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.

“Today, I am not the person I was ten years ago.” Karl Svensson, a convicted murderer, told his Swedish classmates at medical school when his past caught up with him. The prestigious Karolinska Institute eventually side-stepped the unprecedented question of whether to expel Mr. Svensson simply because of his past criminal acts — once a neo-Nazi, apparently, Svensson’s crime had been deemed a hate crime. Instead, the institute expelled him on a technicality — he had falsified his high school records by substituting his assumed name for his birth name of Hellekant.  The story raises two very interesting questions: 1. Can we change? and 2. Should a person who has committed this kind of crime be allowed to practice medicine (or another similar profession)?

The New York Times editorial board has endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate. Its opinions supporting the endorsement of Clinton for the Democratic and McCain for the Republican vote make fascinatingly candid reading. The Times’ opinion of Clinton again raises the question of whether someone, fundamentally, can change. It left me wondering whether Clinton has changed, and, if so, whether she has changed enough to overcome the disadvantages in her character that have revealed themselves so often in the past — her divisiveness and “I know best” intellectual hardness. The Times uses the example of her “famously disastrous foray” into trying to solve the healthcare issue to support its premise that she has changed and now displays a new understanding of what’s to be done.

I’ve written before about our capacity to change as it relates to the concept of free will and personal development. Being conscious allows us to choose between options, and to select options that may be difficult, unattractive or counter to our immediate instinct. Through this reasoning we can see that it is possible to develop new levels of awareness and new patterns of behavior, to make choices different from those we would have made in the past.

But if we examine the concept of behavioral change we find a composite concept. And we tend to conflate and confuse its constituent parts: When I ask, “can we change?” I could really be asking two separate questions. The first: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different immediate responses?” And the second: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different eventual responses?”

Ten years go, in an angry confrontation, Svensson reacted violently. His immediate response was to be urged to violence. And he acted on this immediate response by lashing out.

To say that Svensson’s immediate response may have changed, we would have to believe that he would not feel urged to violence if faced with a similar confrontation ten years on. I would say that we have very little reason to believe that Svensson or anyone could change in this way simply through reflection and remorse. Our immediate, instinctual response is pre-conscious, and therefore isn’t subject to conscious influence.

On the other hand, to say that Svenssion’s eventual response may have changed seems a much more reasonable and rational conclusion. Svensson, still feeling a violent urge, could now have a modified conscious response and resist the desire to lash out.

Svensson’s classmates were split over whether he should be allowed to stay on. Those that supported him said that he’d paid his debt and, by inference, should be trusted to have changed his conscious response to confrontation. But we can infer that those of his classmates who still distrusted him understood and feared that his immediate response to confrontation (or other stress) could and indeed would still be violent.

Should a violent killer, rehabilitated in his conscious actions, be trusted in the medical profession? To answer that question we would need to understand the degree and range of provocation that Svensson may react violently to, and the strength of his newfound ability to keep his emotions in check. In the absence of reliable ways and means to measure these variables, it would seem reasonable for society not to want Svensson providing medical care. Svensson has rights of freedom, but it also seems reasonable for society to say that he has forgone some of those rights (such as an unfettered choice of career) by his past actions.

So to Hillary Clinton: Although the circumstances are very different, we are confronted with the same logical argument. As I understand it, the instinctual fervor of Clinton’s liberal ideological passion inspired and limited her original approach to tackling the healthcare issue. Her newfound understanding means that she’s better able to consciously override her immediate divisive response. But the concern remains that she would encounter similar instinctual responses in a broad range of political situations.

As we’ve seen with Bush and as tends to happen to those in high office, the stresses and demands of the job certainly don’t make it easier to overcome one’s immediate responses. As the Times’ opinion points out, Clinton has been succumbing to these impulses during her campaigning, underscoring the perspective that we have reason to doubt that she has truly learned to keep her immediate responses in check.

Obama, on the other hand, reveals a more promising character for non-devisive leadership. This then narrows the gap between the candidates that the Times claims to exist, and perhaps even makes Obama the more logical choice. It becomes a matter of character versus experience. I for one would choose character every time.

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