If you have watched season 1 of Fargo you will remember the scene where the security guy of the supermarket king comes to Malvo and during the convo, Malvo takes his pants off to take a dump. It is a good example of performative lunacy. You cant negotiate with the crazy guy or cancel him. He does what he wants and you just live with it.

Performative lunacy: in business negotiations, the party is perceived as more crazy tends to out-negotiate its counterparty.

I see a lot of people on Twitter (middle to right ideology) who act even more unhinged than they are in real life. I thought it was a risky strategy but now I get the beauty of it. Because of a few of their provocative tweets, most of their ideas seem moderate. One example is Delian from Founder’s Fund. He tweets out that he has autism one day. The next day he shits on someone on the left. He wears A trump cap to provoke people. The same tweet that got Domm canceled (he has not posted since then) was reposted by Delian, word for word, and no one even fought with him. Also, see the QTs on Domm’s tweet vs Delian’s.

Delian is uncancellable and has enormous power thanks to that. He can share whatever he is thinking.

Twitter for me is a study of human behaviour. The thought leadership bit is the least interesting thing. It is fascinating to observe most of the theories of human behaviour I have read play out. Talking of human behaviour, let’s move to mimetic theory.

One of the main learnings of Dhrishyam 2 is that once you become successful and stand out from the group, the same love and defend the people of our kind changes to distrust, jealousy, and then hatred. Obviously, it is a movie, but I have seen it play out enough in real life. If you understand the mimetic theory, you will understand why:

  • there are endless leadership podcasts on how to manage your ex peers once you become their manager.
  • groupthink is prevalent in middle management.  <- real moral mazes to learn more.
  • we dislike people who shitpost or fight others on social media but when Elon Musk does the same we cheer him on.
  • we hate the thought leadership of Warikoo from our Indian ecosystem but listen to Naval’s thought leadership on Clubhouse.

Most of the events of Dhrishyam 2 happened because Mohanlal dared to become successful and stand out from the rest of the villagers. Once he became successful he should have got out of his small town, but he did not and that lead to mimetic theory playing out.