Part 3 of 3
Voluntarily coming clean is truly an anathema for humans. “I can’t do this anymore. My conscience is killing me. I need help.” Very, very, very few people will ever say this in their lifetime, and I am no exception. We all suffer boiling frog syndrome. We do something unhealthy or harmful in life, and we get away with it, so we just keep doing it. Coming clean is the last thing we want to do despite the accumulation of effects on ourselves and those around us. Unfortunately, it is more human nature to continue our downward spiral until outside forces become too much to bear and we are uncovered, our health fails, or we just die.
There are some cases of people coming clean, but it often takes a rather rude shock or harrowingly close call. Someone who drinks and drives will fall asleep at the wheel and crash into a tree, but nobody will catch them, and their injuries are not too grave. This is the wakeup call that will save their lives and make them take rideshare. For some it may actually take a DUI conviction. A morbidly obese man will experience the death of his morbidly obese wife or mother and change his life around by eating better and less and exercising. It does happen, but it takes a rather big shock to the system to work. This is why sometimes interventions work. When all your remaining social support network gives you an ultimatum to come clean or they will all ditch you, this could be sufficient to shock you into turning your life around.
Another way is to simply be lucky enough to find yourself surrounded by better role models. You unconsciously mimic and copy those around you. You desperately want to fit in. When you join a new group or club, you tend to change your wardrobe. If I were to join some yoga class, I might start out wearing shorts and a t-shirt, but I may ultimately switch to whatever they’re wearing instead. When I went to Burning Man, I wore cargo shorts, a t-shirt, and a boonie hat. I felt immensely out of place. If I ever went again, I’d wear a fur vest, an ironic military hat, and sparkling tights, okay maybe not sparkling tights, but a shiny pair of pants or something. Had Naqvi started to hang around a better crowd, maybe he would have come clean, but he was surrounded by yes-people sycophants and brethren elite con-artists.
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If you’re an investor making huge financial deals, you need to know if the people handling your money are trustworthy. You would think that this would be an easy job. You can tell if someone is trustworthy by how they behave over a long period of time. You notice how they treat people, how they handle stress, how they handle disappointment and difficulties, etc. But at the top of the game with hundred million and billion-dollar deals, you have an entirely different set of qualities in people. They’re greedy, aggressive, showy, egomaniacal, arrogant, charming when needed, and they also have extremely high tolerance for risk. That’s how they made big money in the first place. But these are the exact qualities that correspond to people who can’t be trusted. It’s a total paradox.
How does anything get done? The answer is, there’s a lot of waste, corruption, crime, and backstabbing at the top. You know that people are only using you to move up the wealth pyramid. They’ll be kind and generous to you so long as you serve their higher purpose. So you have to realize that you can only trust people for a short period of time, perhaps you’ll luck out and they’ll give you huge returns to make them look good before screwing over the next guy down the line. When people at the very top say it’s a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world, they’re not talking about the entire population. They’re talking about people at the very top, the 1% of the 1% who have clawed their way up there through a huge amount of luck and connections and initial wealth, and then a fair dose of high risk-tolerance, arrogance, egomania, charisma, and con-artist charm.
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One of the tricks companies use to control their workers like a cult is to expect long hours. This does a number of things. First, it converts the worker’s focus from their family and social life and outside hobbies and interests to mostly their work life. The worker then turns their workplace into their family and friends and rely on coworkers for emotional support and friendship. This way, they are reluctant to quit, because they will be losing all their social support at work. Their work becomes their entire life. Second, from experience, when you put in long hours, your frontal lobe performance deteriorates. This means that you can’t think conscientiously and methodically. You can’t weigh multiple options in your head. Because of sleep deprivation and long hours, your brain tries to spread its energy over a longer period of time. In order to do this, it stops feeding the frontal lobes. You tend to prefer to do mundane, routine tasks that require as little conscious thought as possible. In other words, you’re sleepwalking through your job. When you do this, your morals lapse. You see problems, and you don’t address them. You ignore them or delay responding to them. You get into a routine that you find comfortable and easy to perform over a long day. In this state of mental fog and low-power output, you can’t see the big picture. You become narrow-minded and myopic. You can’t see consequences and social impacts. You can only see one minute ahead at a time. If you encounter something ethically questionable, you’re too mentally tired and confused to see it clearly and respond appropriately. Perhaps years later after you’ve quit or been fired, you realize all the terrible decisions you made and just how impulsive you were.
