So I want to start today by having you visualize
something really mundane. Just picture a standard
city sidewalk. Okay, a sidewalk. Yeah, just a
slab of concrete in a downtown area. You know,
maybe there's a crash can, a fire hydrant, a
few people rushing past you. Right, I'm picturing
it. It's noisy, probably a bit dirty. People
are kind of dodging each other. Exactly. And
if I asked you to describe the movement of those
people, what would you say? You'd probably say
it's random. Right. Oh, absolutely. That it's
chaos. It's just individuals trying to get from
point A to point B without dumping into each
other. Yeah. I mean, it certainly feels like
chaos when you're, you know, trying to catch
a train and you're stuck behind a slow walker.
Oh, man, the worst. But what if I told you that
it isn't chaos at all? Okay. What if I told you
that the way you walk down that street, the way
you pause to check your phone, the specific inch
of the curb you choose to stand on while you
wait for the light. What if all of that is actually
governed by a set of hidden rules? Yeah, rules
that are just as rigid, just as predictable,
and just as discoverable as the code running
a computer program. I mean, I would say that
sounds a little bit like the matrix, but knowing
who you're talking about today, I know exactly
where you're going with this. Yeah, we are doing
a deep dive today into the mind of a man who
looked at the world differently than almost anyone
else in the 20th century. His name was William
H. White. To his friends, he was Holly. Holly
White. Right. And this is a guy who pulled off
one of the strangest, most fascinating career
pivots in history. It really is a unique trajectory
because we are talking about a man who went from
analyzing the stifling gray flannel boardrooms
of 1950s corporations. Right, the Mad Men era.
Exactly. From that to analyzing the gritty, chaotic
streets of 1970s New York City. And the wild
thing is he used the exact same skill set for
both. He was a professional people watcher. Yeah.
But I don't mean that in a casual sitting at
a cafe kind of way. No, no, not at all. He turned
observation into a hard science. He turned just
looking at things into a rigorous methodology.
And that is really the mission of this deep dive
for us today. We have his biography, his bibliography,
and his massive studies on urban planning. right
in front of us. Piles of it. Piles of data. And
we really want to understand how this one man
decoded the secret structures of human behavior.
Because whether he was looking at a Fortune 500
CEO... or a street performer in a plaza, he saw
the exact same thing. He saw a system. He saw
a system. But before we get into the biography,
you found a contradiction in the research that
I think perfectly sets the stage for why this
guy matters so much. Yeah, it's the hook that
really pulls you in. Because William H. White
is famous for two things that, on the surface
at least, seem totally opposed to each other.
Okay, lay it out. First, in the 1950s, he wrote
a book called The Organization Man. It was this
blistering critique of conformity. He absolutely
hated how corporations stripped away individuality.
He was the champion of the lone wolf. OK, so
he's the anti -rule guy. Yeah, precisely. But
then 20 years later, he publishes his findings
on city streets and he argues that jaywalking,
which is literally breaking the law, crossing
against the light, is actually a rational, highly
structured and efficient act. So wait, the expert
on conformity tells us that breaking the rules
is the smartest thing you can do. In a way, yes,
but it's deeper than that. He's showing us that
humans have their own rules, internal social
rules, and those often make way more sense than
the rules the government or the corporation tries
to force on them. That makes a lot of sense.
He trusted human nature way more than he trusted
the rulebook. And somewhere in that tension,
he actually coined a term that we all use today.
But we all use it incorrectly. Groupthink. Oh,
we definitely need to clear the air on that one
later. The way we use it on social media or in
casual conversation is absolutely not how White
intended it. We will definitely unpack that.
But let's rewind a bit. Because to understand
the observer, we really have to look at the lens
he was looking through. And that lens was ground
in a very specific, very intense place. Let's
go back to the beginning. William Hollingsworth
White Jr., born 1917, Westchester, Pennsylvania.
Right. And looking at his early biography, you
really get the sense of a very traditional, perhaps
even elite, American upbringing. For sure. He
went to St. Andrew's School in Delaware, and
then he went to Princeton University. Graduated
class of 1939. Princeton in the late 30s. I mean,
that paints a pretty specific picture. That's
F. Scott Fitzgerald territory. We're talking
about the absolute elite, the future captains
of industry. It really does. It places him in
a very certain social stratum, educated, likely
surrounded by the kind of people who would eventually
go on to run the very corporations he would later
analyze. The ultimate insider. Exactly. But here's
the thing. If he had just stayed on that track,
if he had just ridden that Princeton wave, he
probably would have become just another executive.
