Incentives And Impatience

     All right, enough with the frivolity, seasonal or otherwise. It’s time for another serious essay, and your Curmudgeon is here to fill the need.

     Our social, cultural, and political orders are displeasing to anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders. They’ve been displeasing for some time: at least thirty years. Over that time, nominal conservatives and others of a generally pro-freedom, pro-civility bent have thrice achieved dominance at the federal and state levels. Yet those periods passed without significant changes for the better. Indeed, despite its hegemony, in some cases matters got worse by the standards of the Right. This has engendered considerable frustration, such that even sober-minded people are seriously discussing radical moves such as secession and rebellion.

     You’re not alone in feeling such frustration, Gentle Reader; your Curmudgeon is there alongside you. But a pair of complementary dynamics has brought us to where we are. One of them has produced our sociocultural and political distresses. The other has robbed us of the requirement for correcting them.

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     First, a thematic quote from a rather impressive movie:

     "I nursed him through two divorces, a cocaine rehab, and a pregnant receptionist. God's creature, right? God's special creature. I've warned him, Kevin. I've warned him every step of the way. Watching him bounce around like a fucking game. Like a wind-up toy. Like pounds of self-serving greed on wheels. The next thousand years is right around the corner. Eddie Barzoon...take a good look because he's the poster child for the next millennium.

     "These people, it's no mystery where they come from. You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire. You build egos the size of cathedrals. Fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse. Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green gold-plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own god. Where can you go from there? As we're scrambling from one deal to the next, who's got his eye on the planet? As the air thickens, the water sours, even bees honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity... and it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There's no chance to think, to prepare; it's buy futures, sell futures.. when there is no future.

     "We got a runaway train, boy. We got a billion Eddie Barzoons all jogging into the future. Every one of them is getting ready to fistfuck God's ex-planet, lick their fingers clean, as they reach out toward their pristine, cybernetic keyboards to tote up their fucking billable hours. And then it hits home. You got to pay your own way, Eddie. It's a little late in the game to buy out now. Your belly's too full, your dick is sore your eyes are bloodshot and you're screaming for someone to help. But guess what, there's no one there! You're all alone, Eddie, 'CAUSE YOU'RE GOD'S SPECIAL LITTLE CREATURE!" -- "John Milton," played by Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, describing the milieu that gave rise to his doomed partner Eddie Barzoon.

     Much has been said about the demise of willingness to defer gratification in service to some higher priority. The late M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist of great insight, noted that the willingness to defer gratification is one of the four indispensable tools of personal growth:

     What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively that I call discipline? There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. As will be evident, these are not complex tools....Yet presidents and kings will often forget to use them, to their own downfall. The problem lies not in the complexity of these tools but in the will to use them. For they are tools with which pain is confronted rather than avoided, and if one seeks to avoid legitimate suffering, then one will avoid the use of these tools.

     There is more wisdom in those hundred words than you could find in any other book, the Bible excepted.

     The most conspicuous of all the traits that have risen among us these past eighty years is the “I want it now, and by God I’ll have it now” insistence on the immediate gratification of every desire. Virtually no one is willing to wait for anything any longer. In an irony too profound for your Curmudgeon to capture in a net of words, the most intense expression of that trait is the insistence that suffering is always bad: Not only should one never accept suffering; every sort of suffering in progress must be alleviated at once.

     The will to persevere in suffering, confident that it’s the only road to eventual healing, is especially conspicuous by its absence from our political order.

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     Much has been said and written about the “short time horizons” of professional politicians. Their vision stops short at the next election. What will keep them in office is good; what might impede their tenure there is bad.

     Governmental careerism is indistinguishable in its incentive structure from private-sector careerism. Yet in our republican order, in which officials are chosen by democratic electoral processes, the careerist dynamic depends on another, more widely distributed characteristic: the unwillingness to tolerate suffering even when it’s provably inevitable.

     Consider the deterioration of the U.S. dollar as a case study. The dollar has lost more than 90% of its purchasing power over the century behind us. Anyone capable of making change without a calculator will immediately see that this is a bad thing – that persons whose incomes and savings are denominated in dollars suffer as a result, and that persons whose incomes are fixed will suffer worst. But the dollar’s fall is a consequence of federal borrowing from the Federal Reserve Bank, a process that automatically inflates the number of dollars in circulation, thereby reducing the value of each one. Congress borrows to make up the difference between its revenues and its expenditures: the annual deficit.

