So how should founders building companies (or leaders trying to turn their company around, address disruption, beat competition, and so on) go about creating a true winning culture? Horowitz shares key takeaways from the only successful slave revolution in the history of humanity — the Haitian revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in 1791 — in this keynote first given at a16z’s inaugural summit event. How did this 18th century leader essentially “re-program” an entire culture to win?
The Lord of Misrule
His tweets are classic fool behavior. They are raw, ridiculous and frequently self-destructive. He takes on an icon of the official culture and he throws mud at it. The point is not the message of the tweet. It’s to symbolically upend hierarchy, to be oppositional.
.. The sad part is that so many people treat Trump’s tweets as if they are arguments when in fact they are carnival.
.. They contribute to carnival culture.
.. The first problem with today’s carnival culture is that there’s an ocean of sadism lurking just below the surface. The second is that it’s not real. It doesn’t really address the inequalities that give rise to it. It’s just combative display.
Resisting The Anti-Culture
Let’s face it: We now live in a world where refusing a man the right to expose himself in a woman’s toilet is enough to risk your city losing the right to host a football game.
.. The anti-culture warriors of this present age have very long, very strong arms and—unfortunately for the coming generations—very short sight. Just think of the Talibanic fury recently released on university campuses against any vestige of the past which does not conform to the exacting morality of the present.
Christians need to wake up to this. We have no culture to engage, let alone transform. It is thus time to drop the hip rhetoric of cultural engagement and transformation that comforts us that we are part of some non-existent dialogue and that grants the world of our opponents a dignity which it simply does not deserve.
.. He’s working from sociologist Philip Rieff’s definition of culture. For Rieff, any culture is defined by its “thou shalt nots” — that is, the things it forbids. This tells the people within a certain culture what is sacred and what is taboo. Culture is “a pattern of moral demands, a range of standard self-expectations about what we may and may not do, in the face of infinite possibilities.”
.. Modern Western culture is built on transgressing boundaries, on forbidding to forbid.
The center cannot hold because there is no center to be held.
.. Holding schoolchildren hostage to this perverse generation’s ideal of civil rights. Five years ago if you had said such an edict would come down from Washington, most people would not have believed it. Yet here we are.
.. Tomorrow it will mandate this in the public schools. And it will by no means stop there, not with this bunch, and certainly not with Hillary Clinton in the White House. It’s going to be one damn thing after another.
We no longer have a culture. We have chaos. And the people will accept it, because we have exchanged the culture we had for chaos, and we call it freedom.
I have never been the kind of conservative who thought of my government as a threat to me, my family, my faith, and my culture. That’s over.
.. It’s time to prepare for some very dark days. Those who still have a culture within them and their families and communities had better start digging in.
.. Whether Trump wins or loses, the Trump culture is ascendant. Whether in the person of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, we will get the President we deserve. The question is what next. Anyone who thinks that politics provides the primary answer to that question, is missing the larger reality.
Culture Rot: Donald Trump Is the Effect, Not the Cause
In 1966, which is not exactly millennia ago, Trump’s vulgarity would have had him banned from appearing on anyone’s black-and-white TV — even after midnight. Today, he is the front-runner. Today, in fact, he is coveted not by the blue channels but by the news channels. He is ratings. He sells. He is Viagra without commercials.
.. It is about what has become of us.