Just another guy in a suit. He would have been
one of the exact people he later criticized.
So what changed? What broke the mold for him?
The pivot point, the trauma. really that created
hollywhite the observer wasn't princeton it was
the marine corps see this is a part of his life
i didn't know much about until we dug into these
sources for this deep dive i knew he was an urbanist
i didn't realize he was in the thick of the pacific
theater oh he was right in it he joined in 1941
and served until 1944 and he wasn't just pushing
paper in a warehouse somewhere safe he was the
battalion intelligence officer with the third
battalion first marines wow and he was right
in the thick of the guadal Canal campaign. Guadalcanal.
I mean, historically speaking, that is some of
the most brutal, chaotic fighting of the entire
war. Horrific conditions. Mud. disease, close
quarters combat, just an absolute nightmare.
Absolutely. And we have to consider his specific
role there. He was an intelligence officer. Now
think about what that job actually entails. You're
not just shooting. Right. In the middle of absolute
chaos, mud, malaria, enemy fire, your job isn't
just to react. Your job is to watch. You're stepping
back from the immediate emotion of fight or flight
and trying to see the system at work. Exactly.
It forces a kind of detached observation. You
are a participant, your life is in very real
danger, but your mind has to be somewhere else
entirely. You have to be analyzing the data.
Asking the bigger questions. Yes. Why is the
enemy moving there? What is the pattern in their
attacks? What is the actual system behind this
chaos? So he's essentially training his brain
to suppress the instinct to panic and replace
it with the instinct to analyze. Yes. And the
sources mention that he actually left Guadalcanal
with a serious case of malaria that lingered
for years. Oh, wow. So he carried the physical
toll of that observation with him. He was physically
weakened, which perhaps made him even more reliant
on his intellect. When you can't physically dominate
your environment, you have to understand it to
survive. And interestingly, he didn't stop analyzing
when he left the front lines. The sources say
he spent the rest of the war at the Marine Corps
Staff and Command School in Quantico, Virginia.
Yes, and look at what he was doing while he was
there. He was lecturing and writing. Specifically,
he was writing a monograph on the fighting qualities
of the Japanese soldier. That is just fascinating.
He's taking the enemy, the quote -unquote other,
and trying to systematize their behavior for
a curriculum. He was taking anecdotal observations
from the jungle and turning them into hard data.
He was saying, look, the Japanese soldier is
not a monster. He is a human operating under
a specific set of cultural and military rules.
Right. If we understand the rules, we understand
the man. That really sets the template, doesn't
it? I mean, it's not a huge leap to go from analyzing
the rituals of the Japanese army to analyzing
the rituals of. General Electric. It is the exact
same skill set. You are looking at a tribe, studying
their hierarchy, their values, and their overall
effectiveness. And that is exactly what he did
when he finally came home. Okay, so the war ends.
It's 1946. White comes home. He has this Ivy
League background, this intense military training
and observation. And he lands a job at the absolute
pinnacle of business journalism, Fortune magazine.
Which was really the Bible of business at the
time. And he stays there until 1958. This is
the golden age of American corporate growth,
the post -war boom. And Fortune gives him a massive
assignment. They sponsor him to do extensive
interviews with the CEOs of major corporations.
We're talking General Electric, Ford, the absolute
titans of industry. And this is where he writes
the book that makes him famous. The Organization
Man, published in 1956. I feel like we hear this
title a lot, but maybe we don't realize just
how big it actually was. The notes say it sold
over two million copies. Two million copies.
That is a staggering number for a sociology book.
It wasn't just a business book. It was a cultural
phenomenon. Everyone was reading it. So what
was the core argument? What did he see in those
CEOs and managers that resonated with two million
people? Why did it strike such a nerve? While
he validated a feeling that millions of Americans
were having but couldn't quite articulate for
themselves, he argued that there was a fundamental
shift happening in the American character. He
said we were moving from the Protestant ethic
to the social ethic. Okay, let's break those
down. Protestant ethic, that's the classic American
dream stuff, right? Max Weber. Right. It's the
idea of individual salvation through hard work
and thrift. If you succeed, it's because you
worked hard. If you fail, it's because you failed.
It's rugged individualism. Pulling yourself up
by your bootstraps. Exactly. And the social ethic.
The social ethic is the belief that the individual
is basically meaningless and only the group matters.