     Clearly there are two and only two ways to halt this process:

1. Increase federal revenues;
2. Decrease federal spending.

     Both courses are fatally unpopular with the electorate. Either one would cause suffering among some sectors of society that the public is unwilling to tolerate. Therefore, Congressmen determined to remain in their seats will never vote for either one. Indeed, given the pressures focused upon Capitol Hill by special interest groups that command the loyalties of significant blocs of votes, the more plausible road to re-election is to increase federal spending each year, regardless of federal revenues. Therefore, the slow but steady decline of the dollar will continue indefinitely.

     No one wants to vote for suffering, especially if it would be his own.

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     If We the People have earned a certain suffering-debt for our previous sociopolitical sins – never mind that we were set upon our sinful courses by an earlier We the People, who passed their accumulated suffering-debt down to us – then our choice is simple:

1. We could accept the penalty, endure it, and come out healed;
2. We could reject the penalty, which would compound the ultimate suffering.

     Since World War II at least, the public has preferred politicians who will “kick the can down the road.” In consequence, government has gone ever further astray and our accumulated debt of ultimate suffering has compounded year by year. At some point, though the moment is difficult to predict, the debt will be paid. If it’s grown large enough, it will destroy our society completely.

     But a payable sociopolitical suffering-debt is like a prison term: it’s finite. It will end. It can and should be endured, especially if the alternative is to raise it to an unpayable level. Our unwillingness to accept and endure the penalties that have already accrued is propelling such debts toward the threshold of sociopolitical bankruptcy.

     What debts does your Curmudgeon have in mind? Five in particular:

1. Government: We have allowed the federal Leviathan to expand beyond all Constitutional borders, and to extend its tentacles into every area of human life. Unlimited power is incompatible with any degree of human freedom.
2. Politics: Owing to the item above, the stakes in political contests have become so large that the contestants have cast aside all the rules: legal, ethical, or prudential. Every election is a battle to the death in which there’s no such thing as an unthinkable tactic.
3. Social Intercourse: The importation of persons hostile to American norms and the rise of victimism-as-social-currency have made it almost too hazardous for persons of different races, sexes, religions, or ethnicities to share a community. Social trust is gone; each of us is at the mercy of “the other.”
4. Family Bonds: The collapse of the earlier bonds that held families and societies together, particularly the obligations that traditionally united each generation to its parents and its progeny, have created a pervasive sense of vulnerability that flacksters for innumerable causes and movements can exploit.
5. Personal Indulgences: The insistence on the immediate gratification of our desires, coupled to the lack of will to accept the costs and endure the suffering, has foreshortened individuals’ vision of the future, what it might hold for them, and how best to prepare for it.

     The incentives We the People followed brought us to where we stand. Most potent among those incentives was our inclination to defer the suffering we and our forebears had already earned. For the generation that emerged from World War II, the term of suffering might have been fairly short: a few years of privation and social adjustment as we relearned Constitutional constraints and the many wisdoms set aside during the Progressive Era. Today the term would encompass at least an entire generation, perhaps two. That is:

1. Millions of “civil servants” would have to find productive work.
2. There would be an end, probably through term limits, to life tenure in elective office.
3. We would need to accept two unfairly condemned social necessities: segregation and discrimination.
4. Families would be forced to care for their own helpless and vulnerable members.
5. Individuals would be denied the ability to “finance” their desires.

     Each of these things would involve suffering:

1. Some former “civil servants” would prove unable to work at real jobs, and would become mendicants.
2. Some politicians would starve right alongside them. Moreover, lower polities would be compelled to accept burdens previously carried by the federal government.
3. The natural segregation of our people according to race, creed, and ethnicity would resume. Members of each camp would discriminate in favor of “our own” at least until “the other” had earned trust by adopting and displaying compatible language, conduct, and values.
4. Needy families would be thrown upon the charity of their neighbors and communities. Some would not receive the help they need to stave off great personal suffering and loss.
5. Many things cavalierly treated as “needs” would become unaffordable.

     The suffering – happily, a relative matter in a nation as rich as the United States – would persist for anywhere from twenty to fifty years. But at the end we would be healed – whole – and immune, for a little while at least, to the diseases we had left behind us.

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     “If something cannot continue indefinitely, it will stop.” – Herbert Stein

     Ultimately, we know what we ought to do. Yea verily, even “progressives” are aware that we cannot “kick the can down the road” indefinitely. The problem is a lack of will, or framed through its inverse, our impatience with the term of our suffering.

     The trends of the postwar decades have sapped our will to endure by increasing our will to believe that all suffering is avoidable. Concurrently, the debts have accumulated. Never before have we owed so much...and never before have we been so ready to avert necessary suffering by passing our debts along to our children.

