44 pages • 1 hour read
Alexandra RobbinsThe Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Creativity and Quirkiness
A major turning point in Robbins’ book is her citation of marketing expert Seth Godin (314). His observation that the education system was formed during the industrial era to supply factories with workers is instrumental in Robbins’ apology for “geeks.” The Scottish health services report Robbins quotes supports the “factory” metaphor for the education system: The report concludes that “capacity for divergent thinking declined steadily from 98% at age three to just 2% at age 25 as we progress through the education system. […] We teach conformity” (314). As a consequence of these findings, the British developed a new organization to encourage creativity in school age children. As of yet, no such comparative program exists in the US.
It is now widely accepted by the scientific and business communities that diverse groups are more intelligent and effective than non-diverse ones, even if the individuals within the group are themselves highly intelligent and empowered with expert knowledge (McKinsey; Forbes). This may be because “lack of candor basically black blocks smart ideas,” as it says in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (167). Due to “peer pressure,” non-diverse groups are less likely to respond creatively to a problem. As observed by Wilfred Bion, a leader in the field of group psychology, this is a common problem faced by any organization or social group.
One central deficiency of popularity therefore is its impairment of creativity. Creative ability, whilst hard to define, is high on lists of leadership capabilities and desired traits recruited for at top companies such as Yahoo. Robins writes, “[M]any of the successful and appreciated adults I know were not part of the mainstream popular crowd at school” (45). It may be the failure of the school system to develop creativity that is in part responsible for the existence of Robbins’s own “Quirk Theory.” Success in life and business is very different from success in school: “Ben and Jerry, who met in school as shy boys and the two slowest students in gym class, are also known for their creative marketing and business policies” (166). Independent thinking may be discouraged in school systems, but it is essential in becoming a valuable and valued contributor to society.
Language and Labels
Each of the multifaceted individuals whom Robbins shadows for a year bears a familiar label, such as “geek,” “weirdo,” or “bitch.” As we progress through Robbins’ account of their year, we get some sense of the complexity of these individuals and their lives. Joy’s abusive childhood for instance may not be immediately discernible, nor would others at school know that Noah’s grandmother is ill. Identity can be multifaceted and confusing, which can be disconcerting, especially when we are struggling to find our way in the world. It is easier to brand others as a known quantity, a recognizable stereotype, giving us a social map that we can use to orientate ourselves. The labels that we give to the familiar cast of characters in American high schools are comparable with the stock characters in ancient Greek plays. Stereotypes like “the old man” (“senex”), or the “stupid foreigner” would wear distinguishing masks that provided audiences with an instantly recognizable index of their character, in Aristophanes’ plays for instance. The famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung defined the “persona” as the “mask” worn by an individual to facilitate their existence in society.
In recent years, Western culture has come to value an ideal of authenticity, most likely in response to the ideas of psychologists such as Jung and Freud. The Second World War taught us that cultural stereotypes can lead to outsiders being transformed into scapegoats. Holocaust survivor Primo Levi writes in If This Is a Man that the primary mistake that allowed the Holocaust to take place was labeling someone “other.” New attempts at inclusivity have seen liberals develop new language around social groups, for instance non-gender binary pronouns. Poststructuralist Jacques Derrida has argued that the challenge of communicating with one another in social life is not just the result of our unfathomable depths as people, but inherent in language itself. Derrida argues that language will always fail to communicate that which is intended because it is organized around an essential aporia of meaning. Rather than engage with such complexity, we all too often fall back on labels.
Collaboration and Marketing Channels
The Robbers Cave experiment cited by Robbins reveals the potent influence of group dynamics on individual behavior (386). While fighting broke out between the two groups when they were pitted against one another, shared tasks led to collaboration and the building of new bonds. The plasticity of the boys’ attitudes to one another is a clear example of group dynamics in operation. Collaboration has become a “buzzword” in business, where working with others is essential to success. Collaboration is increasingly associated with a business’s ability to be agile, something that is especially important as technology continues to alter culture.
The digital age has entailed a movement away from traditional hierarchies and structures, not only within businesses, but more generally too. The ubiquity of smart phone devices in developed and many developing countries has shifted behavior. Robbins addresses this in Chapter 6 on social media. It is common to view social media as an ambivalent force in society. While facilitating social connection on one level, online sites can also offer yet one more platform for bullying. The distance between digital and real life can facilitate depersonalization such as that discussed by Primo Levi, making bullying behavior easier and inhibiting empathy. Social media’s addictive nature has been discussed by Sean Parker, the billionaire early investor in Facebook. While offering new kinds of communication, social media networks fail to offer satisfying interpersonal connection and thus sustain an insatiable need for it, leading many users feeling lonely.