White saw that in these massive new corporations,
the old rules just didn't apply anymore. You
didn't succeed by being a rugged individualist
or a lone genius. That would actually get you
in trouble. Exactly. You succeeded by fitting
in, by being a good team player, by not rocking
the boat. The era of the gray flannel suit, the
suburbs, Levittown, everything looks the same.
Everyone acts the same. Correct. But White went
deeper than just saying conformity is boring.
He argued that the social ethic was actually
changing how people thought about themselves
internally. He saw men who were completely surrendering
their individuality to the corporation. They
weren't just working for Ford. They were Ford
men. Right. The company told them where to live,
how to dress, what clubs to join, even who to
marry in some cases. They just accepted it. They
didn't just accept it. They embraced it. They
believed that this belonging gave their lives
meaning. And that brings us to the term we mentioned
earlier, the term he coined, groupthink. Yes.
Let's really do the deep dive on this because
it's so important. I think most people today
use groupthink to mean, oh, we all just agreed
too quickly because we were lazy. Or I didn't
want to be the one to raise my hand and disagree.
That is the common usage, yeah. But White meant
something much more specific and, frankly, much
more sinister. He coined the term in a 1952 Fortune
article four years before the book came out.
And his definition is critical here. He explicitly
says he is not talking about instinctive conformity.
Right, because humans are social animals. We
instinctively want to fit in. It's just biology.
We don't want to be kicked out of the tribe.
Exactly. White called that a perennial failing
of mankind. We all do that. Groupthink, as he
defined it, was what he called rationalized conformity.
Rationalized conformity. What does that actually
mean in practice? It means you don't just conform
because it's easy or safe. You conform because
you have constructed an articulate philosophy
that says conforming is the right and moral thing
to do. Oh, that is dangerous. Yeah. So it's not
just I'll agree with the boss. I don't get fired.
It's the group's decision is inherently superior
to my own. So is my moral duty to suppress my
own doubt. Yes, he called it an open, articulate
philosophy, which holds that group values are
not only expedient, but right and good as well.
It's the fundamental belief that the we is always
wiser than the I. That puts a whole new spin
on it. Because if you truly believe the group
is morally right, you stop critically thinking
altogether. You outsource your conscience to
the committee. And that is what terrified White.
He saw these brilliant men at GE and Fordmen
who were capable of great things, basically lobotomizing
themselves in the name of harmony. In the 1950s
corporate world, if you disagreed with the group,
you weren't just being difficult. You were being
wrong. You were maladjusted. Maladjusted. That's
a heavy word. It implies mental illness. It really
does. And companies actually used personality
tests to screen for this maladjustment. They
wanted people who were perfectly average, perfectly
pliable. All sharp edges. Right. And White hated
these tests. He actually included an appendix
in the organization man called How to Cheat on
Personality Tests. No way. He taught his... readers
how to beat the system he did he gave specific
advice like when asked if you love your father
and mother say yes but don't be too enthusiastic
that is hilarious or if asked if you like to
read books say yes but nothing too intellectual
he wanted people to actively sabotage the machine
that was trying to standardize them i love that
yeah he's like a spy in the house of conformity
he's teaching the prisoners how to pick the lock
He really was. He was holding up a mirror to
the entire American middle class and saying,
look at what you're doing to yourselves. You
are trading your soul for safety. Okay, so he
spends the 50s diagnosing this sickness in the
American workplace. He's a bestseller, a public
intellectual. He could have stayed in that lane
forever. He could have just kept writing about
business psychology and retired wealthy. He absolutely
could have. But then we see this fascinating
pivot. And this is where the story gets really
fun. The pivot. It's 1969. White leaves the world
of corporate psychology entirely and moves into
urban sociology. He starts working with the New
York City Planning Commission. Now, think about
the context here. 1969, New York City is entering
a very rough period. Yeah, it wasn't the Disney
-fied Times Square we know today. Far from it.
Urban decay was really setting in. Crime was
rising. The middle class was fleeing to the suburbs.
Ironically, the same suburbs filled with those
organization men he wrote about. Exactly. Full
circle. And the conventional wisdom of urban
planning at the time was all about urban renewal.
Urban renewal. Now, that usually meant bulldozing
neighborhoods, didn't it? It did. The planners,
led by figures like Robert Moses, looked at the
messy, chaotic city street and saw a problem.
They wanted order. They wanted to separate things
cleanly, put the cars on highways, put the people
on elevated walkways, put the housing in massive
towers, just get rid of all the friction. They
wanted to turn the city into a machine. Exactly.
