Deep thoughts

To Fight the Right Make Them React

You can detect a certain pattern in the US civil discourse: a reaction is always faulted more than the action itself.

A black man gets shot? The protesters get the blame.

Kids in school get shot? Their parents receive death threats.

A woman gets raped?  Why destroy a promising young fella future in the aftermath.

Trump said this or that? But Hillary called people deplorable!

Notice a big pattern here: We don’t like victims and we don’t like their reaction to the injustice.

I sense a big PR opportunity for the beleaguered left.

When was the last time you saw an anti-abortion ad? I see one on the billboard along the NJ Turnpike all the time. Now think of the last time you saw a progressive social ad? In my 20 years in the US I never saw one. This is a major tactical oversight of the left. The left is very good at writing articles and arguing on TV, but their efforts are non-existent in the areas and in the format that regular people access every day. Where are all the ‘Overthrow you corporate overlords’ billboards along the highway?

Anyway, this is not a minor shortcoming. The right has perfected this game, and it is not much different from their usual MO: attract the gullible with one message and sell them something else. Good example of such con is pseudo abortion clinics that they call ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ which are actually anti-abortion establishments masquerading as help centers. But a lot of desperate poor women end up there. The bullshit works! Why shouldn’t we employ the same approach? Except we won’t be even selling bullshit.

To keep rust belt workers attention on Trump and GOP can be achieved by placing a few ‘where are the jobs?’ billboards strategically along a highway with a (left-wing) website at the bottom. Those websites should look like a garden variety right-wing site: a flag, an eagle, a Declaration of Independence, etc. Then welcome them with a message that America is not what it used to be anymore. And it’s not like the message doesn’t hold up to reality. Then, praise the time when the unions were strong. Then ponder about what happened to them. Then link the declining wages to the decline of unions. I’m just throwing ideas out there but you get my drift. It doesn’t have to be an explicit socialist message. Then they look around and see Trump’s administration filled with cronies. I mean Trump is doing all the work for us already.

Hell, it doesn’t even have to be a website. It’s all about the visuals. Lack of a link would actually compel people to look it up.

You consider yourself a patriot? Great. We have something for you too. Have an ad designed like Soviet poster art from the 20s: A worker with a hammer and a fat guy in a tux and a top hat and a sack with $$ on it. Place it on a public bus in a Midwestern city, or, hell, Texas, just for shits and giggles. I mean this is a compelling visual that will reach people on a visceral level. I dare Fox News to mock it as Soviet propaganda. It’s gonna totally blow in their face if they’re too loud about it. First, they’re friends with Russia now, second by talking about it they would have show the image, which will draw even more attention. Third, the left will have a ready compelling rebuttal: ‘what, are you saying you’re against the working class?’ And finally, it’s not the 80s anymore, you can’t scare anyone with the word ‘socialism’ anymore.

Or better yet: the ubiquitous ‘Jesus loves you’ poster. Put it out there, but link it to Pope Francis-style message of compassion for the weak, instead of some TV huckster asking for money. That’s gonna be refreshing.

Another idea: treat expansion and preservation of voting rights as the left’s equivalent of NRA. VRA is the new NRA. Be as vocal about it as possible. Again, the advantage here is totally on our side.

It’s not about collecting money, not about building customer base, not about clicks or likes. It’s about spreading the message, or ‘sowing doubt’ to use the well-known tactic of tobacco companies and climate deniers. Let’s feed them their own shit.

All of it might sound absurd, but everything Trump did was absurd. You can’t fight absurd with another Paul Krugman article. It’s time for us to do some crazy shit.

So our goal in the next few years is to offer an action, in a sense a giant trolling exercise, to which the right will be forced to react. When I say action, I don’t mean protests and demonstrations – quite the opposite. Protests are a reaction and are bound to draw ridicule and dismissal. What I mean is the methodical deployment of the 1st amendment that will withstand any challenge in courts. Just like what they do with the 2nd amendment. No amount of civic deaths will do anything to the power of NRA. In the same sense, no amount of outrage on the right to our ‘sickle and hammer’ billboards in public places will be able to do anything, other than make them look like fools. I have to stress: not articles, not graphs and charts, not academic papers, not talking heads analysis. I mean visual displays in public places. And they will overreact, they will be foaming at the mouth. The right made us react to their juvenile behavior for decades. Now let’s make them react.

