The Goliath Fallacy: Betting on the Underdogs
by William S. Annett (father of Kevin)
In his best-seller, “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants,” Malcolm Gladwell covers the subject – and the frequent success – of ordinary people who tilt at extraordinary opponents or forces.
In other words, instances where a disadvantage becomes an advantage.
Gladwell’s point is that it happens quite frequently and we don’t realize it. You want to argue? Gladwell’s day job as a staff writer for The New Yorker puts him in a better position to know than your standard surfer of the Medusa Screen. The David and Goliath story is Gladwell’s lead-off prima facie case.
Traditionally, we view Goliath as a huge giant of a man, an accomplished warrior armed to the teeth with sword, spear, armor and probably a wrought-iron jock strap. The only guy in the crowd willing to take him on is David, a 97-pound weakling, like Charles Atlas before he did calisthenics, a shepherd boy: literally in shorts and tee shirt, nary a bit of armament but a slingshot with which he occasionally annoys the sheep, using them for target practice, to say nothing of the usual mauvais hanky panky we’ve all heard endlessly about regarding shepherds and their flocks.
You’re inclined to put at least eight-to-five on Fatso, right? Not so fast, says Gladwell.
If there had been endocrinologists in those days, they could have told you by just looking at him that Goliath was not only down a quart mentally, but he had an overactive pituitary gland, accounting for his cumbersome size and unmanageable weight. Plus, his dim-bulb occipital lobe limited his vision, enabling him to do close-range scuffling with nothing but his stupid broadsword, which was about three feet long and as unwieldy as a third marriage.
On the other hand, the sling that David possessed was a strategic weapon which his constant sheep-shooting had helped to hone his marksmanship to a deadly accuracy at a distance, while the rock he chose represented a lethal missile. Altogether, the AK-47 of his time.
Are we clear? Crystal clear, as Tom Cruise would say.
Asymmetrical conflicts, according to Gladwell, are significant because not infrequently there’s a reason why little guys whip big guys; namely, because the Fatsos and Trumps never see them coming, and not only because little guys are good like Popeye and big guys are bad like Bluto.
And then there’s the old chestnut of “deprived childhood,” or children who are denied one or more parents at a tender age. According to Gladwell, concerning not a few children, a parental loss appears to be, ultimately, “a desired difficulty.”
I offer the flip side: my father put me and my brothers through university. I worked in the summers but, according to his mandate, the dough went in the bank. Because of this desired advantage, I hadn’t a clue about money or its husbandry until I was 40 years old. (And damned little since, actually, although I’ve spent my life laboring in the financial vineyards.)
And speaking of desired difficulties, what of the curse of manic depression? A split vote, here. Winston Churchill, one of our boys and a classic bi-polar when we needed him the most, declared that the line between great achievements and abject failure was as thin as a razor’s edge. Ernest Hemingway, who was also as bi-polar as Admiral Perry, climbed a lot of literary Kilimanjaros, before he blew his brains out in Ketchum, Idaho. On balance, Poppa would probably have concluded that his disorder was a desired difficulty.
I kind of finger that possibility myself – I think I’d settle for an ignominious final curtain if I could have written For Whom the Bell Tolls, or even The Old Man and The Sea.
But I meander. The subject was the advantage of disadvantage, or perhaps the misperception thereof.
My late and inadequately lamented brother Jack was born with such lousy eyesight that he had virtually no depth perception, which is the miracle of binocular vision that we take for granted. In Jack’s cramped little world, like Aldous Huxley, he explored by himself the art of seeing and developed his own capability of somehow adapting two-dimensional visualizing to a perception of linear and spatial relationships to compensate.
I don’t pretend to understand that, but as a result, brother Jack became an outstanding architect, with a gold medal from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, an Honourable Mention in the famous Toronto City Hall design competition during the Fifties and, after practising in New York, ultimately became vice-president of a creative firm that built much of L.A.’s skyline.
And since I’ve become hopelessly nepotistic, I choose to conclude with the case of my son, Reverend Kevin Annett, B.A., M.A., M. Div. (also a veteran of Law School, until he recoiled from the prospect of being a lawyer in the dog’s breakfast we call society). Kevin also earned a Ph. D. that was denied him by the University of British Columbia whose trustees were offended (and implicated) by his ‘controversial’ subject matter, as I will shortly explain.
Present to Mr. Gladwell the case that Kevin, as a United Church minister in a small Vancouver Island community, decides to blow the whistle on criminal activity extending over a century among all the Big Churches of Canada, cheek by jowl with the Government of Canada, the RCMP, the Attorney General of British Columbia, MacMillan Bloedel, the largest forestry company in that province, and it’s blushing parent, The Weyerhaeuser Company of Seattle.
All these Big Guys were complicit in a clutch of crap too huge to mention, but having this in common: that it would be nice if Reverend Kevin Annett were quietly blown away. Which they accomplished, quite effectively.
A classic Dave-boy and Goliath scenario, what?
And let’s not forget the Giant’s accomplice, the mainstream Canadian media, who initially gave the whole Canadian genocide issue no ink at all until Goliath issued his own account of it, but has been largely manque about all those little bodies ever since, except to claim they never existed.
And, finally, the Canadian public, who have been as usual either snoozing or in major denial about the subject of anything indigenous or genocidal for the past twenty-some years, ever since Rev Kev first blew the whistle.
Finally, and to tip a hat at Mr. Gladwell as the expert on advantageous disadvantage, if you think all those Canadian institutions are omnipotent, you should recall that there’s nothing dumber than a federal government that has been headed up by such pieces of work as Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark, Jean Chretien, (who was Anglo-challenged) Stephen Harper, who went on and on about apologizing if not for genocide at least for little kids not having a parent, and finally Justin T., concerning whom there is nothing to say since, as Alice B. Toklas observed about San Francisco,
“There’s just no there there.”
As for the dumber than dumb churches, corporations, and the Arsee-Empee Musical Riders in Red, their actions daily bespeak all that is necessary regarding their cretinism.
On the other hand, entering stage left, you have this little Reverend aka defrocked shepherd boy who single handedly used the most lethal, long range, accurate weapon on earth – The Truth – with such stunning effect that Goliath staggered and nearly toppled.
Jesting Pilate to the contrary, we don’t need Malcolm Gladwell to tell us what Truth is. Especially when it hits us in the middle of the forehead.