ROBERT WHITE
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
—Apple’s 1997 Think Different commercial
Steve Jobs regarded himself as one of the crazy ones—a misfit, a rebel, a troublemaker—pushing the human race forward. The Think Different commercial reflects Jobs’s assessment of his place in history.
Walter Isaacson has credited Jobs with revolutionizing six industries: personal computers, digital publishing, animated movies, music, phones, and tablet computing (Steve Jobs, p. xix). A person does not revolutionize an industry, let alone six of them, through the exercise of pure physical labor. These are primarily intellectual achievements. Before a new good or service can be given physical expression, it must begin life as a thought in someone’s head.
The goods and services produced by Apple (the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, iTunes, iCloud, and much, much more) are ideas given physical form. Though a number of individuals contributed, intellectually, to the creation of these goods and services, Jobs provided the intellectual leadership needed to bring these individuals’ ideas to fruition.
The Think Different commercial honors individuals who have changed the world by turning thought into action.
• Thomas Edison—whose inventions gave rise to three new industries: electric power, sound recording, and motion pictures
• Amelia Earhart—who theorized that she could fly solo across the Atlantic, and did
• Frank Lloyd Wright—who projected the Earth as it might be and ought to be, and gave reality to his vision through the medium of architecture
• Maria Callas—whose voice objectified in emotional terms her view of human existence
Different people respond to the commercial in different ways, depending on their value judgments. Speaking personally, I find the commercial especially moving because it is one of the few occasions in today’s world when thinking is honored.
Some critics might judge Jobs to be hubristic for placing himself in the same category as such world-historical figures. Hubris, however, consists in an overestimate of one’s achievements. Jobs earned his place in this pantheon.
The Independent Mind
Though some earlier thinkers (such as Frederick Douglass) had celebrated the self-made man, Ayn Rand was the first philosopher to explicitly identify independence as a virtue. By “independence” Rand means primarily intellectual independence. For Rand, independence is “one’s acceptance of the responsibility of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind” (Virtue of Selfishness, p. 28). An independent person accepts an idea because he judges it consonant with the facts of reality, not because of how he was raised or because of what other people will think. As Tara Smith explains, the facts of reality, not the opinions of others, are the independent person’s compass in life, according to Rand.
Jobs demonstrated intellectual independence throughout his life. As a teenager, Jobs’s parents required him to attend Sunday school. The pastor told the class that God knows everything. The following Sunday, Jobs took to class a recent Life magazine, with a picture on the cover of starving children in Biafra. Jobs asked, “Does God know about this?” The pastor conceded that God did know, and Jobs announced that he did not want to worship such a God (Steve Jobs, pp. 14–15). At the age of thirteen, Jobs had raised what in philosophy is known as the problem of evil—how can the existence of evil be reconciled with the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent deity? Most thirteen-year-olds would not have possessed the independence needed to question the intellectual authority of a pastor. Jobs did.
When Apple went public in the early 1980s, three hundred people became millionaires (p. 103). Money enables a person to pursue his or her values. In this sense, money can buy happiness, contrary to the popular aphorism. In the case of these newly minted millionaires, however, they adapted their values to their newfound wealth. Instead of using their wealth to serve their values, they adopted the values other people expected millionaires to have. They bought multiple houses, Rolls-Royces, and in some cases even paid for their wives to have plastic surgery.
Jobs was an exception. His new wealth did not change him. He continued to live as he judged best, not as others expected him to live (p. 105). For example, Jobs’s wife and children lived in a house so modest that Bill Gates, with his 66,000-square-foot mansion, could not comprehend how the entire family could live there (p. 277).
Not only did Jobs display intellectual independence, he explicitly defended it. In his Stanford University commencement address, Jobs told the graduating class:
Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. (Jobs 2005)
And in an interview with Wired magazine:
To do something really well, you have to get it. . . . It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. (Quoted in Wahl, p. 31)
To have “your own inner voice,” a person must think for him- or herself. To chew something up, not just quickly swallow it, is the process by which a person thinks for him- or herself.
In certain respects, the Think Different commercial honors not just thinking, but independent thinking. After all, to think differently the individuals honored in the Think Different commercial had to first think independently. Difference is not a defining characteristic of independent thought, however. As an independent person’s concern is with the facts of reality, we should expect independent individuals to eventually reach the same conclusions. To think differently, in the sense of originating a new idea, however, a person must first be an independent thinker. Edison did not conceive the phonograph by imitating the thinking of past generations. He had to think differently, and to think differently in a reality-orientated manner he had to grasp the relevant facts of reality himself.
Jobs was able to revolutionize six industries because the independent thinking he cultivated in his character from an early age enabled him to think differently. Tony Fadell recalls, for example, that his team would be working on a seemingly unsolvable problem with the user interface on the iPod, when Jobs would come along and redefine the problem so it simply went away (Steve Jobs, p. 389). When developing the iPod Shuffle, Fadell and Jonathan Rubinstein faced the problem of how to make the screen smaller. Jobs solved the problem by doing away with the screen altogether (p. 410). This is the hallmark of genius.
