How does Paradise Lost bear on startup culture?
Maybe. At least, if you know the rhetoric. If you can also read the lines in which the resistant and rebellious are presented as heroes rather than villains of the plot, it may be wiser to look for a deeper conceptual link. Maybe reading the work as a sort of distorted founder manifesto on startup culture will help. If that sounds too metaphorical for you, think of it as a test. I’m asserting that there’s something going on in this foundational text that follows some of the basic patterns of founder manifestos as I’ve argued that they work. I also want to suggest that these common moves in entrepreneurial rhetoric occur in the argument Satan makes in Paradise Lost.
To say that Paradise Lost supplies a template for present-day founder manifestos is not to say that such manifestos quote directly from the epic. What counts as borrowing, as opposed to quotation? It’s not simply a case of something being repeated, a sentence from Milton in a founder statement, or some Miltonic-sounding claim about purging what has become corrupt in a product launch. The parallel is not a matter of wording but of rhetorical method. Milton’s text offers a whole narrative device that authorizes the displacement and replacement of current institutions, or sections of them, by presenting existing conditions as morally unendurable.
The manifesto, as an effective rhetorical technology, is designed in very general terms to be a way of making a case for legitimacy. In the simplest and most direct sense, a manifesto is a way of making it reasonable to take up a task that your motives fail to justify by converting your motive into your destiny.
- Disruption is a virtue if you can manage to reframe opposition to the existing order as the alternative design of reality.
- If you can also reframe your overthrow of the prevailing order of things as heroic rebellion, you can make it appear to answer one of our strongest moral sympathies.
- You can do it by controlling the frame in such a way that the authority of the prevailing order appears freakish and trumped-up, and therefore not legitimate authority at all.
- If you can manage to make yourself seem so competent, confident, and compelling that disbelief begins to look unreasonable, you’ll have a strong rhetorical position from which to work.
How do you make yourself heard before the world has come to judge you and decide who deserves to be heard? Simply by demonstrating a stance that is in itself so salient as to demand a hearing. That stance, as embodied in Milton’s Satan, is irrepressible charisma, sustained by the continuous performance of belief in itself.
If you also have grand ambitions and talk about them with the gravity they seem to deserve, your listeners may come to believe that your confidence is warranted, your competence genuine, and your goals right. Milton’s cosmic setting works a subtle transformation on the human impulse for ambition: it does not simply substitute the dream of outsizing the present, but makes the process of scale-seeking itself not ambition at all, but providence.
If you can do it all in a way that makes the outcome appear not as your choice but as the inevitable result of forces you alone have understood, your case will seem well-constructed, perfectly justifiable, and totally self-justifying. Finally, and centrally, the epic dramatizes the alchemical process through which the rebel narrows the world to the dimensions of his grievance and then turns his motives into a case for entitlement.
And I think it’s fair to say that it won’t end up making a good endorsement for any of this. After all, the closer one reads Paradise Lost, the less persuasive Satan appears once his claims are set against the consequences of his actions. On a really close reading, nothing about the logic of his action or the terms of his argument fits together well enough to recommend doing what he did and thinking the way he thinks. To put it very bluntly, his case for himself works, but only as long as you do not imagine yourself living under the authority he is trying to establish. His case works at a distance, but fares poorly once its premises and consequences are examined together.
So, what does this mean? Well, it might just mean that with a little distance and a good critical framework, an interesting cluster of parallels can emerge between a passage like this one in Paradise Lost and the rhetoric of an early-stage disruptive startup that must appear successful before its success can be demonstrated. That in turn suggests that Satan makes for a sort of unintentional poster child for one rhetorical blueprint for creating manifestos that work well enough to establish startup-world legitimacy for whatever is being pitched. One based on grand disruption, a charismatic personality, ambitious goals pursued with great determination and confidence, and an account of the project that works by outsourcing all culpability to inevitability. It’s a pretty good picture of how a lot of startup culture manifests itself.
But against this there are counterpoints. If the startup is so often an exercise in measurement, with metrics substituted for metaphysics, Milton’s cosmos may not be a very good match. Then again, metrics do not necessarily produce accountability. They may simply give the founder another way to decide what counts as success.