There have been many articles published in the past month about You Can See Everything, the Nathan Fielder and Lance Opphenheim documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, a company that promised to expedite and simplify laboratory testing for various physical ailments, including cancer. Much of the narrative around Holmes centered on her character. Was she a psychopath, incapable of caring about her effect on others? Was she just autistic? And, was she a victim? In attempting to categorize her, they fail to ask the most important question: What are her organizing principles?
Psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams wrote that one’s personality is “organized around” fulfilling their needs. For example, narcissistically-structured people (possessing a deficit in tolerating their own envy, for example) spend much of their time seeking out admiration, whereas obsessive-compulsive individuals spend it seeking out emotional and/or physical security. Whether one is a psychopath is less important than one’s organizing principle(s) because the label/diagnosis implies a deficit (whose consequences are difficult to directly assess), whereas an organizing principle implies what an individual pursues instead of, and even in conflict with, any attempt to remedy that behavioral pattern. If we peek into the pattern of one’s organization, we may directly ask: How has that organizing principle or those principles affected the lives involved, especially the individual subscribing to it or them?
Most of our lives are organized around several principles. We value love, status, community, achievement, etc… And we make a decision based on our priority in each moment. We may choose love over achievement, as when we choose to keep our family together over a career opportunity, or vise versa, perhaps ending a romantic relationship to pursue a longstanding ambition. The point is that many things matter to us and on average, our decisions imply a balance of values — usually, no individual value, on average, exists above the rest.
Holmes, on the other hand, appears to have structured her life around one principle. While many have been quick to label her a psychopath, implying that her life is only organized around achievement. The movie betrays that this general conclusion is somewhat of a misunderstanding. In reality, she appears to be motivated mainly by love, which can be more dangerous. In the film, Holmes is presented as an attentive mother and highly devoted wife. One gets the impression that everything else is secondary. But, then why does she seem to care so much about being successful or being a good person if that’s true? The answer may be found in an American classic.
Elizabeth Holmes is the ultimate embodiment of the fictitious Jay Gatsby, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and, by extension the feverish and narrow-sighted pursuit of the American dream (which the novel serves as a metaphor for). In the novel, Gatsby is fixated on Daisy, a billionaire heiress whom Jay has a brief relationship with while stationed near her home during the first World War. Jay, like Holmes, worships romantic love, which makes us, the reader, overly sympathize with him, just as I and I’m sure others were able to significantly sympathize with Holmes in the documentary. While initially presenting as a beautiful romance, eventually the story turns. In chapter seven, Daisy and Jay, after a difficult evening, speed home and accidentally kill Myrtle Wilson, who runs onto the road while believing her love interest is operating the vehicle, which he did earlier in the day. Instead of stopping to aid her, Daisy and Jay just speed off into the dark, with Jay later agreeing to take the blame on Daisy’s behalf.
Jay’s sole organizing principle was love and, like Elizabeth, other values were either cast aside or employed in its service when relevant. Nothing but love mattered when there was a choice to be made between love and anything else, and therefore, everything done for love could be excused or justified. In that moment, Jay sacrificed his ethics, sacrificed compassion, for love. And, arguably, Elizabeth did the same in her own way. What is it that they say? All is fair and love and war.
Yes, Elizabeth loved Billy, her husband, in the same way she loved her Theranos co-founder; and both men didn’t seem to care much for compassion for insignificant others, either. One may reasonably conclude Elizabeth was a victim, serving individuals who didn’t seem to be too concerned with what was best for her. But, her sole organizing principle — love — also made her an accomplice/perpetrator, too, just like Jay was.
Perfectionism and myopic thinking tend to go hand in hand, as many perfectionists who would be labeled domain-specific perfectionists struggle to find meaning outside of some goal or cause. Therefore, they may persuade themselves that everything done for that cause is good and noble, regardless of how bad it may appear. Elizabeth likely continued to perceive herself as a good person because she did what she did for love; we can say the same for Jay. And, so, you may ask yourself: What does the pursuit of love, when it trumps everything else, achieve? Whom does it help and whom does it harm? In the case of Elizabeth Holmes, love led to a lengthy prison sentence and isolation from loved ones. Would Elizabeth’s life been different had she valued something else, like compassion for people outside of her circle, as much as romantic love? The answer is a likely yes. I wrote this article for anyone worshipping anything at the expense of everything else.
