On Fighting
Today, somebody found it new that “Steve Jobs took the whole [Gizmodo] thing very personally”.
I don’t understand this about American culture: we refuse to understand fighters. Of course Steve took it very personally. Apple products are his babies, the Purpose of his life. He is Willy Wonka, and someone stole a secret from his factory. You’re surprised he’s supporting a criminal investigation? We should consider ourselves lucky to have labor laws to stop him from breeding a slave workforce of singing midgets.
Americans love to talk about passion, but shun it when they see it. Is it because it’s is so fundamentally undemocratic? Those devoted to a vision doesn’t take public opinion polls. They’re not fond of rules (and have no respect for the status quo). This applies doubly to popular rules of the status quo, like “open technology is morally superior to proprietary technology”. No, he sees useful technology that works well as superior to crappy software that doesn’t. Is that so hard to consider?
Where are our archetypes of the fighter? The one who values the pursuit of his ideas over paternity of his children? Some of our intellectual subcultures understand Don Quixote, but pop American culture don’t have a way to begin comprehending him. To most Americans, “professional success” is a subset of an archetype completely separated from the private, from personal emotion. Except people don’t work that way: we aren’t discrete archetypes. The archetypes originate from within us, as a way of understanding ourselves, and so we’re a combination of them all. So yes, we take personal offense when someone screws up our work, whether we acknowledge it or not. Yes, even over the events of our “professional lives”, we will feel emotions: of anger, guilt, betrayal.
We need to acknowledge this, instead of pigeonholing everyone, including ourselves. Bill Gates is the nerd mastermind billionaire turned philanthropist, BOOM. Paul Graham a quirky but wise sensei/father figure, DONE. And this isn’t at all exclusive to tech, because she’s such a Carrie and he’s such a hitler. Why is it that we refuse to see people in any way other than the archetypes our culture provides for us?
Why is it, that when we see someone who is living his own vision, following his own dream, his own passion, instead of projecting familiar narcissistic images we can use to file him away, that we can’t understand it? He must be mad. He must be power-hungry, a control freak.
No.
He sees his light, and he’s Fighting for it.