Westworld

westworld

After watching the very first episode of HBO’s Westworld it was hard for me to deny that the show’s appeal, aside from superior writing and cinematography, has a potential to spill over from the world of entertainment into our public and political discourse. Already now, after episode 3, it’s clear to me that its aim goes beyond a mere Sunday night pastime; the showrunners cleverly are setting us up to ask questions that we don’t ask ourselves but should. The show of this caliber is long overdue. I’m not writing a recap though, there are plenty of those already. This is just a brief glimpse of the show’s potential as a cultural and political imprint.

What is a real world? Is it the world where you live and work, or is it an adult Disneyland where, like in a videogame, you assume a character, and break out of your inhibitions? But then, the same case – that you’re playing a character – can be made about your everyday existence. The world where you live and make your living is, too, a world of pretense. That’s a marketing ploy behind Westworld – a fictional Wild West-themed park where you can break away and indulge in your fantasies. It does offers you a release, a manufactured freedom, but where you essentially trade one type of mask for another. Would there even be a demand for such a theme park if people found fulfillment in their real lives? Today, when our identities revolve around what we do for a living, we’re prevented from knowing who we really are. It is, perhaps, this search for identity, rather than pure entertainment, that provides a steady stream of customers shelling out $40K a day for the experience.

The park is a place that, as one frequent visitor points out, “answers a question you’ve been asking yourself: Who you really are.” Yet, it doesn’t take us long to spot the obvious extension of this premise: It is also a place to discover who you are not but want to become.

As sentient customers of Westworld how do they choose their game character? If you chose to become a nice guy in Westworld, is it because you’re prevented from being a nice guy in your real life, or is it the opposite: you’re an asshole who wants to be good but prevented from a moral conduct by the overwhelming forces of the real world? Is, then, a simulated reality a reflection of your genuine character or a channel for release of suppressed evil tendencies? And conversely, if you’re a nice guy in the real world who recoils from murder and rape and injustice, why would you want to engage in “violent delights” in your spare time? Can nice guys become bad if given a chance and shielded from judgment?

Dolores, a robot whose task is to be abused and/or ‘saved’ by the customers, muses: “I think when I discover what I am, I will be free.” She’s up to something here. While her consciousness is merely a code, it’s the code that brings her closer to singularity – that is becoming sentient. The allegories and the implications and allusions to our own humanity are immense here. It enters Kantian territory (I’m a little obsessed with Kant these days; took Kantian philosophy class this fall, so I’m like a teenager who’s just discovered Ayn Rand!) What if we, too, can’t be free until we figure out who we are?

If we are a thinking species, a sentient beings, this distinctive feature offers a liberation from a mere reliance on instincts. Dolores is not yet free because she’s a subject to her programming. We as humans are (free), in a sense that we possess a free will. But then other constraints come forward, the constraints of a moral code.

It blows my mind what these guys – writers, producers – are aiming for, if this is their plan, which I think it is. They want us to think of freedom – a grand concept – in a philosophical sense. In the course of the series, as robots gain consciousness, I suspect we will be faced with a question: who is more human and thus more free? Here, I would like to separate the notions of libertarian freedom from philosophical (Kantian) freedom. I wrote on the concept of freedom before as I was trying to give this overused and, frankly, too broad a term, a definition. I’m not satisfied with the notion of libertarian freedom where a person’s freedom is manifested merely in his actions – things that he does because there’s no physical preventive mechanism. Kantian freedom, on the other hand, is not a freedom to do what we like. Such freedom originates in the world of ideas, the a priori world as opposed to empirical world, thus it is guided by reason and not our desires or inclinations. Because it is guided by reason, it is also a subject to moral code, to rules that are universal and independent of our earthly circumstances. Thus freedom, in a philosophical sense, is the ability, no, a requirement to live by a moral code that is a) universal and b) binding because we’re sentient beings (as opposed to, say, animals who cannot be expected to abide by the notion of “ought”). It is, thus, unfortunate that the word and the concept of ‘freedom’ has been so watered-down, so emptied of meaning in current public discourse that it now means whatever you want it to mean. That is another big reason why I’m so excited with narrative possibilities of Westworld: it will force us to ponder on these concepts, it will force us to ask ourselves questions we were too busy to ask before.

Plato’s Republic

I’m in the process of reading Plato’s Republic, and, incidentally, this 2500-year old text is also at the center of a recent Andrew Sullivan treatise about how a democracy can be susceptible to tyrannical forces.

Plato’s political sentiment might not play well in our modern-day uber-democratic approach to politics. He devotes chapter after chapter to building a case for a caste of Philosopher Kings – a group of people, selected through rigorous mental and physical training, to rule the Republic. They are required to forgo the pursuit of material accumulation and fame and only concern themselves with the wellbeing of the state. They would subsist on a modest public allowance. In popular culture this kind of selfless servants of the Republic can be found in Star Wars mythology – the Jedi Knights.