     Have a nice day.

Who Has A Hold On You?

     I wrote recently that The Cult of the Victim Regnant appears to have passed its zenith and is now in decline. Though the evidence for such a decline is considerable, it might take a while to have pronounced sociopolitical effects. I wouldn’t advise anyone to hold his breath while waiting. However, as is the case with most bottom-up developments, this one is already having effects on individuals’ decision making.

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     Let’s talk about debt. Time was, Americans considered it near to criminal to indebt oneself for any reason other than one’s survival or the survival of a loved one. Today, debt is the near-universal condition of American families from coast to coast. Clearly, the change in attitudes has been enormous. That makes it supremely important to question the practice; that which is ubiquitous and habitual almost never receives appropriate scrutiny.

     If you’re “in debt,” you have an obligation to someone else for which no reciprocal obligation exists. You must pay him; he doesn’t owe you a thing. Depending on the terms of the obligation, he might have the first call on every dollar you earn. Indeed, he might have the option, backed by the power of the State, of turning you out of your home. That condition would constrain your options severely.

     My esteemed colleague Dystopic, who was once a skeptic of my notions about debt, had an unfortunate episode in which he found that a mortgage debt was a shackle around his leg that others could use to limit his latitude of decision. Indeed, anyone who lives in or holds title to mortgaged real property is shackled that way. Yet “home ownership” under exactly those conditions remains the Holy Grail to most of the American work force. How does that comport with the increasingly urgent need for personal mobility in the face of a labor economy changing faster with each passing year?

     The same is true for any kind of debt. The strength of the fetter does decline as the size of the debt declines, but a number of such shackles can fasten one into place as effectively as a six-figure mortgage. Yet very few parents ever describe their experiences with debt to their teenage children.

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     Non-financial, non-material obligations are harder to analyze, but their grip can be as restrictive as a jumbo mortgage. People become obligated in many ways. The great majority of such obligations appear nowhere but in the mind. But the power of contingent guilt, amplified by personal pride and the value of one’s reputation, is easy to underestimate.

     Don’t make promises you can’t keep is an old wisdom. I would never deny its importance. However, over the years I’ve come to believe that it’s badly punctuated. The period belongs after the word promises.

     Quite a lot of people are rather free with their verbal commitments. Much of the time, they take those commitments less seriously than those who hear them. If Smith commits himself to some undertaking, freely and out of his own mouth, in the presence of Jones, the most important thing about the promise isn’t how Smith feels about it; it’s how Jones does. That’s even more the case if Jones dislikes Smith or has been looking for a hold on him.

     More, few people grasp how easy it is to commit oneself without intending to do so. The great flexibility built into human languages makes many utterances susceptible to interpretations the speaker did not intend. In any circumstances other than those in which metaphor and hyperbole are absolutely understood to be the rule by all parties, you can easily be held to have made some “promise” you never intended to make. Competitive contexts, such as those that pertain in the typical workplace, make this especially important.

     Granted, there are promises that must be made, though they’re fewer and further between than many would admit. That having been said, your de facto latitude of action varies inversely with the number of promises others believe you to have made – and that will vary directly with how often you open your mouth, before how many listeners, and how casual you are about what issues forth. The moral “should” be “obvious.”

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     Though I hold that it’s a peccadillo rather than a mortal sin, I’m no fan of gratuitous, emotion-free (other than lust) sex. (Yes, I know my Church teaches that it is a mortal sin, but the Church has been wrong before, and anyway, it’s a subject for another time.) Sexual contact is virtually always fraught with implications that go far beyond supposedly simple bodily friction. The attempt to behave as if that weren’t the case has damaged a large number of lives. (The desire to forget such mistakes of judgment has damaged an approximately equal number of livers.)

     The implications of sexual congress – no jokes about Congressional pages, please – can go from “calling the next day” all the way to lifetime support of another person and her progeny. If she doesn’t feel the same as you about having opened herself to you, the two of you are in for a lot of trouble. The sex partner who took the act less seriously is in the greater danger. The danger emanates mainly from the other partner, but also from one’s family, friends, and coworkers.

     The hold such persons can have on you arises from their expectations and standards, and from the value you place on their opinion of you. To the extent that they feel you’ve obligated yourself, and to the extent of your reluctance to “disappoint them,” you can be manipulated – sometimes all the way to the altar, if not worse. Play Misty For Me was a dramatization that’s been acted out innumerable times by real people.

