Mind Scalpel

Years ago, I received some deep wisdom from an extraordinary, modern-day Vietnamese philosopher. Oddly enough, this philosopher appeared on late-night television, surrounded by bikini-clad women, and was aggressively hawking his real estate seminars.

Nevertheless, I learned several important lessons from him, the most prominent among them (for me, at least) being the following (reproduced from memory):

“So I come to the United States, I tell people I want to be rich. They look at me and say ‘You crazy! You poor guy, you poor immigrant, you barely speak English, lots of other people smarter than you, they not rich, how you think you going to get rich? You crazy!’”

“You know what I say to these people? I say ‘You are a loser! Get out of my way! I make it somehow!‘”

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Apologies for the short gap in posting. I’ve been thinking about how to respond to a surprising “cease and desist” letter I received last week. Normally, these things shower down upon me like snow in January, to as little effect, but this one was different.

You see, it was signed by a few people whose name I recognized: Bill Gates (yeah, the Microsoft guy — former minion of mine, now in open rebellion, due for a comeuppance, long story), Sergey Brin (Google, same basic siutation), Jeffrey Bezos (CEO of amazon.com) and Pierre Omidyar (EBay dude).

Rather than try to summarize the letter, I’ll just reproduce it here in its entirety:

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We now know why the Presidential races are attacking the nation like an aggressive mallet to the nose — they’re just trying to perk up the economy.

See, a recent study conducted by four universities – Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and … Pittsburgh? (cue Muppets singing “One Of These Things is Not Like The Others”) — shows that when people are unhappy, they tend to buy more stuff.

This is amazing! It’s essentially proof that the economy is a robust, self-compensating system. Forget monetary policy, trade imbalances, interest rates, tax cuts — that’s all irrelevant. What this study shows is that as soon as the economy starts tanking, infusing people with misery, they’ll be compelled by atavistic impulses to run out and spend, spend, spend.

Unfortunately, it appears that the converse also is true — as soon as people start feeling good again, they’ll hang out at home, living the simple life, weaving their own clothes, and composting. This explains why we’ve been acculturated to keep up with the news and listen to NPR — so we’ll always be haunted by a vague sense of impending doom, and therefore be on the verge of running out and buying another billboard-sized television, thus supporting the economy and ever-expanding government programs. Don’t believe me? Must I remind you that NPR is government-subsidized? I rest my case.

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