Plato is aware of the many pitfalls where during the training, or later, during the actual governing, one might veer off the intended path. There are just too many temptations along the way – fame, riches, vanity, military glory. He acknowledges this risk, and while his solution – more rigorous selection and cultivation of the needed qualities (which include wisdom, courage and moderation) – might seem weak and susceptible to various impostors, he believes it is still our duty to proceed on this path. Just because something is difficult and has not been done before it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tried. Or, as Tyrion Lannister would say: ‘It’s easy to confuse what is with what ought to be.’

Further, in a beautiful allegory about how we perceive the world, Plato employs a thought experiment that came to be known as Plato’s Cave. Imagine there’s an underground den, a cave, where people are chained to a wall from their birth. They can’t go outside and they can’t even move their heads, as the heads are too constrained by a vise-like device. During the day a sunlight comes through the hole and those cave dwellers can see images on the wall, shadows of objects that live and move outside the cave – people and animals. But the prisoners have no concept of life outside the cave, so for them the reality is represented by those shadows projected on the cave’s wall. That’s all their eyes can see. And, of course, they believe their eyes and thus think of the shadows as ultimate reality.

This is a metaphor for our own epistemology, a way of learning about the world. We believe our eyes and what we’re able to perceive with our senses, and describe the world around us according to those findings. This method involves, of course, more than just our vision; our sense of touch and smell and hearing are also a part of that big illusion.

Plato argues that in order to come closer to the truth – a universal truth – one has to abandon such method of inquiry and employ a purely dialectic method, that of reasoning alone.

The cave metaphor carries greater implications. Imagine someone from that cave somehow made it outside. It would take him a while for his eyes to adjust to the light. (Btw, I love it how Plato recognizes that enlightenment is both the sunlight illuminating objects so that we can see and learn about and describe them and also that light, in this case, is a facilitator of knowledge that is outside of our immediate surroundings, an allegory of pure knowledge.) As soon as the prisoner is able to see in the light he would be perplexed to see strange things that have no definition in his old underground world. Plato believes that there are a lot of perplexed people out there – whether by stepping from darkness into the light or vice-versa – and it is for us to determine the reason for a person’s confusion and to help him along the way. Plato takes it even further to posit that it is the duty of those residing in the light world above to descent into the cave and help those still chained to the wall, even at risk of being ridiculed and/or executed.

But modern-day elites forgot what their position of power should be all about. Such amnesia is thoroughly examined by Thomas Frank in his recent book about elite liberals who, in their pursuit of meritocracy, forgot the very people (the working class) they were supposed to represent. Instead of going into the cave and helping the prisoners out, the modern-day liberals ridicule those unfortunate for their ignorance, while sipping champagne at Davos and TED talks, wallowing in their superiority.

There’s someone who went into the cave though. Trump.

Equality in Plunder

Today is International Women’s Day and predictably we’re seeing articles on a dearth of women in management positions. On Bloomberg today there’s an article about how activist investors – guys like Carl Icahn and Dan Loeb – don’t appoint women board members when they take over the companies. Naturally, the article laments the situation while the corporate raiders, those who bother with a comment, give us platitudes about seeing a ‘bigger picture.’

Bloomberg writers, whether by lack of curiosity or adherence to the party line, refused to looked at the issue from another perspective. They never question is it right for women, or anyone, to possess that kind of capacity for destruction. All they care about is equality, even if that equality means access to the tools that sow that destruction. Activist investing, if you’re not familiar with the term, refers to a practice of taking over the management of an existing company, stripping it of any value, firing its employees and then bragging to shareholders about ‘efficiency’. Complaining about the lack of women in that kind of position is like complaining about Jeffrey Dahmer (the serial killer) not hiring female assistants.

This article reminded me of another short-sighted lament in business circles about the lack of women at World Economic Forum at Davos. Cathy O’Neil (mathbabe) made a good point about it earlier this year. Why, instead of pointing out the corruption on modern-day business elites, one encourages women and minorities to join them? Is it because the task of defending the indefensible becomes easier when it is done by a few strategically placed blacks, women and gays? Does it absolve the old white rich guys who are pulling the strings behind the scenes, when they can point at ‘diversity’ at their control panel?