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     “Who has a hold on me?” is a self-assay I’d like to recommend widely. It should be repeated fairly often. More, when facing a decision that will or might create a fresh obligation, asking yourself not just “can I afford it?” but also “can I stand for this new person to have a hold on me?” is an important preliminary step. Not all obligees are kindly or generous, many have the power to pose before a court (including the Court of Public Opinion) as victims, and as Benjamin Franklin has told us, “Creditors have better memories than debtors.” Verbum sat sapienti.

Sturdy Wisdoms: The Worst Habit

     [Just yesterday, after a jaunt on which I spent far too much money on cheese – it’s one of my more difficult-to-resist vices – I received an email from Dystopic of The Declination. He drew my attention to his most recent essay, and mentioned that he’d come to an opinion about mortgage debt that differed greatly from his original one. He wrote that the change was because of the essay below, which first appeared at Eternity Road on December 13, 2006. In appreciation of his missive and the implied compliment...and yes, in recognition of the folly of spending so much on exotic cheeses that I was moved to inquire of the cheese shop proprietor whether financing might be available...I repost it here. -- FWP]

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     Your Curmudgeon is rather older than most wanderers of the World Wide Web, including most of those who hawk their opinions to a general audience. He received a different sort of upbringing from most, too. As his years lengthen, he finds himself ever more frequently revisiting the teachings of his youth and reviewing them for continuing soundness and applicability.

     Many of those lessons are still quite serviceable -- infinitely more so than the guff that's displaced them in more recent years. In part, that's due to an underlying shift in premises; half a century ago, no one would have dared to posit that right and wrong are relative, or that there can be no absolute moral standards, or that "good for you" and "bad for you" are anything but matters of opinion. Today one seldom hears anything else. If you don't believe it, either you don't have children or you haven't paid enough attention to what their "teachers" have been telling them.

     Accordingly, your Curmudgeon has decided to trot out, one by one, the sturdiest and most useful of the simple wisdoms with which his own parents and teachers equipped him. It is his opinion that their promulgation could do quite a lot to correct the faults of modern American society, and even more to quell the rising tide of dissatisfaction with life that afflicts so many of our teens and young adults.

     Of course, opinions will vary. Read on, and judge for yourself.

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     High among the homiletic primaries is this one: don't allow yourself to form bad habits. From the ordinary meanings of the words, this would seem self-evidently wise. For a "bad habit" is a behavior pattern that does harm to oneself. Of course, there's a heavy murk around that word "bad," whose variable interpretation has been the ingress for a lot of irrationality, but we'll get to that some other time.

     There are any number of habits on whose badness Americans would generally agree -- and not by thin majorities, either:

• Avoidance of exercise;
• Routinely bad nutrition and overeating;
• Impropriety of disclosure (i.e., the habit of revealing sensitive facts about oneself or one's family, friends, and acquaintances to persons who ought not to be told);
• Excessive television watching;
• Smoking;
• Drinking to excess;
• The use of recreational drugs.

     The above is, of course, a partial list. Other bad habits less dramatic in their effects would draw general concurrence as well. But there has been a sea change in American attitudes so complete, yet so quiet, that the very worst of all habits, by which millions of persons have utterly destroyed themselves and their kin beyond all hope of renewal, is almost never addressed. Indeed, when it's mentioned, most persons either refuse to acknowledge it or turn away to conceal their embarrassment.

     The habit of which your Curmudgeon speaks is living beyond your means.

     This venerable phrase has almost been effaced from our culture. Yet our nation's habit of living beyond its means is a regular news feature, reported through innumerable channels at least once per month. What else does the federal deficit signify? What else does the American trade deficit signify? What else does it mean when the dollar drops in value against the currencies of other lands? (It's been quite a long time since a physician last clapped your Curmudgeon on the shoulder and told him that he's "sound as a dollar," and not because your Curmudgeon is quick to take umbrage at insult.)

     What's bad in the large is just as bad in the small, yet nearly all of us do it, and very few of us will admit to it.

     Likely you, Gentle Reader, are nodding, perhaps a bit reluctantly, at the unwisdom of "living beyond your means." But you haven't seen your Curmudgeon's kicker yet:

If you've borrowed money, for any reason whatsoever, that you can't immediately pay back out of your own reserves, you're living beyond your means.

     Yes, that includes home mortgages and car loans.

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     A century ago, "mortgage" was a dirty word. (Car loans were, of course, unknown.) In fact, the word means "death pledge." It denoted a promise to return the mortgaged property to the legal ownership of the mortgagee -- the lender -- upon the mortgagor's -- the borrower's -- death. Indeed, it still means exactly that.

