Gordon Taylor

Society seems to reward single-mindedness in so many ways - Rich people are good, people who help people are good, innovators are good - but all of this single minded focus comes at the expense of other stuff, because life is extremely complex and multi-faceted. You almost have to be ignorant of a lot of things in order to succeed in your chosen discipline. Trump is a product of the 80's - that greed tycoon model that values money, status and personal wealth above everything else, and Lewis' novel highlights that pretty nicely, without simply following the President around and reporting him saying dumb things. This quote made it really clear to me - what Trump does is ignore and hand-wave away all of the things he doesn't care about. Which is the entire machinery of government, and all of the hard mission-driven work that people have done over hundreds of years to build a society that allows people to focus on the thing they want. In a way, Trump is a product of our own success. We built a society that delivers all of this value and information and supporting framework to people, and then we started to champion people who succeed in just one vector- in Trump's case, being rich. Then when those people become in charge of the whole framework, they dismiss it as unimportant, and start inadvertently damaging it. For me, this is the risk Lewis alludes to in the Title.