. Oh. Absolutely, that's my church moment. Too. Hey, hey,
we in here man, it's Tuesday. So so let me
ask you this. So we're at we're at the end
of the bombing. Um, how does the courage of the
English factor into the German plan? Because their goal was
(13:43):
to break the English and when it didn't happen, how
did courage factor into that plan? Well? So this actually
I talk a little about this in UM the bombom mafia.
Oh nice, like the plug. Yes, that it's super interesting.
The Germans also assume that the British will crumble. That's
(14:05):
why they're doing this thing. No one had ever done
this in the history of warfare, before large scale aerial
bombing of civilian populations. It was considered to be first
of all, no one had bombers before. But in you know,
in the in the wars of the nineteenth century, you
fought armies. You didn't you didn't slaughter civilians. But the
(14:26):
Germans were like, oh, we think that if we bomb
the civilians, we'll bring the entire country to its needs.
We won't even have to fight their army. Doesn't happen, right,
Brits come through, Fine, then what do the Brits do?
The Brits don't learn their own lesson. They have just
been through an experience where they where people have proven
to be a lot tougher and more resilient than they
(14:47):
would have imagined, and then they turn around forget that
and try the same failed experiment on the Germans. And
when confronted on this question the head of the British
Bomber Command, his answer was basically, well, I don't think
Germans are as tough as English people, which is like
such an obnoxious British thing to say. He couldn't wrap
(15:09):
his mind around the fact that we were dealing here
with something fundamental about human beings, which is that our
powers of courage and resilience, even foolhearty powers of courage
and resilience, are just way more considerable than we would
have imagined. We're not rational actors. Rationally, if you are
living in London during the Blitz of nineteen forty, you
(15:32):
should leave London? Are you kidding me? They're like, there's
just no reason for sticking around, and you have people
stick around. They're not rational. Yeah, it makes me think
of the earliest days of the pandemic. Yeah, if we
talk about the fear that I had early on and
the way that I feel now we know that those
feelings are markedly different, because, like, if you go back
(15:54):
to the British and everything you said about what the
British thought was going to happen to them and the
ways in which they prepared at the beginning, very similarly,
a lot of us were doing that same things at
the beginning of the pandemic. But it feels like in
this case, especially if we start looking at the COVID statistics.
So at the time of this taping, out of a
population of about three hundred twenty million Americans, yeah, over
(16:19):
forty million Americans have been affected by COVID nineteen and
of that over forty million, about seven hundred and twenty
thousand have died. So it's about a two percent mortality rate,
which means the majority of us have been experiencing remote
misses here. Two hundred and eighty million people are fine,
I'm one of the two hundred and eighty million. I
don't think I got it, or if I got it,
(16:40):
I didn't even know I had it. So like you're you,
You're right, the overwhelming number of Americans are people who
had remote misses here. Yeah, I think that. Unfortunately, because
there were so many remote misses that there was a
higher amount of preventable deaths that probably could have been
missed if the people that had remote misses had continued
(17:01):
the same practices. Now, I don't want this to become
a conversation of everybody getting basket to get immunizations. You know,
I understand that those are personal decisions, and I've done
both because I feel like responsible for my community. But
a lot of people haven't. And I think it's because
of this phenomenon of invulnerability. I e. COVID has come.
It did not get me, it didn't get the majority
(17:23):
of us. So we're good. Yeah, you don't have to
be Yes. It's funny. I think it's a perfect illustration
of what McCarty is talking about. Let's compare two actors here.