     Mortgages in the Nineteenth Century were almost exclusively the province and the bane of farmers. Private housing in non-farm areas was very seldom mortgaged. The income tax, the rise of the lending industry, and the demographic and financial conditions that prevailed after our two World Wars were the impetus by which Americans were goosed into thinking that living in homes they do not own, that could be ripped out from under them at any moment, was perfectly all right.

     It's hard to get reliable statistics on the matter, but according to a financial professional of your Curmudgeon's acquaintance, no fewer than 75% of all private homes are mortgaged. The deeds to those homes are encumbered in such a fashion that the persons who "own" them could be stripped of them at any time. It would not surprise your Curmudgeon too greatly if those provisions were invoked to put force behind a Kelo-esque eminent domain proceeding; financiers and politicians have always traveled in the same circles.

     But even apart from the hazards involved in living in mortgaged housing, it's almost always unwise to undertake a mortgage for reasons of simple financial prudence:

• It's a long-term obligation, typically 15 years or more;
• The lender is legally privileged over the borrower -- that is, nearly all the options rest with the lender, nearly none with the borrower;
• The borrower's income, upon which he depends for his debt service, is almost never guaranteed;
• A default on a mortgage is regarded as the worst of financial sins, and in the worst case can ruin an individual's financial standing for the rest of his life;
• In the event of a default, the borrower seldom recovers any significant percentage of his notional equity in the mortgaged property.

     If a mortgage, which is secured by real property and carries tax advantages that are attached to no other form of debt, is unwise, then what need one say about chattel loans on cars and other movable property? What need one say about credit-card debt, which carries extremely high interest rates and has ruined millions of families in the past quarter century alone?

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     Many a reader has been saying to himself "But how could I get the things I need without incurring these debts?" for several paragraphs now. Such questions arise from a perverse sense of "need" far more often than not. Americans are hooked on material self-indulgence; easy credit is the pusher that feeds our habit. Most of what we have, we do not need. We want it, and we certainly enjoy it, but those are far different things.

     "Need" is the gateway drug. "Need" is habitually "defined down" over time: from a house, to a car, to better clothes, to a better car, to a really nice house in a "suitable" neighborhood, to designer jeans and sneakers for the kids, to the latest iPods^®, to a PlayStation 3 ^® and all the "hot" games for it, to a Giant Economy Size bottle of Chivas Regal to dull the pain from having to pay for all that stuff.

     Man's needs are food, clothing, shelter, and heat. All else is discretionary. The truly prudent man does not incur debt to pay for discretionary items.

     Let it be admitted that most Americans, despite their debt anchors, manage to skirt the shoals of financial disaster. But an appalling number do not, and a significant fraction of those never quite recover from the wreck. Compound interest, which master financier Baron Philippe de Rothschild called "the eighth wonder of the world," is in fact the eighth horror of the world for those habituated to debt. Its ability to drain all the vitality from one's present and hope from one's future is unequalled by anything but cocaine and heroin.

     In what might be the supreme irony of ironies, innumerable Americans look for their salvation from their debts...to government. Not only is our government the most egregious abuser of credit in the history of the world, it has an unadmitted interest in encouraging debt to the widest possible extent. Widespread severe debt is the motivator for governmental abuse of the currency: inflation. Inflation in our fiat-currency system gifts Washington with billions of "free" dollars with which it can increase its power over the rest of us. But Americans with substantial savings will not tolerate inflation; Americans deeply mired in debt, seeing the chance to pay down their obligations with "cheap" money, will embrace it eagerly.

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     If you're a young person who has yet to acquire any debts, don't! Live beneath your means; acquire savings. Only borrow when utterly forced to do so, and only as a capital investment in yourself: that is, for tools or an education. Be ruthless in assuring that every dollar you make arrives in your pocket with no debt-service strings attached.

     A young man with a white-collar salary, who restricts his consumption for just ten years and puts his unspent balance into conservative investments (i.e., steady 3% to 5% returns), can usually produce the entire purchase price of a house at the end of that period. He'll have no trouble affording the cash purchase of a used car. Does it mean that he'll live in a less opulent style than that enjoyed by his coevals? Yes. But it also means that the fangs of the debt habit and the shackles of compound interest will have no chance to snag him.

     An older man who has lived free from debt can be certain of mobility and security. He will have savings. No occupational reversal will have the power to dispossess him. Neither will misfortunes of nature render him helpless. He will have leverage in all negotiations that a man chained to debt and beholden to creditors would not possess. He will be as free as his individual efforts can possibly make him. When he passes from this world, he will be able to leave his progeny a substantial patrimony. More, he will have already shown them an invaluable example.

     A sturdy wisdom indeed.