The true mark of intellectual courage used to be to speak truth to power. Nowadays, it takes more guts to speak truth to money. Intellectuals who do so risk jeopardising the lavish speaking fees and Ted talk invites that are the gateway to real earnings. Once you start making money, why give up? Your audiences are likely to be far richer than you will ever be. Thus, with mildly cynical paraphrasing, is the core argument of Daniel Drezner’s powerful book The Ideas Industry .
But Drezner, a scholar, a think-tanker, a blogger and much else, is too self-knowing to blow up the whole shebang. As he admits, he too has appeared in green rooms, business class lounges and swanky conferences in exotic locales. “I can talk frequent flyer air miles with the best of them,” he says. Drezner’s book pulls off a felicitous manoeuvre. He dissects the forces behind the ideas industry — the rise of the new plutocracy being the largest — without going so far as to risk expulsion from its circle. In so doing he speaks gentle truths to money, which only makes them all the more persuasive.
The most critical of these is that the wealthy prefer some narratives to others. For example, our system of meritocracy should rarely be questioned. Casting doubt on the just deserts of your audience’s wealth is bad for business. Likewise, you must offer solutions rather than analysis. Appeals to action resonate with self-made people, particularly those from Silicon Valley. The latter tend to view political challenges through a highly unrealistic lens. Complex problems are fixable through simple engineering, or ripe for venture fund-style disruption. One of the best examples of a disrupter’s tendency to project his experience to the world are Peter Thiel’s fellowships, which pay students $100,000 to “skip or stop out” of university.