Does Power Obscure Perception?
Adam Grant on the Importance of Being a Nobody
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Adam Grant writes that the more powerful and high-status a person becomes, the less capable s/he is of judging others’ characters. The more you have to offer people, the more they will try to impress you, making it difficult to know what they are like at baseline.
Grant’s argument is strangely Foucauldian, in that it implies that truth and power are in fundamental tension. Literature is replete with examples that confirm this idea—from Iago’s deception of Othello, to the Jewish notion that the messiah disguises himself as a beggar and a leper. Post-colonial and anarchist theorists argue that resistance is often found at the periphery, undetected by the mainstream. Official survey and polls can never grasp the “hidden transcript” (James Scott) of the downtrodden. “The peasant bows low and farts silently.”
But is there no way to correct for the myopia that comes with power? And why should we assume that how a person behaves in one context is more true than how they behave in another?
Does Grant err in romanticizing the enlightened perspective of the lowly person, as if, simply by being a nobody, one has magical powers of perception?
David Sedaris agrees with Grant. Every time he observes a person doing something terrible, he silently thanks them for giving him insight into human character—more grist for his fictive content-machine. Sedaris thinks that to be good at fiction one must be voyeuristic; but the only way to gather good information is to be a nobody.
Of course, one paradox that might arise from these dynamics is that we should expect writers to get worse as they get more famous—insofar as they end up attracting more performativity on the part of their subjects. But knowing this, shouldn’t writers nonetheless be able to see through the performance, and to write authentically and compellingly about the nature of fraudulence?
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