Why Change Shouldn’t Surprise Us

In his latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explores negative social contagion and “the strange pathways that ideas and behavior follow through our world.” Investigating the opioid crisis and bank robbery, Medicare fraud and preferential admissions at Harvard, Gladwell departs from the optimistic discussion of epidemics and productive change in his mega best seller The Tipping Point (2000) to look at the dark “underside” of epidemics. “In the first book, I was introducing an idea,” Gladwell told me. “Whereas in Revenge of the Tipping Point, I’m describing something we’ve lived with and experienced. We all know now about epidemics, and the term ‘going viral,’ which would have been meaningless in the year 2000, is familiar to everyone today, for better and for worse. So my project in this new book is very different: I’m trying to give complexity to a known phenomenon.” 

Gladwell was born in England in 1963 to a British father and a Jamaican mother, and moved to Canada with his family at age 6. After graduating from the University of Toronto in 1984, he began working as a journalist in the US. He’s a staff writer at the New Yorker and cofounder of the audio production company Pushkin Industries, where he hosts the podcast Revisionist History. In addition to The Tipping Point and Revenge of the Tipping Point, he has written The Bomber Mafia, Talking to Strangers, David and Goliath, What the Dog Saw, Outliers, and Blink. He’s been named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.

On a New York evening and Tokyo morning, Gladwell and I talked about why shifts in ideas and behavior shouldn’t surprise us, how we unconsciously share beliefs with others, and the importance of shaping our communities in positive ways.

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You set out to write Revenge of the Tipping Point as a revision of The Tipping Point. Why did you decide to write a new book instead? When I reread The Tipping Point, I discovered I couldn’t revise it because I felt like I’d been given someone’s book and told to rewrite it. It seemed like I didn’t have permission to do that. I realized it would be better to do a sequel than a revision. 

Did you feel that your thinking had evolved since you wrote The Tipping Point? Yes, The Tipping Point is a complete thought, a full project. It’s rare that we’re confronted with something that’s a time capsule of our thinking. This allowed me to realize that it’s not so much that my views have changed, although mine have, but that I know so much more. Everything I’ve learned in the intervening twenty-five years is juxtaposed with what I wrote back then. I wrote the book when I was in my 30s, and when I read it again, I saw how much I’d learned in my 40s and 50s. For example, the discussions about crime in the original Tipping Point are very naive. I’d never written about crime in a sustained way before, and I was grappling with explaining the sudden drop in crime in New York City, attributing it to broken windows policing. The drop took everyone by surprise, and I was writing in the middle of the period of surprise. 

The bardo teachings are about impermanence, reminding us that things can change at any moment. The Tipping Point and Revenge of the Tipping Point explore the positive and negative shifts in ideas and behavior that occur in society, whether it’s falling crime or the opioid crisis. Has writing these books affected your attitude toward change and uncertainty? I’ve realized there’s no reason to be surprised by change. In fact, we should be suspicious of its absence, not surprised by its presence. There’s much less consistency in the manifestations of human belief than I would have thought. I mean, there’s consistency in human nature, and the human structure of our reactions to things is the same as it’s always been. But as far as the content of our beliefs, I’m much more aware of the possibility for quite dramatic reversals. Even when we’re right in the midst of something, we often don’t see it coming. I find it both hopeful and worrisome that we’re incredibly unreliable narrators of our present moment. 

There’s no reason to be surprised by change. In fact, we should be suspicious of its absence, not surprised by its presence.

And I can give you a prediction about what I will believe and how I will behave five years from now that will almost certainly be wrong. It’s just a pointless exercise. I was reading today some gloomy and doomy thing about AI, and I think the only appropriate response to the extraordinary level of prediction about AI is to say it’s unlikely anyone has it right. 

You’re not afraid that AI is going to be producing Malcolm Gladwell books? No, you can only be agnostic in the face of the uncertainty. Everything we know suggests that what’s going to happen with AI is very unclear.

Have you become more accepting of change since you’re so used to thinking about it and writing about it? I mean, I’m human, so it’s still hard, especially with some things. My father died in 2017, and I had ample warning of his death, but the intensity and duration of my feelings surprised me. Logically, you know your elderly parent is going to die, but there’s a gap between an intellectual understanding of how the world works and our baseline human reactions. I think that’s true for all of us. 