Working long hours is also unsustainable. You don’t have time to exercise, to unwind, to distract your mind from stress at work, and when you work long hours, your body prefers quick energy in the form of sugar, caffeine, simple carbs, and junk food to slow energy in the form of protein, vegetables, fruits, and complex carbs. You essentially become a burned out mess. But your company doesn’t care. Its eats workers up, chews them up, and spits them out. The company doesn’t want long term employees. First, older people usually get promoted and cost the company more money. Second, long term employees know too much about the company. When the company is rotten and trying to hide things, it’s best to continually rotate workers in and out so nobody accumulates sufficient knowledge about how the company operates. Fresh workers are also easier to brainwash.
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I liked the ending of the book where the author noted that the idea that billionaires and private companies investing in and buying poor companies to help throw fresh, First World money into poor nations can help fix poverty is a similar fairy tale that the state can fix poverty by raising taxes and redistributing wealth to the poor. Both are con jobs, and both attempts have been made by countless con-artists. Billionaires and large private equity companies and corporations have every incentive to exploit the companies they purchase in poor or developing countries and exploiting their customers as well. That is how billionaires and large companies became so wealthy and powerful. They didn’t get there by making companies more efficient, innovative, and streamlined. Rather, they made huge profits by substituting out labor and quality ingredients with cheaper labor, less labor, and poorer quality ingredients. They made huge profits by moving factories to places where labor was significantly cheaper, and in some cases, used prison laborers. Trusting them to help the poor is just as misguided as trusting government.
The author proposes that the state and the notion of democracy should help the poor, but this is equally misguided. Government, time and time again, has proven that its mission is to keep itself relevant by not solving problems but by causing more problems. The war against drugs did nothing to reduce drug use and the social problems associated with drug us but rather made it all worse by exposing otherwise nonviolent drug users and sellers to the violent world of prisons, traumatizing them and transforming them into career users or sellers.
What is not proposed is supporting microlending and small business enterprises in truly free markets liberated from laws, rules, and licensing fees designed to make it near impossible for the little person to enter the market and compete with institutions that have colluded with government for hundreds of years. For example, in the US, it takes more training to become a hair stylist or barber than it takes to become a paramedic. The vast majority of laws sell the notion that they exist to keep us safe but in fact exist to keep the profits of the existing business institutions safe.
No billionaire or private equity fund owner is going to ever tell you that. Countries keep their people poor, because it provides them a huge source of cheap labor and soldiers. The story of Arif Naqvi, the con-artist who conned centimillionaires and billionaires is actually a comedy, because he did to them what they have been doing to us forever. In fact, because he joined their club, he got to acquire their immunity from the law. To this day, he has not stood trial for his crimes. Once you join the billionaires club, even if you screw over fellow billionaires, the powers they have accrued to keep them above the law extends to you. He is living proof that the rich and powerful have taken ownership of the law as well as the government, its politicians, the banks, the money supply, and our economy.
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One of the pet peeves I have at work and elsewhere is when people do things in reaction to some new problem or have some new idea, and it makes no sense. It doesn’t conform to any fundamental principle or long term goal. It just seems impulsive and arbitrary, like, hey guys, let’s change the color of our logo, let’s take away one of the customer options, let’s raise our fees by $2.37. One time we were pricing a new service and I was actually in charge of pricing, but my boss decided upon the price, and there was no analysis of any kind whatsoever. He just thought up a number in his head and seemed right and went with it. At the very least you have a benchmark, the existing revenue per cost rate, and you go from there. Would the customers value the new service at a higher or lower rate?
Another pet peeve is mission creep which is a subset of not following any guiding principles. You introduce a costly temporary fix to a problem, but then you go, well, it worked, might as well keep doing it. No! You did it as a temporary fix, you need to shelve it and fix the root cause of the problem. You need to prevent the problem in the first place and not rely on the costly temporary fix just because it worked. You have to wonder about people who don’t follow any guiding, fundamental principle in life.