No one questions the price of that kind of ‘equality’. I once heard an adage about the difference between white and black women. It said that white women seek equality; black women seek justice. Indeed, white women strive to get into that corner office so that they, too, can plunder the world like the guys did for centuries. Black women, on the other hand, can smell a rat here, and thus reject the entire system that only perpetuates the injustice. Like planets or a light beam that are at a safe distance from a massive gravitational object, they are uncorrupted by its gravitational force. White women, on the other hand, usually are. Thus black women, unlike white women, are under no illusion about this whole corrupt scheme. Just some food for thought.

Thoughts on Hillary, Bernie and Trump

It’s been awhile since I wrote about US politics. The thing is I was torn between Bernie and Hillary, and I wanted to analyze this juxtaposition of Bernie’s idealism vs. Hillary’s practicality. I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition.

Many on the left see the problem with Hillary is that she oozes Establishment. We are usually presented with a list of ‘crimes’ that her husband and, by association, she have committed in the 1990s. Bill Clinton passed a series of bills that made an emphasis on personal responsibility while at the same time weakened the call of duty to the larger, more socially and economically influential entities, like business and government. But the thing is we were all neoliberals in the 1990s. We all thought that we have arrived at the ‘end of history’ where liberal democracy and the invisible hand of free markets will guide the humanity till the end of times. This is what we were taught in the universities and business schools. I haven’t heard of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn until I was about two years into my financial industry career. (I don’t remember how I came across those.) And even then I thought that things couldn’t be as bad as they describe it. How the hell was I supposed to discern that what I was taught was an economic fairy-tale concocted by Reagan voodoo whisperers with a self-serving ends? If the world’s leading intellectuals are wrong, what’s to expect from the little guy? I, too, like Clinton and Fukuyama and a horde of neoliberal intellectuals, from Larry Summers to Art Laffer, thought that this is it. This is where we end up. I, too, thought that all you have to do to succeed in life is work hard and then expect everything else to magically fall into place, like they said. I was sincere in my belief. The reason I’m describing my neoliberal background is to demonstrate that it is possible to acknowledge your past mistakes when you are presented with the new evidence. I’ve done it, therefore it would be disingenuous of me to deny the same benefit of the doubt to the Clintons. I think today Bill regrets signing the Crime Bill and Welfare Reform and the loosening of financial regulations. But let’s remember that back in the 1990s all those laws seemed like a good policy in line with the prevailing economic dogma. I think Hillary understands all of that, which is why she shifted left on many issues. But she can’t do a full Bernie without being accused of being an opportunist. Is there even a room, in our current political process, to allow a politician to change his or her mind?

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Growth and Efficiency Argument, Deconstructed.

I am suspicious of the word ‘efficiency’ when it comes to business – big business to be more specific. There’s a level of honesty in small business that is absent in most of the big business models. Where new restaurants pop left and right, elbowing each other to deliver good food at reasonable prices, I don’t see this kind of eagerness to please a customer from an electric or a cable company or big pharma. What is their interest in going an extra mile for me? And why would they do that? Pleasing a consumer is no longer a goal of a modern day big business. These days, when I hear the word ‘efficiency’, usually from consultants and business majors, I don’t expect to hear about how they are going to devise new ways to deliver cheap and useful goods to a consumer. I usually expect to hear about a strategy of maximizing shareholders value – somehow a more sacred endeavor than merely serving their customers. The consultants never disappoint. In fact, customers of a monopoly have become merely means to an end, a stepping stone to the real endgame – profit at all costs. Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, knows this when he constantly encourages businesses to strive to become a monopoly, rather than wither under constant competition. In his view competition is bad. Nonetheless, we get fed endless stories about heroic entrepreneurs who risk their capital to deliver the goods to consumers, leaving aside the fact that those who are really risking their capital are idealistic mom-and-pops who have internalized this beautiful but obsolete narrative. The real entrepreneurs, the financial innovators in C-suites don’t take risks, because they know 1001 ways of unlocking the already existing value.

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The Fallibility of Men

“Since we are dealing with Men, it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good.”

This is a comment J.R.R. Tolkien made about his new but quickly abandoned book “The New Shadow.” He wrote only 13 pages of it and decided it wasn’t worth writing further. Why? He thought that the story could progress only in one way: the men who are restless and discontented with peace and prosperity will seek new battles and adventures and will destroy the peace in the process. That triumphant moment when the good defeated evil at the end of The Return of The King would only last a brief second before men would bring turmoil to their own kingdom. There’s no need for Orcs or Dark Overlord – men will do it all themselves.

I’ll get back to the fantasy world later.