In Revenge of the Tipping Point, you discuss ideas and behavior that aren’t universal, that are limited to given groups. You use the term “overstory” to refer to the perspectives that develop in a community, disposing that community to act in detrimental ways. This resonates with the idea in the bardo teachings that patterns passed to us from our family or ancestors, from our society, lead us to specific behaviors of body, speech, and mind. What caught your interest about overstories? The thing about overstories that appealed to me is that they’re part of a collective consciousness and they belong to communities and towns, organizations and countries. I cannot get over how interesting it is that these communities of thought, of influence, exist and we’re unconsciously sharing beliefs with others. And that shared beliefs, patterns of practice, have boundaries. You know, Medicare fraud is rampant in Miami but not in Fort Lauderdale, which is twenty minutes away? 

How did you become aware of this phenomenon? I knew a bit about the medical literature on it, what they call “small-area variation”—like when an epidemic stays within a certain area—and I began to think about the broader implications. Scientists don’t have a good explanation for why small-area variation exists, and since they’re scientists, they’re uncomfortable with appealing to something as vague and almost spiritual as an overstory. But I’m not a scientist, so in the absence of any other explanation, this is where I ended up. And it makes a lot of sense. Small-area variation is surprisingly resistant and durable, and to explain it, you have to appeal to something like an overstory, as weird as it sounds. You have to say there’s something in the ether that’s influencing us, just like the overstory in a forest—the canopy of trees—affects everything underneath it.

So the overstory is specific and lasting. It endures collectively, but can you change it for yourself? I think you can change it by moving. On an unconscious level, we may be compelled to move, to pull up stakes and to marry outside our own culture, and so on. My father left England in his 20s and never went back, except for visits. I was always puzzled about it. I mean, all of his family was there. All of his education was there. He seemed the quintessential Englishman. He wasn’t a rebel or an outlaw or an adventurer, and yet, like many Englishmen, he had this overwhelming desire to leave. I think that, on some unconscious level, he had a frustration with the overstory. It didn’t suit him, it was confining. I suspect there was something about the class system that profoundly irked him. And where did he go? He went first to Jamaica, where he met my mother. Then he went to rural Canada. Those are quite substantial leaps from the south of England. He just wanted an ether that felt different.

When you left Canada for the US, were you leaving behind your overstory? I think it was more about the job market in the 1980s and finding a bigger stage, since Canada is a very small place. But I don’t have any problem with Canadianness—in fact, I really like it. I have profoundly ambivalent feelings about the United States. I’m still a Canadian citizen even though I’ve been in the US for forty years, so I guess that tells you something.

In bardo, we can move forward by recognizing that we have agency, that things don’t just happen and we determine our trajectory with the choices we make. Your discussion of overstories in Revenge of the Tipping Point is ultimately about why we’re responsible for what takes place in our communities and why we need to stop blinding ourselves to this with delusional narratives. What’s your view of the responsibility we each have as a member of a community? Well, interesting question. I think what it means to be a member of a community is to accept responsibility for what the community does, or to understand that you need to play an active role in shaping the kind of community you want. Passivity, in other words, is the enemy of community. That’s the idea that I’m pursuing in this book, that there’s too much passivity. The notion that something is unknowable and mysterious is just a pretense, a way of excusing our passivity. There are things going on for reasons, the reasons are knowable, and that knowledge ought to be a spur for us to get involved.

Passivity, in other words, is the enemy of community.

The Poplar Grove chapter of Revenge, which looks at an affluent community where high-achieving teens are committing suicide, is squarely about this. It’s about parents who refuse to connect the dots; they pressure their children and create a culture where the children feel despair. But the parents still want to think of their children’s anguish as an anomalous, mysterious fact. It’s not anomalous or mysterious; it’s the consequence of decisions the parents have made as a community. That’s the kind of disconnect I find frustrating and tragic. 

What do you think your responsibility is as a journalist? To provoke people’s curiosity. To communicate the sense of excitement I have when I encounter a new idea. It’s a feeling I’m trying to awaken in people. Not so much a theme or a topic or an idea. I want you to feel like what I’m writing about is fun and fascinating even if you disagree. Even if you think, “This guy is totally wrong. I can’t believe him.” I want to get away from the notion that the goal of my writing is to initiate agreement. The goal is that you stop and think about it and tell your friends. For me, that’s success. If I’ve provoked someone to think about something and respond and bring their own experience to bear on it, that’s what makes it worthwhile.