Phony Cryptomania Edition
FTX, SBF, and JFK; Manet and Hopper; Gilgamesh and death; Clarice Lispector on the unsayable; squash; Advent’s O Antiphons.
Happy December. Welcome to the hermitage’s monthly grab bag of dubious curios, ambivalent obsessions, and delirious malinformations.
Far be it from me to comment on crypto markets. Especially given how slowly the waterwheels of the hermitage turn, dispensing their lifegiving dribs and drabs at a languid pace intentionally orthogonal to the dopesick delirium tremens of the news cycle.
In other words, by the time you read this in December, you will likely, depending on the depravity of your proclivities, either be sick of hearing of the FTX scandal and the polyculed, methed-up, unhygienic beanbags of the Bahamian billionaire class—or you will have no idea what I’m talking about, and prefer to keep it that way.1
Nonetheless the following aside from Sam Bankman-Fried caught my roving eye. It was expressed to a journalist via late-night DM (always a good idea, especially in the middle of Chapter 11—I’ll be covering this in my $5 ebook on getting away with financial crimes):
“Each step was in isolation rational and reasonable.”
Now, on the merits of this particular case, this is almost certainly bullshit. The steps, Sam, were not reasonable. There are many reasons to doubt his sincerity, not least the rest of the very same interview where he brags about deliberately deploying duplicitous ethical language to appease customers, investors, and regulators. But many of the gritty details are still shrouded, so history, by which I mean probably Michael Lewis, will have to ultimately render its judgment.
However, this logic—of seemingly rational sequences of decisions leading to nightmarish places—is a real phenomenon.
The difficult thing is that this is often true even if the steps really are rational and reasonable, to the best of our knowledge. The complex and interlocking systems in which we undertake our moral decision-making are, frustratingly, more than the sum of their parts. There is a ghost in the machine, an indivisible remainder, an ineradicable non-linearity that defies our best-laid plans. Road to hell, good intentions, and all that—it’s a cliche for a reason.
One of the monumental personifications of this truth was Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the escalation of the Vietnam War. I highly recommend Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary-length interview of McNamara, The Fog of War. By then he was an old man, wracked with doubts but still subtly spinning history in his favor. He presented his “lessons” from his time in power, one of which includes this sobering assessment of how we escaped nuclear armageddon over Cuba:
I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational2. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.
McNamara as immortalized in Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest is the picture of hubris, a towering intellect drawn inexorably to disaster by its very brilliance. But I want to say there’s a sort of deranged humility there too. An unseemly submissiveness to naked data. A shirking of responsibility. And who wouldn’t want to shirk what we did. At every step—”in isolation rational and reasonable”—he ran the numbers and the numbers said to keep dropping the napalm. “Why?” Sorry, the numbers don’t read that query.
What’s called for is more idiosyncratic human judgment, not less. More individual responsibility, not less. Nuclear war wasn’t averted because of “luck.” It was averted because Kennedy, the individual, decided to step out of the stream of escalatory logic, accurately mentally model his opponent, and then agree to a painful compromise. Risky—and from the point of view of almost all his advisers, utterly unreasonable. Setting a bad precedent! Undermining credibility! Reasonable concerns, honestly. But if you’re interested in negotiation at all, you know that the thorniest deadlocks are often overcome by cutting some Gordian knot, not by adding up small, sensible steps.
The trouble with the algorithmic technocracy that was born sometime between the first Ford production line and McNamara’s irrefutable spreadsheets and which we increasingly rely on to make our decisions for us is not that it is implemented by willful and arrogant men and women but something closer to the opposite. It becomes a sort of emergent egregore, answerable to no one. No one to make the decisions, no one to be held accountable.
“Just following orders.” From who? Distributed networks distribute and obfuscate the channels of pressure but the dynamic is roughly the same as ever, selection mechanisms still rule3. McNamara was in a position to de-escalate Vietnam but if he had wanted to do that he wouldn’t have been McNamara and he wouldn’t have been in those rooms. If SBF didn’t make his reckless play to become crypto kingmaker, someone else would have, maybe even a Republican. “No, you don’t understand. You want the money for your petty vanity projects, I need the money to save the world.”
My point is not to slag on Effective Altruism. Honestly. The danger I’m clumsily describing is most acute in utilitarian frameworks but it comes for us all.
Rationality itself isn’t bad, indeed it is a gift of God and a participation in the Divine Coherence of the created world. We can’t help navigating the world by weighing the likely costs and benefits of various courses of action as best we can. Virtue ethics, objective moral rules, commitment to principle come what may—these are all good starting points. But only starting points. Principles have to be applied to particular circumstances, competing moral commandments must be resolved, and the virtues must be lived out in the muddy lanes of everyday life.
But while calculations are involved, they are ever subservient. Real moral choice relies on the primacy of such irreducible and uncountable things as intelligence, judgment, prudence, foresight, and goodwill, not to mention the weight of responsibility and consequence—attributes that only humans, as rational animals, can possess, and which algorithms, spreadsheets, Magic 8 Balls, toasters, viruses, Bears fans, and AI engines cannot.
Rationality is good but it’s a tool, and if you confuse any tool with the toolmaker or the tool-user, you will end up embarrassed or confused or worse.
This is what Iain McGilchrist, the British neuroscientist, is trying to get at in The Master and His Emissary, his book on how left-hemisphere cognition—the seat of instrumental rationality—seeks undue control over the mind. A kind of mental coup d’etat, which comes at the expense of overall truth and well-being. That hemisphere thinks everything in the world can and must be grasped, manipulated, isolated, abstracted. But healthy functioning in fact requires zooming out and taking in the whole view. That’s the realm of right-hemisphere cognition, which interprets the world through holistic thinking, connectivity, context, intuition, and sensual reality.