These people are true idiots, but even worse, they’re also often morally challenged, because the whole point of morality is that you can’t just make impulsive, arbitrary decisions without consulting the moral code which ought to underlie every decision you make in life. For example, you see an unattended wallet, and you pick it up. An impulsive, arbitrary decision would be to take the cash and throw the wallet back on the ground, hopefully for the owner to find it again. At least they’ll have their ID and credit cards. But you don’t do this, obviously, because you have a moral code that tells you this is not appropriate no matter your short term financial gain from taking the cash.
Naqvi’s lack of morality was also mirrored by his lack of business principles. Yes, he sought undervalued companies in conflict zones that Western investors ignored or avoided, and this was a great business principle, but he ignored other principles like due diligence in researching the company to determine its existing debts and costs and potential flaws. He didn’t do that for a number of deals that blew up in his face. He became overconfident from his initial successes. As any psychologist would tell you, he overattributed his initial successes to his own talents and abilities and under-attributed it to pure random luck. He was like a gambler who hit it big early. One of the first few times I gambled, I lost $100 on my birthday and I’ve never gambled that much money on a single day since. But what if I had won $1000. I would have become a gambling addict.
When you abide by a moral code, you also tend to abide by other long term principles as well. For instance, one long term principle is taking care of your health. So instead of eating junk and not exercising, you often compel yourself to eat better and exercise more even when you don’t feel like it. Obviously, Naqvi had a problem with long term principles as his health was terrible from overdrinking, partying, working long hours, and never exercising. Of course, you don’t want to discriminate against people who are overweight. Certainly, many of them do work out and eat right, they’re just heavy. But you do have to question people who can’t stick to their long term health principles.
Another long term principle is relationships. You don’t screw people over for short term gains. You don’t try to embarrass and humiliate people to win arguments or just to be proven right. In every conversation and interaction you have with someone, you need to remind yourself that you have long term relationship principles that prevent you from hurting other people for temporary gain or some short term principle of being proven right or proving others wrong. There are times you may not want to help out a friend, drive them to the airport at 6 AM in the morning, or pick up their kids from soccer when they’re in bed sick, but you just do it, because you have long term relationship principles that require you to do it.
The trick in life and in business for that matter, is to find people who abide by long term principles and stick to them rather than people who are just impulsive and arbitrary and often hurtful to others just to be proven right. Of course, Naqvi is just a normal, dysfunctional, dark triad dude, but because of the profession he chose and his early successes, he became a world renown billionaire con-artist. The real story here is that there are Naqvi’s all around us, most are dirt poor, because they don’t get hundreds of millions of other people’s money to invest or in his case misallocate into his personal offshore bank accounts.
And just to complicate things a bit, there are people who have excellent long term principles they abide by, but they sacrifice all other long term principles for them. They too should be avoided. These people are supremely ambitious and show extraordinary willpower and discipline. They’re impressive until you realize they’re willing to sacrifice all other long term principles for one single one. They’re willing to sacrifice their health for making money, or they’re willing to ignore all their family and friends to become a super athlete, etc. Each long term principle must be balanced with other long term principles. In a sense, Naqvi did have one long term guiding principle and that was to become famous and rich, and he was willing to do anything to achieve it including putting in the long hours but also backstabbing investors and misallocating their funds. The author and Westerners would have you believe Naqvi is some deranged foreign interloper in the elite circles of the ruling class, that his style and arrogance was endemic to his culture and background, that he lacked the pedigree and DNA to play it fair and straight in the world of high finance, but that’s all toxic gaslighting garbage. What they don’t want to admit is the fact that Naqvi was their mirror image. He just didn’t play the long con like Bill Gates, Trump, the Clintons, the federal government, the Federal Reserve of private banks, and entire global ruling elite. You don’t suck so much blood the host dies, you do just enough to make it a disoriented, anemic, confused, idiotic flag-waving, government-loving, law-abiding, boot-licking blob of misdirected fear and loathing.
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