So I had some time to read Moe Tkacik’s essay on Malcolm Gladwell in the Nation, and I found myself caught on a section where she discusses Gladwell kindred spirit Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s infatuation with Enron’s Lou Pai, a man rewarded for perennial failure. She writes:

This was certainly likely to interest anyone who bought Taleb’s contention, in ‘Fooled by Randomness,’ that the most vexing problem of modern finance was in its practitioners’ tendency to conflate success and talent. According to their logic, failure equals talent, too! But if both were true, surely an industry rife with Lou Pais was not a little corrupt?

And here I risk defending the system that gave us the financial collapse and the intellectual class that enabled it and then explained it away. But what if we have too simplistic an understanding of failure?

A few weeks ago, at a Marine Corps University held a conference on counterinsurgency, Tom Ricks made an institutional analysis of military commanders in the Iraq war and came away with the conclusion that from 2003 to 2007, no one had any incentive to innovate. In the Rumsfeld Pentagon, conformity was eagerly rewarded — I’m looking at Gen. Pace, Gen. Myers and Amb. Giambastiani in particular — and while mission failure was never punished, deviation was, as Gen. Shinseki and Sec. White learned. And so, Ricks suggested, nonconformity became career failure, something everyone wanted to avoid. It took commanders who were willing to say fuck-it to their careers, like H.R. McMaster, to innovate in Iraq, even if it meant, say, fighting an entirely different war than the one directed by the theater commander. That’s uncontroversially problematic.

Ricks’ conclusion wasn’t simply that Donald Rumsfeld was a bad defense secretary. It was that there was something wrong with the aversion to failure within the military, and the Army specifically. It’s one thing to reward failure-as-conformity-and-lethargy. But it’s quite another to punish failure-as-innovation-that-fell-short. The military was doing too much of both, while outwardly communicating the untrue message that it actually wanted to avoid both. Ricks’ prescription was the military needed to create career paths that didn’t punish people for pushing innovation. (I know, I know: this account begs the question of what innovation means, and whether that innovation is potentially problematic. It might be. Here it means ‘rapidly adaptive to circumstances on the ground as discovered, and willing to jettison preconceived notions of what a war ought to look like.’) In essence, it had to allow people to fail, and sometimes fail upward.

I think Moe herself is a perfect example. When I read her stuff, I find myself grumbling under my breath like Salieri, embarrassed by how conventional my own stuff is. Dense and wonky and rapid-paced, she takes the longest possible narrative path to get from Point A to Point B, because her contention is that you encounter more relevant and revealing stuff that way. She requires a lot of concentration from her readers, even when it feels like she’s not concentrating herself. Some people hate the way she writes. I think they’re fools. Being a difficult and challenging writer to read is only problematic to a reader who doesn’t want to be challenged. And, like me, she’s been fired from places and, like me, is supposed to be hard to work with. If we were to take a strict definition of the critique she lodges of Taleb and Gladwell, we’d be ill-equipped to avoid the statement, Well, Tkacik, I suppose then that a sign of purity in journalism is your own continuing unemployment.

And so there’s the absurdity. A media architecture that rejects Moe Tkacik and rewards… really, don’t make me name names; we know who we’re talking about… — it’s that media architecture we labor within, and that’s what’s corrupt. So we need to disaggregate between failures of substance and failures of careerism. We should reject the former and — yes, I suppose, ironically — underwrite, subsidize and reward the latter. Someone who fails a couple of times to find an audience because her presentation is simply too dense and complex and challenging and innovative really needs to be given as many times as possible to fail, because the ambition is that worthy and the wages of mediocrity are that, depressingly, obvious.

OK, put another way. Around 1999 and 2000, the American Prospect basically shitcanned two difficult writers. They were Josh Marshall and Ana Marie Cox. Should we have written them off as failures? Should we have viewed the system that rejected them as operating wisely and justly?