Last week a former RBS trader pleaded guilty to defrauding investors. It’s not big news in and of itself. But it’s a great illustration to the point I’m trying to make.

Adam Siegel was a young star at Bear Stearns back in the day. He became an MD while still in his 20s. When Bear collapsed in 2008 he jumped to RBS with a bunch of his colleagues. After the crisis RMBS/CMBS trading was on the decline so to make any kind of money in that business one had to become resourceful. And he did. His new business model involved shaving a few beeps off his counterparties. Nothing fancy really. In 2014 one of his colleagues pleaded guilty in the expanding probe and Siegel himself was placed on leave. What does he do? Goes home and rethinks his life? Ha, no. He jumps yet to another shop – Fortress – to join yet another Bear alumni Michael Nierenberg.

This story is a great example of the kind of restlessness of men that Tolkien was talking about. Life gave Siegel plenty of opportunities to retire, to abandon the game – his first employer collapsed, the other suspended him – and yet he’s incapable of walking away. Instead he jumps from one sinking ship to another, probably self-congratulating himself for his agility and perseverance.

For guys like him the worst punishment is not jail time or a large fine. For guys like him the worst punishment is being excluded from the game. Now that he’s pled guilty and is on bail, I assume that, at the very least, he’s banned from using his Bloomberg. Oh, man, denying a Bloomberg access to a trader is like denying crack to an addict. He wishes nothing more than to be able to check some quotes. If you told him that for the rest of his life he will never trade again, never hustle a client again, you would put him into a severe, suicidal-level depression. It would be an equivalent of a concert pianist breaking his fingers. Life is over.

Back to Tolkien and to a Man’s ‘satiety with good.’ Good, the way Tolkien understands it, is a boring concept to a modern-day American. To Tolkien good is content and idleness. To Siegel and to any ambitious American (and what American is not ambitious these days?) good is dissatisfaction and action. We are like Nicky Santoro who, after getting himself banned from every casino in town, keeps devising new schemes to stay in the game. “I gotta do something, I gotta do something,” Nicky tells Ace. “They ain’t getting rid of me. I’m staying here. Fuck’em.” In our current zeitgeist such tenacity and perseverance is considered virtuous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDv-gauNQ4I
But what if we can’t abandon the game because the game itself gives us comfort? What if it is the unfamiliarity of a new route, the lack of familiar structure that we fear? What if it is the quiet that we’re scared of? Life offers us many exits from our routine, but we can’t take it. If we truly loved the game the way we claim to – the kind of game we imagine we play: competitive, ruthless, favorable to the best player – then we should welcome any chance to “step out of the comfort zone”, as numerous self-help books advise us. But we don’t. For our trader Siegel to step out of his comfort zone would be to abandon the industry and, I dunno, coach Little League. He won’t do that voluntarily.

The funny thing is, while at the game, we often dream of freedom from “all this shit.” Numerous movies and TV shows have explored this human need. But, alas, as soon as such freedom is within our reach, we pull back, horrified. We are all masters at what we do, all right. But it’s better to practice our mastery in familiar waters.

But God speed to Adam Siegel. I wish that, if he avoids jail, he reunites with his P&L soon. Things can always get worse when ambition is denied an outlet. It’s not like he’s stiffing public workers or municipalities, right? And what’s a few basis points between friends?

The Folly of The Big Short

Before I get to critique, and there will be plenty, I have to give the movie credit where it’s due: it does an excellent job describing the convoluted structure of the products to a layman. The movie is good at describing all the details of the trade that up until now were the province of finance bloggers. Everything about the swagger and the conferences and the various participants is true. SEC was toothless and uninterested at doing their job; rating agencies didn’t want to ruin their profitable relationship with the banks; the traders are young, white, haughty and male. They even mentioned the ABX index – an obscure but important gauge of a subprime market back in the day. The pivotal moment did indeed come during the ASF in Vegas in January of 2007. The subprime market, measured by the ABX did fall about 2-3 points during the conference. It was an unprecedented move, as the index usually moved about a few ticks up until that point.

But that’s where the movie’s merits end. The first thing that I found hard to believe is how the shorts – that is the guys who shorted the market – are portrayed. You see, when you’re short and the market goes down the last thing on your mind is who’s on the other side of the trade. It’s the truth that is founded in our own fallibility. But the narrative makes all kinds of efforts to make us like the protagonists. We are told that they are brilliant oddballs, unlike the stiff Wall Street suits represented by Goldman and Deutsche bankers. I have difficulty reconciling this depiction with their actions. When you make money – that kind of money, hundreds of millions, billions – you celebrate. You’re exhilarated, even gleeful. Your longshot bet just paid off! You don’t give sermons, like Brad Pitt’s character, in a half ass attempt by screenwriters to make him look human, about how the little people are about to lose their homes and jobs. That just isn’t believable. But here we are led to believe, rather clumsily, that these guys care about the downtrodden because they are shown saying a few high-minded words to their underlings.

