Bond or bust?

David Brooks’ satirical first novel focused on the new upper class and how they got there. His protagonists were the 1990s descendents of the yuppies he called Bobos (a portmanteau term coined from bourgeois bohemians).

Having grown up on rock and roll and liberalism, the Bobos went on to make a killing as entrepreneurs or trend-spotting businessmen. It was a melding of 1960s liberal idealism with self-interest of the 1980s. Bobos, however, failed to replace Yuppies.

Brooks followed up with Paradise Drive, on how we live now (and have always) in the future tense. ( Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Nowarticulates the antithesis; that only by becoming deeply conscious of the present moment can we hope to transform our mode of consciousness.) Brooks’ latest book, Social Animal, takes one on bigger and fuzzier challenges.

Among the questions he ponders, for example, is the eternal conundrum: why do some people seem to be so sunny and successful while others who started along with the winners turn out to be burnouts and failures?

Blame it on the Unconscious, Brooks opines, echoing Freud while citing Evolutionary Psychology. Though humans love to believe in the primacy of logic and reason it is instinct, bias, habit and emotional responses that silently shape our most important attitudes and decisions, he argues.

The real paradigm breaker, according to him, is the transformation of the global economy from a purely physical one to one that is humancapital intensive. This needs anew grammar that’s fixated on relationships and emotional bonds.