There is the person in East London in nineteen forty
joining the Blitz who has observed five people on their
street had their houses destroyed by German bombs, and you know,
(17:48):
five of them died, but their house is still standing
and their whole family is still alive. McCurdy would say,
is that person is a remote miss and they're like, whatever,
I'm fine, I survived, And they're the ones who are
going to the pub, and they're the ones who are
going dancing on a Saturday night, And those are the
(18:08):
ones who just went about business as usual. Now, that
person's response to the Blitz is probably best termed as
irrational in that they're not out of the woods. The
Germans are still coming night after night, but their psychological
interpretation of their experience is one of invulnerability. How is
that person any different from the person who declines to
(18:31):
get vaccinated today? I think it's exactly the same. Yeah,
only only one difference. The person joined the Blitz who
act at all, and we know whose response was I'm invulnerable,
I'm fine, I'm gonna go back to work is considered
to be heroic and a hero. The unvaccinated person today
(18:52):
is considered to be a social shame now for good reasons.
But it's just funny about how a different circumstances, in
different times, we have very different responses to people who
have this kind of psychological reaction of invulnerability. They cannot
be heroes or they can be chumps. So the reason
(19:13):
why I think that is, and you can help me
with this, but the reason why I think that is
is because bombing feels more random than avoiding COVID. Avoiding
bombing feels more random than avoiding COVID because with COVID,
there's a lot of people that can do a lot
of things, right, Like, there's studies that show that wearing
a mask helps prevent the spread of COVID. There's studies
(19:35):
that show that getting immunized helps prevent the spread of COVID.
There's studies that show that social distance helps prevent the
spread of COVID. All of these things that help prevent
the spread. And there's people that at every juncture have
avoided those three things and still not gotten sick. And
I think those people that are in the remote miss
category are somehow bolstering the numbers of people that feel
(19:58):
invulnerable in a way that's actually spreading harm in a
way that the bombing does it. Yeah, necessarily, because it's
still you could go to the pub and you could
still get bombed, even though you're not afraid, but you
could still get bombed. Yeah. The other aspect of this
is what is your social responsibility here? You could argue
that in nineteen forty during the blitz, you are actually
(20:19):
not reacting with panic. Is a fulfilling your social responsibility,
that it's a good thing that you behave in that
mildly irrational way because you're in the middle of a war.
You have to fight, I mean, you have to sacrifice.
Social responsibility in terms of a contagious disease is the
(20:41):
opposite that behaving with caution and being appropriately fearful is
part of the way that we end diseases. So you
end a war by being irrational, you end up pandemic
by being rational. I love that. Right. You can even
go further and just say that no soldier in wartime
(21:04):
can do their job without being irrational. It's nuts, right,
say more, Well, you can't. You're asking someone to go
out and like risk their life for some I mean
meaningful cause, but like it's still abstract to them. Like
the rational response to being asked to fight in a
war is to go crazy and get like sent to
(21:28):
a psychiatric hospel for the That's actually the rational response.
But people don't see that, you know, I'm glad they don't.
They go through some experience in wartime believe that they
are a in the remote miss category and that's where
courage comes from. But so then it's courage irrational. Of course,
it is Yeah, the rational thing, under any circumstances to
(21:52):
run knowing that I guess the question that I'm really
kind of that we're kind of like kind of circling.
Is understanding when courage is helpful, Yeah, and courage needs
to be restrict yeah, Or making it clear to people
(22:13):
who don't behave appropriately during a pandemic that the behavior
that they're exhibiting is not courageous. It may feelgeous or
come from the same psychological place as wartime courage, but
it's not. It's and I This has been one of
my frustrations with the messaging around things like vaccination in
(22:35):
this country is that it's been too much about the
self and not enough about society. The argument should be
very simple. When we say to someone you should get vaccinated.
