David and Goliath

David and Goliath

by

Malcolm Gladwell

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Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Convention and the Status Quo Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in David and Goliath, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon

Although David and Goliath focuses almost exclusively on underdogs and their unexpected advantages, there are moments throughout the book when Gladwell’s analysis highlights something broader—namely, the fact that humans often cling stubbornly to their convictions because they believe them to be moral, even when this is not the case. This dynamic is especially evident in the story Gladwell recounts about Mike Reynolds, who helped institute California’s Three Strikes Law in the aftermath of his daughter’s senseless murder. Throughout the 1990s, Reynolds was celebrated for helping decrease crime by pushing lawmakers to abide by the Three Strikes Law, under which offenders receive prison sentences of between 25 years and life if they commit three crimes—no matter how serious their third crime actually is. In recent years, though, it has become clear that this policy has put a massive strain on the prison system and has possibly done more harm than good. And yet, Reynolds refuses to acknowledge the law’s negative qualities. By placing Reynolds’s uncompromising view alongside the British military’s myopic obsession with power in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s—along with several other instances of unyielding conviction—Gladwell ultimately urges readers to recognize that believing in something doesn’t always make it right.

At first, Gladwell invites readers to empathize with Mike Reynolds. He does this by recounting the story of Reynolds’s daughter’s death, explaining that Kimber Reynolds was in a restaurant parking lot in her hometown of Fresno, California, when two men appeared on a motorcycle, pinned her against her car, snatched her purse, and shot her in the head. Devastated, Mike Reynolds immediately set to work talking to the most influential people he knew about how to address Fresno’s high crime rate. These conversations led to the drafting of the Three Strikes Law, which soon went into effect. In a conversation between Reynolds and Gladwell, Reynolds explains that California had a murder rate of roughly 12 people per day before the Three Strikes Law went into effect. Years after the law was put in place, the rate decreased to 6 people per day. This makes Reynolds feel incredibly “lucky,” since he sees himself as having saved many lives over the years. However, Gladwell is skeptical of this idea, since the murder rate in California had already begun to decline before the law even went into effect. Furthermore, studies have had trouble proving that the law did anything but overcrowd prisons, and some criminologists have even posited that Three Strikes surprisingly “increased the number of violent crimes.” Because of the overwhelming skepticism surrounding the law, California “scaled [it] back” in 2012, but this has had no effect on Reynolds’s unwavering belief that he did the right thing. In turn, his unwillingness to fully assess the ramifications of his idea comes to symbolize the somewhat unsettling human capacity to ignore the greater good in service of what one wants to believe.

Gladwell’s interest in what makes people unquestioningly commit themselves to a cause also extends to the book’s more central preoccupation with power. He implies that belief isn’t the only thing that can lead to unreasonable dedication, demonstrating this by referencing the relentless commitment to law and order that the British military displayed in a particular incident during the Troubles (a period during which the British government and Ireland’s Protestant population fought against Ireland’s Catholic community). This confrontation took place in a Catholic neighborhood called Lower Falls, where the military came to search for “illegal weapons” in the local church. The British military had been instructed to “deal toughly” with “thugs and gunmen,” which is why they overreacted when a riot broke out over their intrusion into the Lower Falls church. When they military finished, they started to walk away, but the crowd flung insults and small stones at them, so they turned around.—after all, they had been instructed to meet resistance with strength. Accordingly, they fired tear gas and began to shoot, only making the crowd angrier and prompting them to throw small homemade bombs. Eventually, the military forced the residents of Lower Falls into their homes and instituted a curfew that lasted for two days, a period during which families weren’t even allowed to go outside to get food for their children. Gladwell uses this story to exemplify the extent to which people will unfortunately devote themselves to the pursuit of power even when it’s not in their best interest—if the military had simply taken the residents’ anger in stride, they could have avoided unnecessary turmoil.