In popular discourse the right-hemisphere gets tagged, somewhat rightly, with being the ally of the inner child, the intuitive, the creative. But McGilchrist’s more important point is that it’s also the adult in the room. It takes in the data from Rationality but gives it a smell-check before using it in Sunday dinner. It’s the wise mother shaking her head, chuckling at your misplaced toddler arrogance, and patiently trying to explain to you that your impeccably-crafted strategy to finally bring the world under total control is very impressive but is missing some big things and is about to blow up in your face/defraud your investors/bleed your country dry in an unwinnable war/cause a nuclear holocaust/etc etc.
That’s why McGilchrist calls the right-hemisphere The Master. The guy who sees the big picture and knows his limits is the one who needs to be in charge. Not the one who thinks about “steps in isolation” and then acts surprised when he walks off a cliff.
None of the above should be construed as financial, nor indeed life advice. My financial adviser is a homeless experimental performance artist.
The bells of Mosul’s Chaldean Catholic Cathedral of St. Paul the Apostle are rung again for the first time since the Daesh occupation. Hamdilullah.
Links.
Jackson Arn on Hopper’s New York: “these paintings never become full-on tragedies…the pain arises from the tension between buildings and people, not from the people themselves.”
Manet, whose painting career began with a desperate attempt to retouch unsightly cheese rinds for resale and who believed that ”one must be of one’s time and paint what one sees.”
What cybersex can reveal about the broader phenomenon of online identities becoming not just reflections but idealized and perpetually over-writable avatars of ourselves, how the resulting dissociation has silently become constitutive of everyday life, and how that disembodiment feeds into the psychological substrate for rising depression, anxiety, and dysmorphia among the Digital Natives, God have mercy on them.
The story of Botticelli’s forgotten Dante illustrations.
The always perspicacious Oliver Traldi with a cutting little review of the unstable epistemology of the misinformation police. “The much-touted experts on disinformation and misinformation who have cropped up over the past year or so have become very comfortable with the feeling that disagreeing with them is something between scandalous and criminal. But epistemology, a study of what we can know and what we ought to believe, which goes back millennia, has some less hysterical answers.”
Sam Kriss on Gilgamesh, friendship, and death.
My closest friend died nearly four years ago. The same experience that made Gilgamesh afraid for his life did something very different to me. Before, death was simply an absence without features. My ownmost, the void of myself, waiting only for me. Afterwards, my death also contained the person I loved most in the world. Sheol is no longer a pit; it now has her features. I don’t fear it so much any more. Life is a little emptier, and death is a little more full, and whatever void I’m facing, she is already there.4
Could the Catholic and Orthodox churches agree on a common date for Easter by 2025, the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea?
Auden’s scandalous secret life.
Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it—and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But—I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.
―Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
Welcome to Advent. Particularly beautiful in the Latin tradition are the so-called O Antiphons, the series of seven plaintive supplications that accompany the evening Vespers prayers in the week leading up to the Christmas feast. Each feature a different Old Testament title for Christ. The first being Sapienta, or Wisdom:
O Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from one end to the other, mightily and sweetly ordering all things: come to teach us the way of prudence.
Stay frosty, stay cozy, stay hygge,
As ever,
J
If you actually want, like, insight or at least entertaining speculation on the nuts and bolts of various financial markets I always recommend Matt Levine’s newsletter as a jumping off point.
Somewhat dubious to conclude that Castro was behaving as a rational actor here, as he was begging Krushchev to incinerate not just the Northern Hemisphere but Cuba itself in order to…prevent an invasion of Cuba. Big “burn the village to save it” energy. (He did eventually regret that, which, good, I guess.) But leaving that to the side.
“[Kennedy adviser] Robert A. Lovett, the symbolic expert, the best of the breed, a great surviving link to a then-unquestioned past… He was a man of impeccable credentials, indeed he passed on other people’s credentials, deciding who was safe and sound, who was ready for advancement and who was not.” Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, pg 10.
Kriss is right that it’s very hard to really think of one’s own death, to really inhabit its inevitability even for a moment. That’s why memento mori is a spiritual practice and not just a slogan. I keep skulls on my desk and say prayers (almost) every day that invoke death and the afterlife, but can’t help but wonder if repetition can’t have its own blunting effect. If I’m being honest it doesn’t usually penetrate into the emotional bedrock. Afterwards I usually get up and go right back to obsessing over some imagined slight or anxiously turning over all the disastrous futures that await me or some other stupid shit with which I squander the precious time given me. What can make us experience the jolt of mortality in a truly somatic key? For Gilgamesh it is losing Enkidu that rends the veil of death. For Kriss it is the bewildering absence of his friend. I haven’t lost anyone I’m that close to, yet. For me the most reliable way in so far is when I think about all the places I will never see again. For some reason the most quotidian coordinates leave indelible images: a certain side street blue and orange at dusk, an unassuming gravel parking lot worn smooth in memory, a chair next to the window covered in dust and lamplight, the hidden lake where we sunbathed and read Rilke. And a million others. When life is infinite, it goes without saying that I will have all the time in the world to visit them again. Yet any sober reckoning of the numbers—hours, days, dollars—must show that almost all of them I will have already said goodbye to for the last time. And meanwhile the new ones keep piling up.
My financial advisor is Larry David, so the mood at my hovel these days is pretty, pretty, pretty good.