Second, if we have established, like the writers would like us to, that these guys actually have scruples and principles that the bad greedy bankers supposedly didn’t, then why didn’t they abandon their positions and the industry in disgust and went to live on a ranch somewhere? Many of the real life characters are still somehow involved with the industry – trading commodities (like water) or running their funds.

Third, the idea that aside from 6-7 prescient people described in the movie no one has known about what was coming is a big stretch. I understand it from a dramatic perspective of a movie, but if the film advertises itself as a serious unbiased version of events then we are not getting the full picture. We are told that no one bothered to look at loan level tapes except for Michael Burry and that’s just not the case. I mean you’re telling me that thousands of investment banking analysts, who have been crunching numbers and loan level files from subprime lenders day and night, didn’t notice that the quality of those loans was becoming worse and worse with every tape they received? That they didn’t see those low FICOs and NINJA documentations and high LTVs? That it is only those few heroic outsiders who bothered to do that? That’s fantasy realm. Every trader worth his money, and there were plenty of brilliant guys (and I’m not necessarily talking character, I’m talking professional acuity) on the trading desks, will know what it is he’s trading. The problem wasn’t that people were oblivious; the problem was that many had perverse incentives not to know. And for those who knew, it was the timing and the scope of the collapse that was a big unknown variable. And, as we saw in the movie, people got burned by being short too early.

The audience’s ire is redirected from the guys who actually shorted the market to the guys who facilitated it. Surely, the guys who facilitated it – the banks, Greg Lippmann, Wing Chau – are not without blame, but let’s not let the hedge funds off the hook. Before Michael Burry and Co. decided to short the mortgage market there wasn’t even a product available on the Street that would enable them to do so. It had to be created specifically for them as we see during the course of the movie. It was that demand for shorts that drove the issuance of shittier and shittier CDOs – so that there were something to bet against. Without that demand, perhaps, the housing collapse would be contained. They use the world’s old trick of blaming the prostitutes but not the clients.

The bigger story that got swept under the rug is why and how it was possible. This should have been a story about the realm with no rules, or the rules that are written by players as they go. When we’re told that those new products, those weapons of mass destruction are created on the fly, as the demand appears, this pivotal piece of info is presented as merely a passing link to a more audience-friendly story – the good old story of stupidity and greed. The viewer will leave the theater thinking it’s the greedy bankers’ fault, which is a convenient, simple and a rather tired notion. A takeaway here is that if one is greedy and wears a suit he’s evil, but if one is greedy but is a barefoot, unshaven, drum-playing oddball then it’s ok. It’s as if we’re steered away from pondering on what’s wrong with the entire system.

Furthermore, movies of that sort usually have some redemption in the end. There’s no redemption here. Screenwriters want us to be angry. Well, that goal was achieved. A layman will come out of that movie angry at the suits – the S&P, SEC, the bankers, but not the outsider financial cowboys. But that doesn’t absolve one from making a moral judgement. I think a movie, especially a movie exposing such spectacular misdeeds, has to carry a moral message, and this one fails to do that. What’s our takeaway? That the only recourse we have towards greedy bankers are even greedier and shrewder hedge funders, whom, after the dust settles, we will be asked to celebrate, simply because they exposed the fraud? But it is the very process of exposition, like in quantum mechanics, that made the experiment have an outcome that otherwise, without that exposition, would be very different – limited and less severe in scope. Without them, the betting process would stop at the very first level – the level that Selena Gomez played at the Blackjack table. There would be no second or third order of betting, there would be no CDOs and CDO^2. But they – the hedge funders, the shorts – opened the floodgate of a shit lake that otherwise would be contained. They are the observers of a quantum experiment that without their actions would have a very different, less severe outcome.

We are given a lot of shocking information and then left to make our own judgements. For the industry (Hollywood) that likes to give us sermons in easily digestible tidbits this is puzzling. The narrative is good at building up outrage but then, as we are shaking in our seats with rage, it stops short of making a coherent conclusion, as if the screenwriters and Michael Lewis were afraid to make a judgment after every appalling detail that they’ve given us. As such it’s just another good ol boys’ heist movie, masquerading as social commentary. The only moment in the whole movie where they come close to the truth is when an S&P executive played by Melissa Leo, herself a corrupt player, tells Steve Carell that his positions make him a hypocrite. That’s about it.

