Friedan, Megalomania, and Memory Lane

There is an interesting tidbit of an obit on Betty Friedan on Steve Sailer's recent blog. After Germaine Greer wrote a devastating nil de mortuis nisi malo piece that portrayed Friedan as a grasping megalomaniac, it brought to mind meeting Friedan at a dinner party in Sag Harbor in the mid-80s at the home of John Scanlon, a peerless PR person for Daniel J. Edelman whose Rolodex had every name one could think of and who had a cell phone way back before it was standard issue for even top business people.

Betty Friedan was attending, along with Ken Auletta, an obscure congressman named Chuck Schumer [Scanlon could spot a comer a mile off], the WaPo's Richard Cohen, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Nora Ephron, and other luminaries of lesser incandescence. Strangely, Betty sat to the side as meek as a sheep, or ewe, and seemed almost oblivious to the merrymaking. My only strong memory is talking about human sacrifice with a three-sheets-to-windward Vonnegut, who made a lot of sense even slurring his words through serial glasses of gin on the rocks.

But Steve had an interesting point that the Financial Times maven Lucy Kellaway made one Monday in her FT column, which I cannot find online, unfortunately. Lucy was writing about senior business execs, but her comments on their completely blithe solipsism and limitless self-regard are salient in very much the same way as Sailer’s following point:

Indeed, much of what we are taught as the high intellectual history of the human race is based more on the magnetism and impenetrable self-assurance of thinkers than on minor issues like whether they were right or not. Freud is a perfect example, a charlatan who befuddled two generations via his implacable self-esteem. Marx was similar, and Ayn Rand was cut from the same cloth but fortunately never had as deleteriously wide an impact as Marx or Freud

I believe Kellaway went on to say that often these super-management achievers are finally feckless and render great harm to their companies. But unlike Steve Jobs so far, whose wiki bio accuses him of causing a "reality distortion field," or RDF in Apple lingo, they and their companies often come a cropper with disastrous consequences to stakeholders trusting the CEOs' inner vision and outer confidence. As the wikipedia says about Jobs:

Jobs is both admired and criticized for his consummate skills of persuasion and salesmanship, which has been dubbed the "reality distortion field" and is particularly evident during his keynote speeches at Macworld Expos. This "RDF" shield is an encapsulating term, also referring to Apple's sometimes non-competitive market pricing, such as the overly expensive G4 cube, or making decisions outside the desire of market demands, such as the elimination of Macintosh clones.

I watched Jobs weave his magic web online at his Macworld Expo presentation and his rollout reminded me of his Syrian ancestry, as he projected a sort of religion-tinged [I believe "indigo" is the new buzz word"] absolutism in unadorned straightforward self-assurance. A combination of a smarter younger Saddam Hussein and Carlos Slim controlling the world through his brilliant artifice.

As I look at my daughter's TV Ipod, bought by her grandparents behind my back, and watch Disney come into the Jobs/Lasseter magnetic field, I wonder how much longer before he overtakes stodgy Bill Gates.