What’s left? Your gut, of course. “Listen to your gut,” Trump intones, “no matter how good something sounds on paper.”

If you’re a few dozen deep on the waitlist at the local library for The Art of the Deal and don’t have $11.95 to shell out for the Kindle edition, I can save you some trouble: The answer to all of your deal-making questions lies in your gut.

But, you might say, what if I don’t have the brains in my gut to be a deal-maker?

Good question, but The Donald is way ahead of you. “More than anything else, I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with,” he tells his readers in a revelation many of them might have longed for before they plonked down $11.95. “It’s in the genes,” he continues. “It’s not about being brilliant. It does take a certain intelligence, but mostly it’s about the instincts.”

So, just to review, it’s not just the genes of your gut that count, but the instincts of your genes, though they alone won’t make you a deal-maker: “[M]ost people who do have the instincts will never recognize that they do, because they don’t have the courage or the good fortune to discover their potential.”

In other words, you need vision in your genes and guts in your instincts, otherwise, your gut may be spineless and where would that leave you?

Not a deal-maker.

* * *

If not with Trump’s 24-carat bravado, many people have a propensity to talk about capitalism in terms less befitting a complex economic system than a sequel to Rambo. Rather than an elaborate phenomenon characterized by collective action, analytical diligence, and bouts of serendipity, commercial success is presented as a stirring tribute to self-reliance, individual will, and superhuman feats of strength overcoming the dark forces of smug complacency and conventional thinking.

This isn’t surprising. No matter how far we have evolved from the days of trading bearskins for beads, commerce remains a human activity, and the temptation to turn its patterns into a morality play persists as a seductive heuristic and an invitation to self-flattery. What is surprising, though, is the contemporary turn away from the belief—once held by both scholars and successful businessmen—that business success was not some mystical achievement but the result of diligence and organization.

A century ago, advances in science and technology augured a new understanding of capitalism that would bring it more firmly in line with the expectations of an age that seemed increasingly shaped by logic and reason. In a 1927 address at Harvard Business School, Owen D. Young, the president of General Electric, said that the very idea of a proper business school affirmed that the future of commerce was a process by which companies drew strength and direction from the “new explorers at work” in the pure and applied sciences.

In a similar vein, Alfred Sloan, the man who made General Motors the nonpareil of mid-century American companies, argued on behalf of “a highly rational and objective mode of operation” that eschewed the Great Man theory of industry. As Sloan chronicled in My Years at General Motors, his own company had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy by William Durant, his charismatic predecessor and the co-founder of GM whose on-the-fly management style included impulsive purchases, careless accounting practices, and other habits that made him (in Sloan’s polite formulation) “too casual in his ways for an administrator.”