As we know from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, social media paradoxically works against social cohesion, increasing polarization by profiling and segregating its users for advertising purposes, and reinforcing the ideas associated with each group. This in effect makes such online communities less diverse, and thus less intelligent and creative, according to studies. As Robbins argues, nonconformists are “vital for America’s culture and progress” (396). As many have pointed out, the “fake news” phenomenon—whereby one’s views are echoed within social media channels—creates a potentially dangerous polarization. The digital age has radically restructured society, offering many benefits along with important challenges, something Robbins book reflects with great relevance.
Power and Control
Power and control are pervasive dynamics in dysfunctional groups. For Robbins, “power over” may be distinguished from “power to,” with the former being maintained through the belittling of others. This type of power is by definition fragile, requiring constant reconfirmation, and often spiralling into increasing expressions of dominance and control. In her chapter, “Why are Popular People Mean?”, Robbins points out that those with social power over others slavishly safeguard their authority. Whitney is never completely accepted by the popular group and is thus forced to maintain compliance with its strict rules. Robbins writes about what psychologists have termed the “popularity cycle” (80), whereby popularity is most fragile at its pinnacle, when others seek to depose the powerful oppressor. This popularity cycle correlates with a certain kind of news cycle. Media can idealize celebrities, only to devalue them later.
Conformity is policed in groups that exert power over others, according to psychologist David Anderegg. Just as Whitney’s clique defines itself through strict codes of behavior and markers like fashion sense, so the teacher clique at Regan’s school also marshals power thorough exclusionary methods. Robbins recounts: “A counselor in Virginia described an intimidating drama teacher who wielded power by controlling access to the auditorium” (99). The group members at Regan’s school—known to themselves as the PIGS (“People In Good Standing”)—“maintained power by “ostracizing non-PIGS, sometimes calling them derogatory names or turning other colleagues against them” (97). Anderegg writes that especially in middle school, “[d]esirability of all kinds is rigidly circumscribed by what is seen as ‘normal’” (247).
“There is power in numbers” is a maxim that the studies Robbins quotes on Pages 151 and 152 seem to corroborate. Solomon Asch and Gregory Berns’ experiments suggest that three quarters of people will follow the herd, even when the group opinion is factually incorrect. Going against the group activates the amygdala’s fear responses. Berns writes in Iconoclast that “these are powerful biological mechanisms that make it extremely difficult to think like an iconoclast” (151). It seems we are biologically predisposed to conform. Robbins notes that social groups even norm in areas such as self-esteem and pathologies like depression or eating disorders (316). Research such as this pertains to American politics, where conformity is especially pronounced. Robbins’ notes that in the 1970s, “fewer than 25 percent of US citizens lived in counties in which the presidential candidate won by a landslide” (312). Thirty years later, “that percentage has nearly doubled” (312).
Yet many successful people in our culture claim they were social outcasts in school. Director, producer, and screenwriter Judd Apatow asserted, “I think that everything I do tends to root for the underdog” (173). Rapper Drake, singer Taylor Swift, and actress Angelina Jolie also claim to have been social rejects at their schools. This may suggest that “power to” operates on a different (perhaps even opposing) axis from “power over.” Talented people may be more likely to be perceived as a threat to the superiority of the “in group” and its conformist agenda. Civil rights campaigner James Baldwin, writing in 1962, pinpointed the crucial distinction between “power over” and “power to”: “Perhaps this […] helps to explain why ‘Negroes,’ on the whole, […] have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.” Robbins shows how intrinsic group dynamics are to American society.
As Joy comments, “Most bullies were hurt at some point and don’t want people to see that they are weak” (201). The daughter of an abusive father, Joy sadly has extensive firsthand experience of bullying. Rather than concede to the bully, she sees the inherent fragility of the “power over” structure, and the unenforced racial segregation that persists in her school. Anderegg goes so far as to call the forms of social control that frequently emerge in middle school “fascist” (247). This may seem extreme, but American children are routinely prevented from expressing their native heritage in schools, in the name of conformity (312). Robbins’ overview of recent social science research offers a clarifying lens through which to view American society, and this may be the reason for its own reign at the top of the bestseller list.
