Max Gladwell

What the victory of Barack Obama means for the nexus of social media and green living. What it means for the ideals of Max Gladwell.

It’s now been a full week since we woke up to that momentous new day in our history. Barack Obama was elected president with 367 electoral votes and 52% of the popular vote. It was a sweeping mandate for America’s first black president. It was a victory for the greatest political campaign ever run. A victory for social media technologies and Web 2.0. A victory for clean energy and the five million jobs it promises to create. A victory for hope and pragmatic idealism…a triumph over the politics of fear and division. It’s a victory for the Millennial Generation, who turned out in record numbers and who will forever change politics in America. Indeed, their numbers are staggering, and only a small percentage of were old enough to vote this time around. In fact, many now prefer the moniker of Generation O.

In this series of posts, we’ll look at what the election and presidency of Barack Obama means within the context of Max Gladwell. We’ll explore the trends and principles that made the Obama revolution possible, and we’ll forecast a bit about what it means for America and the world on a go-forward basis. In no particular order, we’ll discuss what the Obama presidency means for Internet technology, energy and the environment, community organizing and national service, the economic crisis, campaigning and governing, entrepreneurship and philanthropy, marketing, the Millennial Generation, and even the Republican party. First, we address the title of this series: the heroic ideal.

We recently presented at the Opportunity Green conference at UCLA. Our time was significantly curtailed, so we didn’t get a chance to expand on the answer to the central question of “Who is Max Gladwell?”

You should hopefully know that it’s not a person. Still, the question is a legitimate one. Max Gladwell represents an ideal. It the heroic ideal of the networked social entrepreneur. There is a literary context to this that draws from the objectivist ideals of Ayn Rand. Allow us to further explain.

The world of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is set in the heyday of the industrial revolution. It’s a time when industrialist were changing the world and amassing tremendous wealth in the areas of steel, railroads, copper, automotive, and energy. Rand’s heroes were entrepreneurs. They were people like Hank Reardon, Francisco d’Anconia, and Dagney Taggart. Each represented the heroic ideal of the innovative, visionary, and self-motivated business person who is driven by reason, profit, and purpose. Likewise, Rand casts politicians as weak-minded antagonists who undermine progress and seek equality at the expense of personal freedom.

Rand is known to have openly opposed environmentalism, but this was for good reason. In her day, it was used as a political tool with no basis in science or economics. In hindsight, we realize that the industries that built our modern economy did so at a great expense to our health, security, and overall ecosystems. These industries were not sustainable primarily because the external costs of extracting and burning oil or strip mining copper were not factored into the actual costs, leaving a balance due for all of humanity to pay. Little has changed about this flawed way of doing business. But the true hero of the novel–the leader of the leaders in Atlas Shrugged–was John Galt. He alone achieved mythic status, wherein the first line of the book poses a question with no clear answer: “Who is John Galt?”

Galt was idolized among his industrialist peers as the thought leader of his generation. He came to symbolize the ideals of self-reliance, reason, ingenuity, civil disobedience, and unwavering principles. He was the first to see the writing on the wall: a corrupt government that prides itself on mediocrity and a populace of sheep that is all too willing to follow one another to slaughter. Sound familiar? What’s so compelling about Galt’s character, though, and what makes it so relevant to Max Gladwell is that Rand casts him (unwittingly, we suspect) as a pioneer in clean energy technology.

Galt was alone among his fellow industrialists in developing a disruptive technology that would forever change the landscape of energy, transportation, and the means of production (if only he had allowed society access to it). Galt developed a motor that harnessed static electricity as an infinitely clean, abundant, and renewable source of energy. Whether Rand realized it or not, Galt was a social entrepreneur. His motor had a clear social benefit with a compelling triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. Granted, this is largely science fiction, but so was going to the moon at the time Rand published Atlas Shrugged (1957).

As we argued in Why We Can’t Save the Planet, Rand’s objectivist philosophy is, in fact, compatible with progressive environmentalism. We feel she would have agreed given what we know about the costs and economics of pollution and human injustice. There is tremendous economic incentive to innovate and solve these crises, lest we continue on this path of collective suicide. The entrepreneurs and industrialists of our age will be more like John Galt (cleantech) and less like Francisco d’Anconia (copper mining). But it’s more a function of what we know about the world and less about differences in their core principles. Both were heroic characters. Galt was just more visionary and driven by technology. He was more evolved.

This is this fundamental inspiration behind Max Gladwell: the heroic ideal of the networked social entrepreneur. It is the entrepreneur who wants to create wealth while changing the world and providing some social or environmental benefit, whether implicitly or explicitly. It is the entrepreneur who understands the power and potential of technology to further these objectives and magnify their impacts. It is the entrepreneur who collaborates with his or her peers, as well as potential competitors, and works together to achieve mutual success. It is the entrepreneur who values innovation, authenticity, openness, and transparency as core principles of competitive advantage.

In the months leading up the election, we wrote several posts that compared 2008 to 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt defeated Hoover in a landslide. We acknowledged the historic political truth, wherein the incumbent party gets voted out (every time) during an economic crisis. It’s become clear that this historic parallel between FDR and BHO runs much deeper.

Given the election of a Democrat during the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression, there’s been plenty of speculation about a New New Deal. But while the original New Deal may have been the right medicine for the time, those times have changed. Atlas Shrugged demonstrated how and why Big Government and nationalization kill innovation and threaten the entrepreneurial spirit. We’re optimistic that Obama has a different plan and that he’ll choose to empower entrepreneurs with policies and an economic environment that encourages and rewards innovation. Government is not the answer, yet it serves an important role. The evil and bumbling politicians of Atlas Shrugged were, in fact, more like Bush and the neoconservatives than the libertarian leanings espoused by John Galt and company. Bush’s “free market” was an illusion and a lie.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is a true networked social entrepreneur. He embodies that heroic ideal. It’s how his campaign was run. And if Change.gov is any indication, it’s also how he’ll govern.

Atlas Shrugged ends with the triumph of freedom and entrepreneurship, marked by the dawn of new era.

They could not see the world beyond the mountains, there was only a void of darkness and rock, but the darkness was hiding the ruins of a continent: the roofless homes, the rusting tractors, the lightless streets, the abandoned rail. But far in the distance, on the edge of the earth, a small flame was waving in the wind, the defiantly stubborn flame of Wyatt’s torch, twisting, being torn and regaining its hold, not to be uprooted or extinguished. It seemed to be calling and waiting for the words John Galt was about to pronounce.

“The road is cleared,” said Galt. “We are going back to the world.” He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.

We see many parallels between these final words of optimisim and Obama’s victory speach on November 4th. The world has been torn down through a leadership vacuum and so much political and economic ineptitude. Not only does it need to be rebuilt, it needs to be rebuilt in a new way with a new set of ideals and an emphasis on accountability. It calls for a new generation of John Galts and Dagney Taggarts. It calls for Atlas Shrugged 2.0 and for the heroic ideal of the networked social entrepreneur.

Related Posts

• The Heroic Ideal of Max Gladwell and Barack Obama: Part II
• True Innovation is Always Green
• Using Social Media to Accelerate Sustainability…at #SXSW
• Stephen Colbert on Atlas Shrugged: Rand Illusion
• Innovation or Extinction: The New Economic Reality