I’d like to conclude with a quote from Yves Smith’s recent blogpost, (which is a must read, btw):

“Lewis’ desire to satisfy his fan base’s craving for good guys led him to miss the most important story of our age: how a small number of operators used a nexus of astonishing leverage and camouflaged risk to bring the world financial system to its knees and miraculously walked away with their winnings. These players are not the ugly ducklings of Lewis’ fairy tale; they are merely ugly. Whether for his own profit or by accident, Lewis has denied the public the truth.”

A Modern Day Dilemma, Explored.

This Aeon magazine article, long and meditating on details, encapsulates my ideas – the kind of ideas that are increasingly becoming my main point of interest – on the two major irreconcilable forces that drive our identity: the fulfillment (or lack of it) that we find in work and our desire (and inability) to be good people. Can we have day jobs (the kind that can pay our bills) and be the good guys at the same time?

As I wrote a lot of posts on the topic, I could not have better condensed my sentiment into a simple sentence:

“The innocent moral imperative to stand on your own two feet helps sustain structures of inequality that have come to seem – no lesser word will do – barbaric. The work ethic has a lot to answer for.”

In other words, as we struggle to survive under the current economic structure and get better at it, as we become more resourceful at and more dedicated to our jobs, we inadvertently help sustain this vicious circle of inequality. What we think of as a virtue – being good at what you do, or, to be more precise, being good at no matter what you do – is, in fact, a vice.

The author makes a point that television, albeit a what we call high-quality TV, can actually provide an idea of what it would take to be a better person while doing your job, as opposed to merely lament, as old traditional TV shows did, on how meaningless our day work is. Here I want to put the TV part aside, however, and just focus on author’s superb analysis of the status quo.

“The work ethic used to mean putting yourself on the line. Today, physical risk has been replaced by speculative risk.”

The author juxtaposes a cop and a finance guy (and we don’t really need a TV show for that) to demonstrate that, while both work hard, one of them gets all the goods and the other is assigned with protecting the former’s property while risking his life doing it. If you’re doing good at your day job, like enforcing the law or care for the sick or the elderly, does that make you into a sucker? Then he goes to make a point, or rather ask a philosophical question, that I have been pondering for years:

“How much of what we call respectable work is something that nobody under any circumstances should be allowed to do? Such subversive questions are actively provoked by the long-running gangster shows The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad. These particular series are all about men, and all a man wants to do is provide for his family. But given the rules of the game, providing for your family might entail committing acts you can’t tell your family about, including murder. That’s just how it is. It’s not your fault. You’re just doing your job.”

By veiling our dedication to our jobs, no matter how unethical, in a shroud of ‘providing for the family’ is a mental escape that many of us use to get through the day. And because we’re so busy, we have no time to examine it, to think of it from this angle, let alone to change anything about it.

It is interesting to see the author to conceive a situation, albeit utopian, where we would reconcile the competition and cooperation: a Zombie apocalypse. This is a situation where we would abandon a sharp division of labor and our individual specializations. As I routinely mock finance guys who go out of their way to seek physical hardships, whether out of boredom or excess energy or preparation for a total economic collapse, perhaps there’s some real truth to my scorn. These demonstrations of physical prowess are their subconscious manifestations, perhaps even a longing, for the world where the real meaning would exist. But if and when the real Zombie apocalypse happens and we’re forced to apply our physical skills to survive, the upheaval would also force us to have a conversation about what it means to do meaningful things. Are we prepared or even mentally equipped to have that conversation?

Our Cult of the Underdog.

In a modern-day America, a good modest origins story is as necessary an attribute of a public figure’s self-identity as a Birkin bag is a necessary attribute of an Upper East Side trophy wife. As political season heats up and the candidates elbow each other to ingratiate themselves with the little guy, we should ready ourselves for the bi-annual onslaught of personal hardship stories. But come to think of it, the underdog story is a permanent American staple, election season or not.

Election year, however, offers a great insight into the power of such narrative, where political candidates, most of whom were born to uninspiring circumstances ranging from middle-class families to political dynasties, compete for ‘the shittiest childhood’ spot. There’s a problem there, as the candidates, raised in the postwar, economically prosperous America weren’t exactly subjects to a Great Depression or a WWII level upheaval. Here, lacking a true personal hardship story, they pivot to the story of their immigrant parents and grandparents, as if the suffering of ancestors is somehow a proof of one’s own hard life. How was it hard? Was he a barefoot 12-year old forced to work in a coalmine to feed his family? On genetic level? Damn, if only one could buy a crappy childhood!