Independence and Pseudo-Independence
The hallmark of an independent person, according to Rand, is that he or she treats facts of reality as absolutes. An independent person will evaluate and question human creations, such as the laws of a country, but he or she respects as absolute facts inherent in the nature of reality, such as the law of gravity (Rand 1984, pp. 23–34).
The independent person recognizes that existence has primacy over consciousness, which means that we must conform to the facts of reality, we cannot expect the facts of reality to conform to us. The intellectually independent person is independent in the sense that he or she seeks to grasp the facts of reality first-hand, not in the sense that he or she seeks “independence” from reality.
According to Rand, the type of “independent” person who seeks to escape reality is not genuinely independent. Ultimately, the person who refuses to grasp the facts of reality him- or herself has to rely for his or her survival on those who have taken on this responsibility (Mayhew, p. 117). In this respect, such a person is as dependent as the one who openly parrots the opinions of others. Consider, for example, a person whose “independence” consists in rejecting modern science and embracing various forms of supernaturalism, such as astrology and psychic readings. To the extent such a person is consistent, she must rely on individuals who are reality-orientated for her survival. She might sleep on an innerspring mattress. She might use an air conditioner to cool her house during summer. She likely purchases food from a supermarket and cooks it in a microwave oven. She might listen to mantra chants on her iPod. And her ability to purchase these goods and services is made possible by the individuals who created the business she works for. Alone on a desert island, such an “independent” person would not survive long.
Though Jobs demonstrated genuine intellectual independence throughout his life, in certain significant respects he simply was not reality-orientated, and therefore to that extent lacked genuine independence. One notorious example being Jobs’s refusal to bathe, because he was convinced his vegetarian diet prevented body odor (Steve Jobs, p. 43). Unfortunately for Jobs’s colleagues, he was wrong. In fact, he stank. To check this, all Jobs had to do was lift his armpits and sniff. Despite the direct evidence of his olfactory receptors, Jobs continued to deny that which was evident to his colleagues’ noses. Convention states that we should bathe regularly. Though the genuinely independent person may sometimes defy convention, in this instance Jobs was doing so in a manner that failed to respect the facts of reality.
A tragic example of Jobs’s lack of genuine independence was his initial response to the diagnosis of cancer. His doctors advised surgery. Jobs refused. He attempted to treat his cancer with alternative remedies such as fruit juice and the expression of negative feelings (pp. 453–54). Unfortunately, for Jobs, and for us, cancer has a specific nature. Given the nature of cancer, fruit juice and the expression of negative feelings was never going to work. All Jobs achieved was a delay in pursuing an actual treatment, thereby endangering his health and contributing to his premature death. Reality is unforgiving.
Like the genuinely independent person, the person who is pseudo-independent will also think differently, though not in the same sense. As a first-hand thinker, the genuinely independent person may end up challenging certain received wisdoms that most people take for granted, such as that the Sun and planets revolve around the Earth, or that heavier-than-air machines cannot fly. The person who is pseudo-independent is not concerned with facts, and therefore has no intellectual qualms about propounding absurdities that clash with common sense. The genuinely independent person thinks differently because his different thoughts are in accordance with the facts of reality. The pseudo-independent person thinks differently in a way that treats the facts of reality as irrelevant to his or her conclusions.
My claim that Jobs was not always reality-orientated is uncontroversial. This fact was widely recognized by Jobs’s colleagues, who repeatedly referred to what they called his “reality distortion field” (explored in Chapter 1 of this book), a concept borrowed from an episode of Star Trek, in which aliens possess the power to create new realities through a sheer act of consciousness. This is what Rand termed the primacy of consciousness, the belief that reality is a product of consciousness, whether the consciousness of an individual, a group, or a deity. The genuinely independent person places reality first. The pseudo-independent person places his or her own consciousness first. The primacy of consciousness is implicit in the above examples. In each case, Jobs was acting on the premise that his consciousness can rewrite the facts of reality.
Jobs’s colleagues were not trained in philosophy, and there is no such phenomenon as a reality distortion field (Harry Binswanger has called it a concept of imagination, like “hobbit”), so we should not be surprised to find the concept applied inconsistently. The concept was used in at least two substantially different senses. In some instances, the reality distortion field was used to describe how Jobs persuaded a person to achieve that which he or she previously thought impossible.