They were applying that exact same corporate
desire for order to the organic mess of the city.
And here comes White. And he doesn't bring a
textbook with him. He brings a camera. This is
the Street Life Project. And the methodology
is just pure white. He didn't want to rely on
abstract theories about what people do. He wanted
to know what they actually did. Right, because
he realized that most architects and planners
never actually watched people using their buildings.
They designed for how people should act, not
how they do act. Big difference. Huge. So White
hired a team of research assistants, mostly students,
and gave them tools. And these weren't just clipboards.
The source says they were wielding still cameras,
movie cameras, telephoto lenses, and notebooks.
They were doing surveillance, but for a benevolent
purpose. They would set up time -lapse cameras
overlooking plazas, street corners, parks, and
they would just film for hours, days, weeks.
It reminds me of those nature documentaries where
they film a watering hole in the Serengeti just
to see which animals come to drink. That is the
perfect analogy. White treated New York City
like an ecosystem. He wanted to describe urban
public life in an objective and measurable way.
Measurable is the key word there. He wasn't just
saying, hey, I feel like this park is busy today.
He was counting. Exactly. He was completely obsessive
about the data. How many people sat on this specific
ledge? How long did they stay? Did they sit alone
or in groups? What happened when the sun went
behind a cloud? How many men versus women? Really
granular stuff. He was collecting hard data on
things that everyone else just took completely
for granted. And this work culminated in two
major works. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
in 1980, which was both a book and a film, and
City, rediscovering the center in 1988. And The
Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is really the
bible of this new way of thinking. If you watch
the film... And it is a total delight, by the
way. You see White's voiceover analyzing footage
of people just existing. Right. But he makes
it riveting. He treats a couple saying goodbye
on a street corner like a complex ballet. So
let's get into what he actually found. The science
of the city. The nuggets, as we call them. This
is where he really starts breaking conventional
wisdom. Remember, the planners of the time thought
they knew how cities worked. They thought, for
example, that density was bad, that people wanted
to escape the crowd. I mean, that seems intuitive.
If I'm in a crowded city, I want a quiet, empty
space to relax, right? That's what we say we
want. But White's cameras showed the exact opposite.
He found that people are naturally attracted
to other people. He called it self -congestion.
Self -congestion. Yes. When he filmed a large
plaza, he found that people didn't spread out
evenly like gas molecules in a jar. They clumped
together. They sat near the flow of traffic.
And empty space actually made people nervous.
A space with people in it attracted more people.
So we complain about the crowd, but we subconsciously
seek it out. Exactly. We are social animals.
We want to be where the action is. One of my
absolute favorite findings of his is about jaywalking.
Now, usually we think of jaywalking as a nuisance
or dangerous or a literal crime. The city planners
certainly did. They wanted to put up fences to
force people to use the crosswalks. They saw
the jaywalker as an agent of chaos. But White
actually studied them. And what did he find?
He found that jaywalking is actually a highly
rational behavior pattern. People aren't just
running into traffic like maniacs. They are calculating.
How so? A pedestrian crossing mid -block is processing
a tremendous amount of data in real time. They
are judging the speed of oncoming cars, the size
of the gap in traffic, the timing of the light
up the street, and the shortest geometric distance
to their destination. They are doing instantaneous
physics. And they're good at it. surprisingly
good white found that accidents were extremely
rare among jaywalkers because they were hyper
alert wow it goes back to that organization man
idea doesn't it the planners want everyone to
cross at the crosswalk because that's the rule
that's the conformity but the individual the
jaywalker looks at the situation and says, no,
it makes more sense to cross here. And White
sides with the jaywalker. He always sides with
the human over the system. No. Every single time.
He does. He realized the pedestrian is an expert
navigator. You don't need to corral them. You
just need to get out of their way. Another great
term he used was schmoozing patterns. Yes. This
is a classic White observation. He wanted to
know exactly where people stop to talk when they
bump into each other on the street. Common sense
would say you move out of the way, right? Step
to the side so you don't block the sidewalk.
That's just basic politeness. That's what we
think we do. But White's camera showed the exact
opposite. He found that people stop right in
the middle of the traffic flow. The 100 % location,
he called it. The 100 % location. The busiest
point of the intersection, the place where the
most people are walking. That is exactly where
the conversation happens. Why? Are we all just
jerks? No, we are social anchors. Subconsciously,
we want to be in the stream. We want to see and
be seen. The conversation is an event and you
want that event to happen on the main stage,
not hidden in the wings. That is fascinating.
