Behold the smartest people in the room: The Waterstones Dads
Oh, Waterstones Dads. The khaki-clad infantry of intellectual self-satisfaction. You know the type: armed with a stack of Very Serious Non-Fiction about geopolitics, economics, and, naturally, the failures of socialism, they march into pub chats and social media threads alike, convinced that they’re the only ones who see the world as it truly is, because if there’s one thing these midlife epistemic warriors hate more than emotional arguments, it’s fiction.
To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with reading non-fiction. In fact, it’s quite useful if you’re interested in learning about the world. Some of my favourite books are non-fiction. I can strongly recommend Leon Neyfakh’s The Next Next Level, or No Less Than Mystic by John Medhurst, or Dictatorland by Paul Kenyon. They’re great reads and opened my mind in one way or another.
The problem is that Waterstones Dads don’t just read non-fiction; they treat it like a divine revelation. To them, the truth is simple, obvious, and discernible by anyone willing to sit down with the right books (usually written by authors who are from some kind of think tank who have absorbed the entire cannon of conventional wisdom and have no flair to their prose).
Who are Waterstones Dads?
So, you may be wondering what a Waterstones Dad is. The thing is, you already know. They’re the sort of guy who reads a lot of books with names like The Rise of China and then feels like they are an expert on all things related to the rising superpower, because they have the facts. They are quick to criticise others for having an ideological worldview because what they believe doesn’t end with an ism, but are completely blind to the fact that they are as doctrinal - in a neoliberal way - as an angry early twenty something on campus cosplaying Citizen Smith.
This mindset, that they alone are armed with unfiltered reality while others are blinded by ideology, is one of the most subtly dangerous forces in politics. It leads to easily dismissing anyone who disagrees with you. Why engage with those pesky lefties who want to discuss inequality, capitalism, gender equality, or anything more emotional than interest rates? They’re just *feeling* their way through the world, after all. Unlike you, the intellectual who sees reality for what it really is.
The thing is, everyone thinks they see the world clearly. It’s a comforting delusion shared by conspiracy theorists who believe the Queen is/was an alien lizard and by smug centrists who believe that anyone to the left of Keir Starmer is a Marxist. The difference is that the Queen-is-a-lizard crowd can usually be found ranting on obscure forums, whereas Waterstones Dads are often found in board rooms, current events panel discussion shows and in the profile of “hero voters” who politicians are desperate to pander to.
Open to ideas
Speaking of debate, isn’t it funny how these self-proclaimed champions of open-mindedness are always more open to ideas from the right than from the left? They’ll gladly entertain a nuanced discussion about, say, the merits of free-market deregulation, or why we can’t do anything about climate change (or occasionally why the gender pay gap isn’t real) but suggest that perhaps capitalism has some inherent flaws, and suddenly they’re less open-minded. “Let’s have a debate”, they say, but they don’t listen and never change their minds. Why would they? They already know all the facts.
Their disdain for fiction is where things get truly fascinating. Fiction, to the Waterstones Dad, is nothing more than emotional nonsense. Real learning, they believe, comes from non-fiction, or more accurately the specific type of non-fiction they read. It’s easy to dismiss novels when your bedside table is stacked with titles like The Economist’s Guide to Saving the World with Graphs, or How to Think Like a Very Clever Person Without Actually Trying, or Sapiens, but here’s the thing: fiction teaches you to connect with other people. Whether from the past, the future, or other cultures. It helps you realise that there are more perspectives than just your own.
Empathy isn’t emotional fluff
In a world increasingly defined by division and misunderstanding, empathy isn’t emotional fluff, it's a survival skill. Reading non-fiction might teach you about the mechanics of the economy, but fiction helps you understand the lived experience of what a 9% rise in inflation is like.
It’s one thing to know the statistics about refugee crises; it’s another to read a novel that brings you into the life of someone fleeing their home and facing hostility everywhere they go, like Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Waterstones dads could use a little more of that perspective. Less Why Nations Fail, more How People Feel.
The smartest guys in the room
Let me be serious for a moment. The title above references the film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. It’s a great, non-fiction, film that is really worth a watch. There are two main things that stand out to me about the film.
First, all these people who thought they were smarter than everyone else - and they had a lot of credentials to prove it, Princeton and all that - made a company that collapsed in contact with reality. Secondly, although many of them made huge amounts of money out of being the smartest men in the room, they were ultimately the stooges of capitalism in that all their efforts made more money for people with even more wealth and power than them.
Understanding the world
Waterstones Dads may think that they’re super smart because they know that if we tax the wealth on billionaires we might also tax the pensions of ordinary workers saving for their retirement - valid point that bears more debate - but ultimately Waterstones Dads, in their semi-detached houses in Leicester, full of books, are far closer in terms of power to students marching for a free Palestine than they are to billionaires like Elon Musk - whose politics they claim to detest but who they ultimately end up on the same side of against the woke socialists.
So, dear Waterstones dads, by all means, keep reading your Very Important Books, but maybe slip a novel in there once in a while, because if there’s one truth worth embracing, it’s that understanding the world requires more than just knowing how it works. It requires knowing how it feels, and for that, you’ll need more than just facts, you’ll need a little bit of fiction.
