Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, is pretty well known by this point. It’s a book about snap judgments: how we make them, why we make them, and when they’re a good idea (more often than you’d think). Gladwell delves a bit into the biochemical reactions that occur during split second blink moments but spends more time explaining what happens during these moments. It seems counterintuitive that a person’s snapshot judgment can beat scientific analysis, but that’s what happens in the very first example. Months of scientific analysis deemed a statue genuine: after a single glance, experts said it was a fake. And the really cool thing? These experts didn’t know why it was a fake; they just knew. Now, in today’s results driven society, that type of thinking isn’t really encouraged. More facts equals better decisions is almost the rallying cry of our Google happy age. But in so many scenarios, that’s just not the case. Gladwell devotes a large section of Blink to attempting to explain when to trust your first impression (speed dating is good!) and when not to (maybe facing your accuser not always the best way to go in court cases). However, in the end he admits that there is no hard and fast rule about when to/when not to trust your snap judgment and advise us to, well, use our best judgment.
This is an aside from the book, but it’s interesting enough that I want to write about it anyway. In Blink, Gladwell discusses a researcher who has learned to read marriages to the point that he can predict whether a marriage will last based on only fifteen minutes of observation. First of all, DUDE. I want to learn how to do that! What a gift that would be to a marriage and family therapist (which is what I am currently attending grad school for). But, the more I think about it, the more ambivalent I become. Yes, it would be nice to know ahead of time whether a marriage would work or not. But, if you were able to see this, what then? I mean, do you say to your clients, “You know, the way you roll your eyes at each other signifies a deep level of contempt. This isn’t going to work out, so give up now.” While that is the quick and honest route, I’m really uncomfortable with that type of pronouncement. People can change. This is the underpinning of MFT, of cognitive behavioral therapy, of psychoanalytic therapy, of all therapy, of all people who work with people. People can change. Our behavior is not predetermined. So the idea that you can predict the events of someone’s life after 15 minutes? Pisses me off. Even if it’s true, damnit.
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer by Nathaniel Fick is, as the title implies, an account of a marine officer. Nate Fick graduated college and instead of going to business school joined the Marines. He did so for a lot of reasons: an attraction to the Corps honor and courage, a desire to test himself, a desire to live instead of talk about living. I don’t have the book in front of me so I’m not going to go into details, but the upshot of it is that after boot camp and officer training he ended up in Iraq as a lieutenant in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the first push of Operation Freedom. Evan Wright’s series of embedded articles for Rolling Stone, the book Generation Kill and the HBO miniseries by the same name were all based off of Wright’s experiences in Fick’s platoon. (For the record, all of the above are excellent reading/viewing. For sheer immediacy, I prefer the articles, but the book is also very good, even if a bit more scattershot. The miniseries, directed by The Wire’s David Simon, is amazingly realistic and unflinching, like all of Simon’s work.) The book is interesting to view as a course in idealism: Fick joins the Corps for truth, justice and the American way. However, as Iraq happens, his view of the Corps and the American military system becomes increasingly jaded and pessimistic. It’s painful to so clearly experience the grinding away of someone’s ideals and illusions, especially someone as articulate and thoughtful as Fick.
Very interesting, but wtf does this have to do with Blink, I hear you cry (yes, my formative years consisted of British novelists and Monty Python. Why do you ask?) During his training, Fick talks at length about the seemingly insane and petty attention to detail demanded by the Marines. He wrote thousands of reports, spent ages learning how to wear his belt correctly, and assessed maps and technical reports till his eyes bled. Why? So these actions became ingrained in his subconscious to the point that drop the man in a war zone and sixty seconds later he could give you a detailed report of the scenario, three options to deal with it, and four ways to carry out each of those options. As I read the book, it seemed like every exercise Fick detailed was formulated to make something second nature. Why do you do pushups if your belt isn't perfectly centered? Because if your belt is awry in combat, your gun will be pulled out of reach. Why are officers forced to write thousands of situational reports in school but never once they're in combat? So they start thinking in terms of objectives and alternatives.
Besides this whole retraining of the subconcious, I also noticed another fucntion of Blink within the narrative. A large part of Fick's exasperation with the Marine Corps was that the Battalion went to war with the whole chain of command in the field. Decisions had to be run up and down that chain of command every time. As such, the general would issue an order that made sense at the time (or not. Fick is pretty generous in seeing the good intentions behind each order, while Wright relays soldierss views on orders. To say the least, their views are not so flattering), but by the time that order reached the men charged with enacting it, the situation had changed. The order made no sense or put the troops in harm's way.One of the things Fick learned in officer training was that a good somewhat informed decision made now is nearly always better than a great and exhaustively researched decision made in 48 hours. This statement sums up Blink in, well, the blink of an eye.
Yeah, that was corny, sorry. I think the point of writing these two reviews together is to say that sometimes books change the way you see the world. Blink changed me; One Bullet Away highlighted that change in blinding neon letters.
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