Rational Philosophy

On industrious criminals and the lure of lucra.

As law enforcement officials round up members of the Gambino, Bonanno and Genovese crime families, I find myself pausing at a phrase in the NY Times piece on the arrests — “the scope of the schemes carried out by [La Cosa Nostra's] members are limited only by their imagination and industriousness.” Imagination and industriousness. These are not dull-witted layabouts. Surely with such imagination and industry members of these families could make money legally, but they have found a niche and a sure-fire way of maximizing profit — exploit what’s illegal. For the mob, illegality becomes leverage. Looked at purely as a business philosophy it makes a lot of sense. If cable companies can make money selling cable access legally, for instance, the mob knows it can make more money pirating cable channels and selling them illegally. It’s all about knowing your business and seeing the angle.

I’m not trying to justify or glamorize illegal activity, just unearth a philosophical truth.

Jerome Kerviel saw the angles, too. Driven by a desire to demonstrate his trading genius, he ended up demonstrating instead that he was a lousy trader but an excellent fraud. He figured out how to work around the Societe Generale’s controls and systems to make trades that he shouldn’t have been making, then cover these up with more trades that he shouldn’t have been making, until the bank was in the hole for $7.2 billion.

Research suggests that Monsieur Kerviel’s urge to trade, even in the face of losses, may not be so unusual. Making money can stimulate the same kind of gratifying response as having sex, apparently. “If you make money and make money again,” says Jason Zweig who wrote a book on the subject, “it is very similar to a chemical addiction and it becomes very hard to let go.” Brain imaging of drug addicts and traders supports the theory.

Two philosophical questions present themselves: What is the connection between material success and a rational theory of life? And why would imaginative and industrious people stick with a business model founded on illegality?

Unlike taking drugs or having sex, making money, while it can have physiological effects, stimulates our sense of gratification entirely mentally. The only impulse is one’s consciousness of making money.

So, the concept of making money must be closely connected to something directly felt. Money represents bartering power and prestige. If you have a billion under your belt, having another billion isn’t going to buy you anything that the first billion can’t buy you. So the directly felt thing must be not increased bartering power but prestige. (This is just what Kerviel described when he explained his feelings about trading, even though he kept his trades secret — he wanted to be seen as brilliant.)

People experience these kinds of feelings whether they’re risking any real bartering power or not. If we play gin rummy for points with no money on the game, for instance, the same powerful feelings of gratification can arise when we win. This confirms that a sense of increased prestige, a sense of being a winner, is sufficient to cause the rush. If I end a game of gin rummy with 100 points, what does that matter to me if my opponent has 101?

The answer to the second question follows from the answer to the first. I imagine that members of La Cosa Nostra would tip my second question on its head and ask “why make money legally if you can make it illegally?” If we’re talking about the rush of success, making money illegally must up the ante by adding considerable risk to the transaction. The possibility of getting caught must speed the flow of juices in the same way that for Kerviel the fluctuations of the market made his trades unpredictable. The greater the risk, the greater the feeling of gratification when one succeeds.

Just as the market eventually caught up to Kerviel, so too the law has caught up to the Gambinos, Bonannos and Genoveses. While crime and fraud can inspire imagination and industry, they’re not the most rational of pursuits.

I just put out a music video for My Darkest Hour, a song from my album ‘nylon.’ The song and the video aim to express in artistic terms what it’s like to grapple with compulsion — in my case a compulsion to drink. Addictions, as they’re sometimes called, can be very easy to acquire and very hard to drop. Compulsion plays a very broad role in life, appearing in many guises and to many degrees. But what is it, why do we have it?

A NY times story today reports on Korean efforts to address an issue that has hit hard in a country where almost all homes have high speed Internet connections — web addiction. Alarmingly, some young people have apparently died from exhaustion after days without a break playing on-line games, and millions more young people may be at some risk of addiction.

Also in the Times, Amy Harmon writes about the obsessiveness of having access to one’s DNA data. She found herself spending hours every day sifting through the many genetic markers (SNPs) that would tell her about her predispoition, or lack of it, for everything from a dislike to brussel sprouts to alzheimer’s.

Such introspective compulsions affect the people who have them and the people in their lives, but I was also reminded that the effects of one person’s compulsion can go much further. Take Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, for instance, who has announced deep consitutional changes and sweeping reforms that will cement his vision for a revamped Venezuela and consolidate his position long term as the overseer of that vision. His biographer, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, had this to say about the current situation: “This is not a dictatorship but something more complex: the tyranny of popularity.”

We could say that genetics and circumstance result in compulsion and leave it at that. But there must be some reason for a tendency to compulsion and perhaps some insight that can help us thwart it through understanding it better.

I remember news stories about the polar bear in Central Park zoo obsessively swimming endless little laps because he was so bored. We human beings have become hypersensitized to boredom. Living in New York City you see the highly intensified impact of this. People everywhere walking and talking on their cell phones. People wearing earphones even in the elevator on the way up into the office. People exercising on treadmills while watching TV or reading. People watching portable movie players on the subway. We cram our lives full of activity to squeeze out the threat of inactivity. But, unlike our ancestors, much modern activity is artificial and unnecessary.

There’s an intersect then between the level of compulsive activity and the degree of ease with which we can ensure our basic survival needs. (The Korean boot camps for Internet addicts get the addicts away from their computers and involved in physical activities outdoors — whether this works or not, it seems conceptually well-directed.) But what about the origin of compulsion? What is compulsion and why do we succumb to it at all?

Compulsion comes about when we return frequently and strongly to a perceived or actual need or desire. It’s a pattern of response that comes about either genetically or circumstancially. It’s also helpful to regard compulsion as existing on a spectrum, and as a response that can be harmful or helpful.

My theory is this: Compulsion is a necessary trait. Without some degree of compulsion organisms wouldn’t have a mechanism to draw them to do the things that are good for them or good for the species. Bees wouldn’t build hives, cats wouldn’t lick themselves to clean their fur, people wouldn’t have sex. But compulsion becomes problematic either when circumstance puts us into a situation we’re not genetically prepared for (drinking alcohol, shooting heroin) or when we have an imbalance between free time and purposeful time, leading to boredom.

Chavez has found himself in a circumstance with which he is unprepared to cope effectively. The compulsion to keep feeding himself a steady diet of power and control, to guarantee that he will be able to keep experiencing that power, has overcome his ability to balance his own desires with the responsibility he has assumed for his people. Unfortunately, when it gets to this point, the prognosis is not good.

On a happier note, the Central Park zookeepers devised mechanisms to relieve Gus, the depressed polar bear, from boredom. He is now a much happier bear by all accounts. What would it take to wean Chavez from his addiction to power? One thinks that it may take him going cold turkey.