It's like a rock in a river. The water flows
around it, but the rock stays right in the current.
Exactly. And if you are an urban planner and
you don't know that, you design the space wrong.
You try to push people to the edges, but they
simply won't go there. They want to be in the
center. He also got really technical with things
like sitting. Sitting was his absolute obsession.
In the 70s, New York had all these bleak concrete
plazas in front of office buildings that were
completely empty and the architects couldn't
figure out why. They probably thought it was
the aesthetics, like maybe the concrete is the
wrong color. Right. Or, oh, it's the wind patterns.
But White watched and he found the simplest,
most profound rule of urban life. People sit
where there are places to sit. It sounds so obvious
when you say it out loud. It does. But these
architects had designed ledges that were too
high or too narrow, or they literally put spikes
on them to keep vagrants away, or the benches
were set completely in the shade. White showed
that if you provide a sittable surface, about
17 inches high good sunlight, and a view of other
people, the plaza will fill up immediately. And
then there is the movable chair. This is a huge
one for him. This is perhaps his greatest contribution
to plaza design. He argued that you shouldn't
bolt benches to the ground. You should give people
loose chairs. Why? Isn't that messy? Won't people
just steal them? That was the big fear. But White
observed that when people approach a movable
chair, almost everyone does the exact same thing.
They move it, even if it's just an inch. They
twist it slightly. They drag it into the sun.
They drag it into the shade. It's a claim of
ownership. Exactly. In a giant, overwhelming
city where you have zero control over the noise,
the traffic, or the architecture, moving that
chair says, this little square footage is mine.
I decided how to sit. It's the anti -groupthink.
It's individual agency in a public space. I really
love that. The freedom to scoot your chair two
inches to the left is the essence of a free city.
In White's world, yes. It turns the passive user
into an active participant. And we can't talk
about his findings without talking about the
crown jewel of his work, Bryant Park. This is
the practical application of everything we've
been discussing. If you go to Bryant Park in
New York today, right behind the public library
on 42nd Street, it is an absolute jewel. It's
lush. It's full of people. There are thousands
of movable chairs. People are playing chess,
having lunch. It is arguably the most successful
public space in the world. But it definitely
wasn't always like that. No. In the 70s and early
80s, it was known as Needle Park. That paints
a picture. It was dangerous. Drug dealers completely
controlled it. The average New Yorker avoided
it like the plague. It was a place you walked
around, never through. So the instinct of the
city was probably to lock it down even more.
Exactly. High fences, more police, keep people
out. But White argued for the exact opposite
approach. He worked with the Project for Public
Spaces and the Bryant Park Corporation. He told
them, look, the problem isn't that you have bad
people here. The problem is that you don't have
enough good people here. So how did they actually
fix it? They applied his observations directly.
They lowered the stone walls and added entrances
so you could see into the park from the street.
Visibility makes people feel safe. They added
food kiosks because food attracts people. They
added the movable chairs. And what happened?
Normal people started coming back. Office workers
came for lunch. Tourists came to sit. And as
the park filled up with thousands of regular
people, the drug dealers were pushed out. They
lost their cover. He proved that a vibrant space
is inherently a safe space. Precisely. It's the
theory of inducted flow. You flood the zone with
positive activity. It wasn't about aggressive
policing at all. It was about presence. As his
mentee Jane Jacobs would say, the best police
force is a thousand eyes on the street. Speaking
of mentees, that brings us nicely to his legacy.
Because White wasn't just a lone wolf with a
camera. He spawned an entire generation of urban
thinkers. He really is the patriarch of a certain
school of urbanism. You mentioned Jane Jacobs.