To admit privilege, to admit the possession of power or influence, is to put oneself into a weaker argumentative position and to invite criticism. The privileged know this even if on merely subconscious level – they never miss a chance to tell a self-deprecating story. This strategy kills many birds with one stone, it deflects the critics and endears the narrator to an economically struggling audience.

In real life we’ve all met manifestations of such underdog mindset when we heard a successful person boast about how hard he worked to get where he is (usually a soapy immigrant story), and then, without missing a beat, complain about how it’s tough to live in a world where his tax dollars support all kinds of riff-raff. You see the trick here? While he’s eager to convey his success story he’s careful to mask it in a certain degree of martyrdom.

Positioning oneself as an underdog is a low-risk, high-reward strategy. Kim Davis, a Kentucky public official who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples knows this. Her ostensible underdog bona fides, validated by the stint in jail, were cemented at the moment of her release, in a surreal but too delicious to watch spectacle. The visuals of the event – the Eye of the Tiger soundtrack, the politicians jockeying to insert themselves into a photo-op with a bunch of country bumpkins, the crosses, the main character’s triumphant posture, arms in the air, akin to a pastor about to deliver a sermon to her flock, her husband in denim overalls and the scarecrow hat – were just too awesome. A fiction writer would kill to conceive and write a scene like this. But the scene was real and unscripted and thus powerful – there was no hint of irony in the entire show. Clearly, Kim Davis fancies herself to be a scrappy Rocky Balboa defeating, in an uneven and bloody fight, an all-powerful Ivan Drago. And that gives her power. She would not have that power if she merely performed her governmental duties, because a government official cannot be an underdog. What’s also interesting here is that one doesn’t even have to put up any sort of a real fight to achieve the accolades. These days one can achieve the glory of David fighting Goliath, without doing all the work. You don’t have to defeat the Goliath, you just have to bait him, make yourself into an underdog and take a stand, and next thing you know there are TV cameras and politicians and a cult following. Whether you’re in her camp or not you watched that scene in awe. The genius of that scene is undeniable. It could not have been conceived and executed as preplanned. It was a sporadic, organic display delivered in the most dramatic fashion to the hungry, rapturous audience. Somewhere, Karl Rove is biting his nails in envy.

As much as this Kim Davis’s kind of underdoggery is entertaining and attention-drawing, it can’t do much harm. 6 months from now we won’t even remember who Kim Davis was, like we don’t remember the outrage surrounding Rachel Dolezal a few months back.

It is the low-profile underdogs that worry me. It is the true elites with power, pretending to have none, that can do real harm. The greatest cache of low-profile underdogs can be found on Wall Street or among the billionaire ranks. I would argue that, among these elites, a quest for a personal narrative is as strong a motivator as monetary rewards. A smart billionaire with politics and a gospel to spread knows that denial of power is a power in itself. Acknowledgment of being in privileged position, of possessing power, would then require some kind of stewardship, a responsibility. But denial of power frees one from responsibilities. What kind of stewardship and responsibility can we expect from the majority of Wall Street players and hedgies who, with multi-million dollar paychecks, with an army of lobbyists, with a direct line to and an ear of lawmakers, still insist on describing themselves as ‘scrappy kids from Brooklyn’ – a tired metaphor, sure, but still a dominant sentiment among the finance crowd, doggedly resistant to self-reflection?

Such resistance – to the acknowledgement of one’s membership in a power elite – reveals a deep desire to be free from responsibility, to remain a child in essence, to be an immanent, passive participant, who merely reacts to events unfolding before him. Again and again, in the aftermath of the crisis, we heard one bigwig after another, defend themselves with “I didn’t know nothing” and “beyond my control” fables. They knew that to be in charge is to be accountable. To be perceived as a winner, to be transcendent, is to invite all kinds of unwelcome scrutiny. But when you’re an underdog you can use it as a shield from critics and a niche from which to attack others. Folksiness and bootstraps stories are immune from attacks by nosy journalists and Vox.com eggheads. It’s a smart positioning. One has to be a Trump to revel in the spotlight and the “winning.” But Trump has a rare quality of not giving a fuck, unlike many self-conscious “winners” on Wall Street, who feign modesty and shroud themselves in ‘poor me’ stories. Is it any wonder then, that the public, correctly, perceives them as the biggest douchebags?