فصل 13: فضیلت تجارت

Chapter 13 The Merchandising of Virtue

Sontag is about Sontag—Virtue is what you do when nobody is looking—Have the guts to be unpopular—Meetings breed meetings—Call someone lonely on Saturdays after tennis Lycurgus, the Spartan lawmaker, responded to a suggestion to allow democracy there, saying “begin with your own family.”

I will always remember my encounter with the writer and cultural icon Susan Sontag, largely because I met the great Benoit Mandelbrot on the same day. It took place in 2001, two months after the terrorist event of September, in a radio station in New York. Sontag, who was being interviewed, was piqued by the idea of a fellow who “studies randomness” and came to engage me. When she discovered that I was a trader, she blurted out that she was “against the market system” and turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, just to humiliate me (note here that courtesy is an application of the Silver Rule), while her assistant gave me a look as if I had been convicted of child killing. I sort of justified her behavior in order to forget the incident, imagining that she lived in some rural commune, grew her own vegetables, wrote with pencil and paper, engaged in barter transactions, that type of stuff.

No, she did not grow her own vegetables, it turned out. Two years later, I accidentally found her obituary (I waited a decade and a half before writing about the incident to avoid speaking ill of the departed). People in publishing were complaining about her rapacity; she had squeezed her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for what would be several million dollars today for a novel. She shared, with a girlfriend, a mansion in New York City, later sold for $28 million. Sontag probably felt that insulting people with money inducted her into some unimpeachable sainthood, exempting her from having skin in the game.

It is immoral to be in opposition to the market system and not live (somewhere in Vermont or Northwestern Afghanistan) in a hut or cave isolated from it.

But there is worse:

It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.

This will be the main topic of this chapter: exploiting virtue for image, personal gain, careers, social status, these kinds of things—and by personal gain I mean anything that does not share the downside of a negative action.

By contrast with Sontag, I have met a few people who live their public ideas. Ralph Nader, for instance, leads the life of a monk, identical to a member of a monastery in the sixteenth century. And the secular saint Simone Weil, while coming from the French Jewish upper class, spent a year in a car factory so the working class could be something other than an abstract construct for her.

THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE

As we saw with the interventionistas, a certain class of theoretical people can despise the details of reality. If you manage to convince yourself that you are right in theory, you don’t really care how your ideas affect others. Your ideas give you a virtuous status that makes you impervious to how they affect others.

Likewise, if you believe that you are “helping the poor” by spending money on PowerPoint presentations and international meetings, the type of meetings that lead to more meetings (and PowerPoint presentations) you can completely ignore individuals—the poor become an abstract reified construct that you do not encounter in your real life. Your efforts at conferences give you license to humiliate them in person. Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison, sometimes known as Hillary Clinton, found it permissible to heap abuse on secret service agents. I was recently told that a famous Canadian socialist environmentalist, with whom I was part of a lecture series, abused waiters in restaurants, between lectures on equity, diversity, and fairness.

Kids with rich parents talk about “class privilege” at privileged colleges such as Amherst—but in one instance, one of them could not answer Dinesh D’Souza’s simple and logical suggestion: Why don’t you go to the registrar’s office and give your privileged spot to the minority student next in line?

Clearly the defense given by people under such a situation is that they want others to do so as well—they require a systemic solution to every local perceived problem of injustice. I find that immoral. I know of no ethical system that allows you to let someone drown without helping him because other people are not helping, no system that says, “I will save people from drowning only if others too save other people from drowning.” Which brings us to the principle:

If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

And a solution to the vapid universalism we discussed in the Prologue:

If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.

This is not strictly about ethics, but information. If a car salesman tries to sell you a Detroit car while driving a Honda, he is signaling that the wares he is touting may have a problem.

THE VIRTUE MERCHANTS

In about every hotel chain, from Argentina to Kazakhstan, the bathroom will have a sign meant to get your attention: PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT. They want you to hold off from sending the towels to the laundry and reuse them for a while, because avoiding excess laundry saves them tens of thousands of dollars a year. This is similar to the salesperson telling you what is good for you when it is mostly (and centrally) good for him. Hotels, of course, love the environment, but you can bet that they wouldn’t advertise it so loudly if it weren’t good for their bottom line.

So these global causes—poverty (particularly children’s), the environment, justice for some minority trampled upon by colonial powers, or some as-yet-unknown gender that will be persecuted—are now the last refuge of the scoundrel advertising virtue.

Virtue is not something you advertise. It is not an investment strategy. It is not a cost-cutting scheme. It is not a bookselling (or, worse, concert-ticket-selling) strategy.

Now I have wondered why, by the Lindy effect, there is so little mention of what is called virtue signaling in the ancient texts. How could it be new?

