Master of the Die: Psyche,
Thinking to Appear More Beautiful...,
Opens the Fateful Box (1530–1540)

"We never were merely externalities …"

Our billionaires inhabit a radically different universe than the rest of us, for they exist without consequences. I might reasonably believe their existence must prove much more consequential if only because they command vast resources. In that narrowest sense, I might consent, but commanding vast resources says little about success. It might be that few things more reliably exceed than excess, but this says nothing about effectiveness. It's little or nothing to purchase something with one-hundredth of one percent of one's resources. The significance, however otherwise magnificent, tends to get lost in rounding on those sorts of transactions. A working man might struggle for a decade to finally save a downpayment for a modest home he'll never ultimately pay for. Still, he will have really accomplished something monumental in so doing. The lowly billionaire could buy and sell him ten thousand times without diminishing his wealth by a comparative dime, yet never once experienced success in the way that workingman does. Nor could they experience consequences because the workman risks everything to achieve his modest result, and the billionaire risks essentially nothing.

It's much more and different from idolatry to worship our billionaires' successes. It seems much more akin to misunderstanding. These poor souls do not live enviable lives. They exist divorced from consequences. This means they cannot succeed because they can no longer fail. This state seems akin to achieving eternal life. Eternal life seems to leach out the meaning from living, for if it were merely never-ending, what could the purpose possibly be? If generational wealth guaranteed your progeny's place in the pecking order, what would they strive for? Could it even be life without certain death stalking every move? The absence of uncertainty would most certainly eventually become unbearable. Not only that, but it seems one's judgment becomes less reliable as one's wealth and security grow. Those immune from the usual dangers seem to lose their ability to relate to the world everyone else inhabits. One becomes relatively cavalier, presuming everyone's equally risk-secure. They place bets with what they consider to be pennies, creating debts others can never repay.

Billionaires seem indifferent to details. They paint with the broadest of brushes. They speak of bold strategic moves, perhaps because they know that they won't be the ones dying on the battlefields. They overlook details that serve as the workingman's bread and butter. Billionaires can afford to ignore logistical limitations to realizing grand visions because they consider details like supply chains to be externalities. They command, and someone else grinds the handle that moves the gears. It's one thing, for instance, to proclaim some fresh tariff scheme and quite another actually to enable tariffs to be collected. Collecting tariffs amounts to authentic workingman effort. Customs officials have always been the most reviled civil servant class; theirs must always be a thankless job. They're responsible for delaying delivery of every incoming shipment. They're also held accountable for the revenue lost to smuggling. Changing a tariff scheme might require years to ramp up the bureaucracy necessary to perform the accounting. Even if one expects the importers to honestly report the contents of each shipment to forego inspection, the incentive increases to cheat with each percentage increase in tariff. What might seem brilliant gets lost in rounding somewhere between idea and execution. Any shortcomings can be conveniently ascribed to Deep State bureaucratic inefficiencies. It's always somebody else's fault.

MagicalThinking centers on an All Ya Gotta Do attitude. From the loftier heights, anything might seem possible. From there, the less one understands the details, the better one can envision striking results. Time and space get distorted when viewed from such a distance. No sense of gravitas naturally levitates up and into any boardroom. They're separate from operations for good reasons. Details too easily poison vision. Systems thinking requires circumspect delusion. One must refrain from asking too many questions if one intends to initiate radical changes. The more profound the intended shift, the less reality ever has to do with it. Consequently, the most senior managers tend to be fanaticists. They are in the business of encouraging the formerly impossible, knowing full well that most of their initiatives will eventually turn into failures. But at those scales, not striving holds a more significant downside to achieving their notion of the future they're commanding. If that one-in-a-thousand chance manifests, they might become wealthy beyond imagination, whatever that success might buy anybody.

Their failure rate beggars the imagination. The recently mustered Department Of Government Efficiency admits to a twenty-percent error rate. How inefficient, especially when you're dealing with professional careers. Most observers think that rate is absurdly under-reported, given the number of redos required. What improvement succeeds when it admits to failing one in every five iterations? Certainly not the workingman's improvement, for he could not sustain his existence with much less than an almost one-hundred percent success rate. Perhaps we're talking about a billionaire's success rate, which never needs to approach even zero percentage for him to maintain his position. Nothing's wagered, so nothing’s really gained. Much gets lost, though, in the interface between MagicalThinking and what passes as the real world for the rest of us. Billionaires seem inept because they are inept. Little forces like gravity and reality tend to stumble them, though neither matter very much to them, either. Their collateral damage doesn't manage to upend their existence, unlike the experience of the rest of us who absorb externalities for a living. We never were merely externalities but substance.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CHope , #PureSchmaltz