Are You a Contrarian?
If you say you are in your Twitter bio and have more than 100k followers you probably aren’t.
But this begs the question: what does it mean to be a contrarian? (Contrarian answers only.)
Are contrarians people who express unpopular opinions, but who look forward to a future in which they will be vindicated, or are contrarians people who we are willing to suffer for their beliefs even if they are never confirmed?
Naval Ravikant says that to be a contrarian you have to hold a minority view and be right. The genius has to risk looking like a fool, but, in the end is not actually one. 99/100 crazy people are crazy. But 1/100 are just “ahead of their time.” So goes this line of thought.
This line of thought allows us to have our cake (differentiation) and eat it, too (social acceptance). Few want to live their whole lives as pariahs in the desert. King Arthur is only a hero if the grail can be found. But if the grail doesn’t exist, or doesn’t exist in literal form, and Arthur is chasing a metaphor, what, then?
The concept of a “narrative violation,” taken from postmodern theory and transfigured into VC jargon for a non-consensus worldview is at odds with another popular concept from the business world, namely “social proof.” Buy this thing, because everyone else is. You would think these should be opposite concepts, yet, to my perception, it appears that “narrative violations” have now come to mean, very progressively and optimistically, ideas that will one day be commonsense.
Unicorns today have changed in meaning from fantastical creatures that are impossible or near impossible to find to ideas that have the potential to “go viral.”
But what if you found a unicorn and a forest, didn’t have your phone, and couldn’t tell anyone? What if the unicorn disappeared never to be found again? And what if telling the world you saw one might get you institutionalized?
So, is the value of contrarianism rooted in a willingness to differ from the crowd or is it just a means to the end of changing what the crowd thinks? If the latter, then, we don’t really value contrarianism. We value social validation.
The mainstream Silicon Valley view of contrarianism is that it is a medium-to-long term strategy for gaining social acceptance. Defer one marshmallow today to get 10,000 in 10 years.
But if contrarianism is about the pursuit of truth, no matter the consequences or winning prospects, then only the martyr or would-be martyr is a contrarian. Not the person looking to have better impact and greater return on investment, which are commonplace desires.