Well, it is not new, but was not seen as prevalent enough in the past to warrant much complaining and get named a vice. But mention there is; let’s check Matthew 6:1–4, where the highest mitzvah is the one done secretly: Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

TO BE OR TO SEEM?

The investor Charlie Munger once said: “Look it. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?” As usual, if it makes sense, it has to be in the classics, where it is found under the name esse quam videri, which I translate as to be or to be seen as such. It can be found in Cicero, Sallust, even Machiavelli, who, characteristically, inverted it to videri quam esse, “show rather than be.” SIMONY

At some point in history, if you had money, you could part with some of it to exonerate your sins. The opulent could clear their conscience thanks to the purchase of ecclesiastical favors and indulgences, and while the practice peaked in the ninth and tenth centuries, it continued in a milder and more subtle form later, and most certainly contributed to the exasperation with church practices that led to the Reformation.

Simony was a convenient way for the church to raise funds, by selling offices, and everybody was happy with the arrangement. Same with indulgences: the buyer had an inexpensive option on paradise, the seller was selling something that cost nothing. It was, as we call it in trading, “free money.” Yet technically it was a violation of canon law, as it commuted something temporal for the spiritual and intemporal. It was most certainly Lindy compatible: technically, indulgences were not markedly different from the pagan practice of giving offerings to propitiate the gods, a part of which went to line the pockets of the high priest.

Now consider publicly giving a million dollars to some “charity.” Part of that money will be spent to advertise that you are giving money, a charity being defined as some organization that aims to make no profit, and to “spend” a chunk of the money on its specialization: meetings, future fundraising, and multiplicative intercompany emails (all meant to help a country after an earthquake, for instance). Do you see any difference between this and simony and indulgences? Indeed, simony and indulgences reincarnated themselves in lay society in the form of charity dinners (for some reason, black tie), of people feeling useful engaging in the otherwise selfish activity of running marathons—no longer selfish as it aims at saving other people’s kidneys (as if kidneys could not be saved by people writing checks to save kidneys), and of executives giving their names to buildings so they could be remembered as virtuous. So you can scam the world for a billion; all you need to do is spend part of it, say, a million or two, to enter the section of paradise reserved for the “givers.” Now, I am not saying that all those who put their names on a building are necessarily non-virtuous and buying a spot in paradise. Many are forced by peer and social pressures to do so, so it could be a way to get some people off their backs.

We have argued that virtue is not an ornament, not something one can buy. Let us go a step beyond and see where virtue requires skin in the game in terms of risk taking, particularly when it is one’s reputation that is at risk.

VIRTUE IS ABOUT OTHERS AND THE COLLECTIVE

From the scaling property, we can safely establish that virtue is doing something for the collective, particularly when such an action conflicts with your narrowly defined interests. Virtue isn’t in just being nice to people others are prone to care about.

So true virtue lies mostly in also being nice to those who are neglected by others, the less obvious cases, those people the grand charity business tends to miss. Or people who have no friends and would like someone once in while to just call them for a chat or a cup of fresh roasted Italian-style coffee.

UNPOPULAR VIRTUE

Further, the highest form of virtue is unpopular. This does not mean that virtue is inherently unpopular, or correlates with unpopularity, only that unpopular acts signal some risk taking and genuine behavior.

Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.

If I were to describe the perfect virtuous act, it would be to take an uncomfortable position, one penalized by the common discourse.

Let us take an example. For some reason, during the Syrian war, thanks to Qatari-funded public relations firms, the monoculture succeeded in penalizing everyone who stood against jihadi headcutters (the Syrian so-called rebels who in fact were fighting for the establishment of a Salafi-Wahhabi state in Syria). The labels “Assadist” and “baby killer” were designed to scare journalists from questioning any support for these jihadists. And it is always the children. Recall that Monsanto shills often accuse those opposing them of “starving the children.” Sticking up for truth when it is unpopular is far more of a virtue, because it costs you something—your reputation. If you are a journalist and act in a way that risks ostracism, you are virtuous. Some people only express their opinions as part of mob shaming, when it is safe to do so, and, in the bargain, think that they are displaying virtue. This is not virtue but vice, a mixture of bullying and cowardice.

TAKE RISK

Finally, when young people who “want to help mankind” come to me asking, “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world,” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1)Never engage in virtue signaling;

2)Never engage in rent-seeking;

3)You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.

Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks. The entire idea is to move the descendants of Homo sapiens away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, away from the kind of social engineering that brings tail risks to society. Doing business will always help (because it brings about economic activity without large-scale risky changes in the economy); institutions (like the aid industry) may help, but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming).

Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.