The wrong argument is you should get vaccinated because it
could save your life. Well, most people are. They have
a remote misattitude about that. It's like saying you should
(22:56):
leave London because it will say their life. Now, I'm
not leaving London as my home. The right answer is
you have an obligation to other people who are more
vulnerable than you to get vaccinated. I thought, you know
things the other day that the single most powerful thing
that I read about the reason to get vaccinated were
(23:17):
these personal testimonies from nurses who are describing what they've
been through working in intensive care units during COVID, that
seeing people die day and day out, working in these
insane shifts, being completely burnt out. We are asking of
people who you know, at the not the bottom of
(23:38):
the healthcare food chain, but pretty close to it. We're
asking them to perform these unbelievably heroic acts. And if
you don't get vaccinated, you're making the life of this
group of unbelievably heroic people a whole lot harder. Why
would you do that? Right? That's the argument, Right, So
(24:01):
let's take it off the plane of let's acknowledge these
people feel invulnerable. Yes, you feel invulnerable. Fine, it's not
about that, though. It's about you're making someone else's life miserable,
and that's not what we do when we're in a
civilized society. Can you think of some examples of times
(24:21):
where community successfully went from eye to we in ways
that we can learn from in trying to do that
in this moment? Now? Yeah, well there's a bunch of examples,
but one simple one would be One of the things
that turns the corner on smoking is the introduction of
the idea of the dangers of secondhand smoke. We've been
(24:43):
telling the smoker for a generation that they are endangering
their own life, and we had very limited success in
getting people to stop smoking under those circumstances. And then
the conversation shift and we literally stopped talking about not
talking exclusively about the smoker, and we started talking about
the people around the smoker, and it became a matter
(25:04):
of collective responsibility. Right. I'm old enough to remember when
you could smoke into of an airplane. They had a
smoking section the back of an airplane. That stopped not
because we were trying to prolong the lives of the
people smoking in the back of airplanes, but because everyone said, oh,
wait a minute, what about all the non smokers. It's
about creating a safe environment and congenial environment for them.
(25:26):
That was a huge shift and really successful, because you know,
it was a way of reaching smokers and to say
you couldn't smoke, but you can't smoke in the back
of the airplane. They may have felt invulnerable when it
came to the individualized risks because most smokers do not
die of lung cancer a lot too, but not most
of them. Right, So it's for most people it's a
(25:47):
pretty remote miss category. Do you think that that messaging
is the only way to truly win the war during
this pandemic? Because again, knowing the majority of us have
experienced remote missus. But now we're all making personal decisions
as to how we're going to engage with the community
and how we're going to be protective of those around us.
(26:07):
So I guess the big greater question I'm asking is
how do we take this information and use it to
end the war on COVID? Yeah? We stop. And to
my mind, the great frustrating thing in public discourse in
this country around a whole series of issues is we've
fallen so in love with the language of personal freedom
(26:29):
and responsibility that we've forgotten the power of collective appeals
to community. We don't use that language anymore. No one
ever says, it's not about you, it's about it's about
your service to others. Right, It's like the I mean,
since we're being churchy today, the whole the whole message
(26:50):
of the New Testament is about, like, you're do one
too others as you would have to do it. I mean,
not even a New Testament, the Old Testament too. The
whole message is about some awareness of your place in
a community, right, It's not about you. That is the
single most powerful, you know, message in human history. And
(27:11):
we've like, well, suddenly get into these arguments where it's well,
one side saying well, it's my personal choice and freedom
and the other person the other side. I was saying, well,
you need to be a rational actor and stop with
the eyes already, Like enough with I I love it.
I love it, Ronald. When we get churchy, Let's get
churchy every time we do these. Yeah, don't pass with me, man,
(27:34):
I'll come with you with scripture every time. Yeah, I'm
the one who quit scripture, not you. I was waiting
for you to come back at me. I'm like I'm
doing I walked in the Valley or Shadow of Death.
I got crickets on your end. Malcolm, thank you so
much for being with us again. It's always a pleasure
of ue on the show. Thank you, Ronald, Always a pleasure.
(27:59):
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of David and Goliath and
the co founder of Pushkin Industry. He also hosts one
of our sister podcasts here at Pushkin Revisionist History available
everywhere you get podcasts, and you should check out his
new audio book, The Bomber Mafia. Solvable is produced by
Jocelyn Frank, research by David Jah, booking by Lisa Dunn.
(28:21):
Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer
is Mia LaBelle. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening.
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