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{{a|book review|{{image|Finite Game|jpg|{{br|The Infinite Game}} by {{author|Simon Sinek}}. Execrable.}} }}The [[JC]] is indebted to TED-talker extraordinaire {{author|Simon Sinek}} for the TED talk which introduced him to {{author|James P. Carse}}’s obscure but brilliant book {{br|Finite and Infinite Games}}, which provides the basic idea for this, Sinek’s own take on the subject. | {{a|book review|{{image|Finite Game|jpg|{{br|The Infinite Game}} by {{author|Simon Sinek}}. Execrable.}} }}The [[JC]] is indebted to TED-talker extraordinaire {{author|Simon Sinek}} for the TED talk which introduced him to {{author|James P. Carse}}’s obscure but brilliant book {{br|Finite and Infinite Games}}, which provides the basic idea for this, Sinek’s own take on the subject. | ||
And here let me pause this review, and say you can save yourself the ten minutes it will take to read | And here let me pause this review, and say you can save yourself the ten minutes it will take to read it and the handful of hours you may waste slogging through Sinek’s wittering, if you just set Sinek’s book aside — it is one, in {{author|Dorothy Parker}}’s terms, to be ''thrown'' aside with great force — and immerse yourself in Carse’s [[Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility|magnificent original]]. To be sure, it demands much, much more work (it’s a short book, but boy is it ''dense'') but it is so worth it. | ||
If only Simon Sinek had taken the trouble to put in the necessary work to understand a gem he then spends 272 pages misrepresenting. | If only Simon Sinek had taken the trouble to put in the necessary work to understand a gem he then spends 272 pages misrepresenting. For Carse’s hypothesis is subtle, deep and many-splendoured. Its continues to unfold on you, like it’s own infinite game, months and years after you first read it. I ''still'' find myself stumbling on its moments of clarity. | ||
Would that you could say the same about this effort. Where Simon Sinek understands Carse at all, he does so superficially and in a flat monochrome. But that isn’t often. Mostly, Sinek misses Carse’s point altogether, improvising and extemporising his own simplistic contrivances such as the idea that one can have a “finite mindset” or an “infinite mindset”, and these things are meaningful, mutually-exclusive negative and positive moral values. | |||
This is not the point at all. But this is where Simon Sinek wants to go, and hence he delivers a glib, lump-headed social democratic tract that no-one asked for. | |||
Along the way Sinek manages to misrepresent [[Adam Smith]], [[Shareholder capitalism]], [[Evolution by natural selection]], [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] and, most egregiously of all poor old Milton Friedman, whom Sinek paints as a kind of selfish Gorgon; something he emphatically was not. | |||
Sinek manages | |||
In fairness, Carse’s book, though elegant, is gnomic. It asks questions of its reader. It requires, but richly rewards, hard work. | In fairness, Carse’s book, though elegant, is gnomic. It asks questions of its reader. It requires, but richly rewards, hard work. | ||