Now, she is famous in her own right for the death
and life of great American cities. But people
forget that White was actually her editor at
Fortune. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, he was
the one who encouraged her to write about the
city in the first place. They shared that fundamental
belief in the ballet of the sidewalk. And then
there's Paco Underhill. Paco Underhill is fascinating
because he took White's methods, the tracking,
the observation, and applied them to the private
sector, to retail environments. Right. He wrote
the book Why We Buy. Exactly. He studied how
people move through a store. Why do they turn
right when they enter? Which, by the way, they
almost always do. How long do they look at a
shelf? He realized that a shopping mall is really
just a privatized city street. He is doing for
retail what White did for Bryant Park. And Dan
Biederman. Dan Biederman is the guy who executed
the Bryant Park renovation. He runs the Bryant
Park Corporation. He took White's theories and
made them truly operational. He proved that you
can manage a public space almost like a business,
but in a good way, keeping it clean, safe, and
highly active. We have to mention Fred Kent,
too. Fred Kent worked directly with White before
founding the Project for Public Spaces. That
organization is still out there today, fixing
cities all over the world using White's exact
methodology. And Amanda Byrd. a future new york
city planning commissioner she's described in
the source material as a socialite an heiress
but under white's tutelage she became a serious
highly influential urban planner she shaped the
modern skyline of new york and she credits white
with teaching her how to really see it's an incredible
family tree and it all stems from that one guy
the former marine looking for patterns in the
mud at guadalcanal and we should touch on his
personal life just briefly just to round out
the full picture of the man right It wasn't just
a brain in a jar. He married Jenny Bell Bechtel,
a fashion designer, in 1964. A very creative
match. And they had one daughter together, Alexandra
White. And he lived a long life of observation.
He died on July 11th, 1999. Which was his 82nd
birthday. That is such a poetic detail. Born
and died on the exact same date. A perfect circle.
He is buried at Oakland Cemetery in Westchester,
Pennsylvania, right back where he started. So
we've gone from the muddy trenches of Guadalcanal
to the boardrooms of General Electric, all the
way to the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue. It's a
wild ride. It really is. So let's synthesize
all of this. What is the common thread here?
What truly connects the intelligence officer,
the fortune writer, and the urban sociologist?
I think it ultimately comes down to a relentless
desire to see the world as it actually is rather
than how we pretend it is. Yeah. In the Marines,
he couldn't afford to underestimate the enemy
or rely on comforting myths. In the boardroom,
he completely refused to accept the corporate
PR that said conformity was good for the soul.
And on the street, he refused to accept the planner's
blueprints that said people act like robots.
He was a truth teller. But his truth wasn't found
in philosophy books. It was found in the data.
In watching. Exactly. And deeper than that, I
think he was a champion of the fundamental dignity
of the individual. Say more about that. Think
about it. In The Organization Man, who is he
fighting for? He's fighting for the employee
who wants to have their own thoughts, who doesn't
want to be entirely swallowed by the group. And
in his urban work, who is he fighting for? He's
fighting for the pedestrian who wants to cross
the street where they want to cross or sit where
they want to sit. He's fighting against the system,
whether the system is a massive corporation or
a rigid city grid. Yes. He believed that if you
strip away the top -down rules and just look
at human nature, you find something messy, yes,
but also incredibly efficient, creative, and
beautiful. He trusted people more than he trusted
plants. That is a really beautiful way to put
it. The guy who wrote the definitive book on
conformity ended up being the ultimate defender
of free will. He really did. And that brings
us to our final thought for today. I think this
is a big one. This is something I was thinking
about while reading the notes on groupthink.
Go on. So White defined groupthink as believing
that group values are inherently right and good.
Now, he was writing in the 1950s, the age of
three TV channels and the office water cooler.
The consensus back then was manufactured by a
few very big institutions. Right. You watched
Cronkite. You went to work at GM. You lived in
Levittown. The options were limited. But look
at us now. We were in the 2020s. We have social
media. We have hyper -specific algorithms that
feed us exactly what we want to hear. We live
in these isolated digital bubbles. It raises
a very provocative question. Are we living in
the ultimate version of the world White warned
us about? Think about it. Instead of one big
corporate groupthink, we have fractured into
thousands of little tribal groupthinks. If you
go on social media today, do you see independent
thought? Or do you just see rationalized conformity?
That is chilling. Do you see people signaling
their virtue to their specific group just to
prove they belong? Saying, I agree with the group,
therefore I am moral. That is the exact definition
White gave us in 1952. If Holly White were alive
today, I honestly don't think he'd be filming
plazas. I think he'd be screen recording our
social media feeds. And he'd be asking, what
are the schmoozing patterns of the Internet?
Where do we gather? And are we actually moving
our own chairs or is the algorithm bolting them
to the floor for us? Are we free to move the
chair or are we just sitting exactly where we're
told? That is the real question. I think that's
exactly the question he'd want us to leave with.
Well, on that note, I'm going to go find a park
bench. Ideally one I could move a few inches
to the left. Good plan. Thank you to everyone
out there for joining us on this deep dive into
the life and mind of William H. White. If you
want to see the world differently, put down the
phone, go outside, and just watch. You might
be surprised by what you see. We'll see you next
time.