In such cases, “reality distortion” is a misnomer. Here, Jobs is not acting on the premise of creating his own reality. Jobs is the one with the better grasp of reality, and his colleagues are several steps behind, playing catch-up. To paraphrase a Wayne Gretzky quote Jobs liked, he was skating where the puck’s going, while they were still skating where it’s been (Steve Jobs, p. 349). When Jobs told Corning Glass CEO Wendell Weeks that he wanted as much of their gorilla glass as they could make for the then soon-to-be-released iPhone, and that he needed it in six months, Weeks told him that this is impossible, because their plants are not set up to make such glass. Undeterred, Jobs told Weeks, “Get your mind around it. You can do it.” Almost overnight, Corning converted one of their facilities to make a glass that had never been made before. The glass was delivered on schedule (pp. 471–72). This is Jobs the independent thinker at work.
In other instances, however, the concept was used when Jobs showed an insouciant disregard for relevant facts. For example, in 1985, when Jobs was CEO of NeXT, he announced that their first computer would ship in eighteen months. At the time, all the facts indicated that this commitment could not be met. And it wasn’t. The computer would not ship for another two years (pp. 226, 235). In such instances, Jobs was not identifying the relevant facts and making a judgment on the basis of those facts. Rather, Jobs was making a groundless judgment and expecting reality to comply. This is an attempt to overcome the facts of reality by sheer willpower. This is the primacy of consciousness. This is pseudo-independence.
The Glitch in Think Different
The Think Different commercial packages together genuine independence and pseudo-independence, treating two substantially different character traits as though they constituted a single type of human action. Perhaps this should not be surprising. Given that Jobs instantiates both himself, we might expect a television commercial that reflects Jobs’s self-estimate to treat the contradictory traits in his own character as though they constituted a single package.
To appreciate what’s happening here, consider the Think Different commercial at two different levels. In terms of particular examples, the commercial focuses, for the most part, on individuals who are genuinely independent. But in terms of the abstract description of these individuals, the commercial focuses on characteristics common to both genuine independence and pseudo-independence. In particular, the commercial stresses that these individuals are united by the fact that they think differently.
In so doing, the commercial commits what Harry Binswanger terms the fallacy of false integration. A concept is analogous to a manila file folder. In the folder labeled “surgeon,” for example, we file everything we know about surgeons. Similarly, in the folder labeled “murderer,” we file everything we know about murderers. As these are separate folders, our knowledge about surgeons and murderers is kept conceptually distinct. Now, imagine we never formed these concepts. Instead, we formed the concept “cutter,” which denotes anyone who cuts into human flesh. In the folder labeled “cutter,” we would have to file all our knowledge of surgeons and knife-wielding murderers. As a result, we will take everything we learn about knife-wielding murderers and apply this knowledge to surgeons, and vice-versa. In our mind, surgeons and knife-wielding murderers are united in a single, inextricable package (Binswanger, pp. 236–38).
This is what the Think Different commercial has done with genuine independence and pseudo-independence. As we’ve seen, the genuinely independent person and the person who is pseudo-independent think differently, though in substantially different ways. In focusing on a non-essential characteristic common to both, the commercial treats them as though they belonged to a single folder. This means that alongside Edison, Earhart, Wright, Callas, and Jobs, who were genuinely independent, we have to file individuals who think differently in fundamentally irrational ways. I am thinking of such individuals as child killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, holocaust denier David Irving, and clan revivalist William J. Simmons.
In focusing on a non-essential fact—that these individuals thought differently—the Think Different commercial has packaged genuine independence with pseudo-independence, so that the two become inextricably linked in our minds. So doing transforms the arguments for independence as a virtue into arguments for pseudo-independence as a virtue, and the repugnant characteristics of pseudo-independence into repugnant characteristics of genuine independence.
Judging Jobs
An unintended consequence is that this package-deal undermines our ability to accurately identify and evaluate Jobs’s character. If genuine independence and pseudo-independence are conceptually distinct, Jobs is an individual of mixed character—virtuous in some respects and vicious in others. However, if we follow the lead of the Think Different commercial and treat both traits as part of a single package, then these are not two different character traits, together they constitute a single character trait, which means Jobs could not have had one without the other. Thus, we will come to think that Jobs had to have his negative traits in order to have his positive traits, and vice versa. Fans will cite his positive traits to cleanse his negative traits, and critics will seize on his negative traits to undermine his positive traits.
To do Jobs justice we need to recognize that genuine independence and pseudo-independence are distinct character traits. Consequently, Jobs should be praised—unreservedly and without qualification—for his independence, and at the same time criticized—unreservedly and without qualification—for his pseudo-independence.
Judging a person of mixed character is always a challenge. In Jobs’s case, we must focus on the essential or important aspects of his character—those traits that distinguished him from other human beings and made him the unique individual he was. Observe that many people have gone days without bathing and have resorted to quackery when faced with a terminal illness.
Only Jobs possessed the independence needed to revolutionize six industries. That’s what’s important about him. That’s why he was able to push the human race forward. That’s why he’s a hero. That’s why I wrote this chapter. That’s why you’re reading this book.