There are, however, times when uncompromising convictions are appropriate. Gladwell makes this clear by recounting the story of the French mountain town of Le Chambon, where the entire population put themselves in danger by openly defying the Nazis and protecting Jewish people during World War II. Although everyone in the town—and especially the local priest, André Trocmé—opened themselves up to extraordinary danger by welcoming Jewish families from all over France, they remained steadfast in their commitment to what they thought was right. Reflecting upon his altruistic actions later in life, Trocmé wrote that “there was no decision to make.” For him, standing up to the Nazis was the only thing to do. The difference between this kind of conviction and the relentlessness of the British military at Lower Falls, of course, is that Trocmé’s actions were motivated by empathy, whereas the British military merely wanted to establish dominance. And though Mike Reynolds’s steadfastness comes from a good place, it, too, lacks the empathetic motivation of Trocmé’s selflessness, since the Three Strikes Law was a punitive measure that likely hurt more people than it saved. By revealing the different forces driving these three forms of conviction, then, Gladwell tacitly prioritizes the kind of commitment that arises out of empathy and morality, though his depiction of conviction as a whole suggests that people are often blind to the moral failures of their beliefs.

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Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Quotes in David and Goliath

Below you will find the important quotes in David and Goliath related to the theme of Conviction, Morality, and Empathy.
Chapter 2: Teresa DeBrito Quotes

He was successful because he had learned the long and hard way about the value of money and the meaning of work and the joy and fulfillment that come from making your own way in the world. But because of his success, it would be difficult for his children to learn those same lessons.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), The Hollywood Executive
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5: Emil “Jay” Freireich Quotes

But the question of what any of us would wish on our children is the wrong question, isn’t it? The right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma—and the answer is that we plainly do. This is not a pleasant fact to contemplate. For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences. Freireich had the courage to think the unthinkable. He experimented on children. He took them through pain no human being should ever have to go through. And he did it in no small part because he understood from his own childhood experience that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Emil “Jay” Freireich
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6: Wyatt Walker Quotes

In the traditional fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, told to every Western schoolchild, the Tortoise beats the Hare through sheer persistence and effort. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s an appropriate and powerful lesson—but only in a world where the Tortoise and the Hare are playing by the same rules, and where everyone’s effort is rewarded. In a world that isn’t fair—and no one would have called Birmingham in 1963 fair—the Terrapin has to place his relatives at strategic points along the racecourse. The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Martin Luther King, Jr., Wyatt Walker, Eugene “Bull” Connor
Page Number: 188
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7: Rosemary Lawlor Quotes

In Northern Ireland, the British made a simple mistake. They fell into the trap of believing that because they had resources, weapons, soldiers, and experience that dwarfed those of the insurgent elements that they were trying to contain, it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them. General Freeland believed Leites and Wolf when they said that “influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism.” And Leites and Wolf were wrong.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Nathan Leites, Charles Wolf Jr., Ian Freeland
Page Number: 203
Explanation and Analysis:

First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Nathan Leites, Charles Wolf Jr.
Page Number: 208
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8: Wilma Derksen Quotes

This is what Jaffe was talking about in Brownsville. The damage she was trying to repair with her hugs and turkeys wasn’t caused by an absence of law and order. It was caused by too much law and order: so many fathers and brothers and cousins in prison that people in the neighborhood had come to see the law as their enemy.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Joanne Jaffe
Page Number: 246
Explanation and Analysis:

Is Wilma Derksen more—or less—of a hero than Mike Reynolds? It is tempting to ask that question. But it is not right: Each acted out of the best of intentions and chose a deeply courageous path.

The difference between the two was that they felt differently about what could be accomplished through the use of power. The Derksens fought every instinct they had as parents to strike back because they were unsure of what that could accomplish. They were not convinced of the power of giants.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), Mike Reynolds, Wilma Derksen
Related Symbols: The Three Strikes Law
Page Number: 253
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9: André Trocmé Quotes

But had the police asked him if he was Beguet, he had already decided to tell the truth: ‘I am not Monsieur Beguet. I am Pastor Andre Trocmé.” He didn’t care. If you are Goliath, how on earth do you defeat someone who thinks like that? You could kill him, of course. But that is simply a variant of the same approach that backfired so spectacularly for the British in Northern Ireland and for the Three Strikes campaign in California. The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission. You could kill Andre Trocmé. But in all likelihood, all that would mean is that another Andre Trocmé would rise in his place.

Related Characters: Malcolm Gladwell (speaker), David, Goliath, André Trocmé, Ian Freeland
Related Symbols: The Three Strikes Law
Page Number: 273
Explanation and Analysis: