- “Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur”…
- Who wants to be a philosopher, anyway?…
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Dear reader,
Yesterday I argued that markets wish to be deceived.
I cited the market’s joyful reactions to every glint of hope the president radiates… though to date each glow has proven false.
Yet I maintain the desire to be deceived is central to human existence. It is a vastly underappreciated aspect of human action.
“Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur,” runs the Latin phrase — “the world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.”
I believe there is vast justice here. The world yearns to be deceived, eternally and infinitely deceived.
Why else — sisters and brothers — do people attend magic shows… consult “psychics”… or read New York Times editorial columns?
Why, indeed, do people vote for presidents of the United States?
The answer, so far as I can discern, is because they wish to be deceived.
Hence the world’s desperate, eternal plea for soothing deception. Hence the vast stock of frauds and pitchmen rising forth to meet the infinite demand.
And let me say it right away. If the world wants to be deceived, then by all means let the world be deceived.
Nasty, Brutish and Short
Life is “nasty, brutish and short,” in the dour 17th-century telling of Mr. Thomas Hobbes.
A man must grab hold of something — anything — to ease his way across the dark and perilous valley.
Like gazing into the midday sun, the normal human being cannot long gaze directly into reality.
He can only approach it at an angle. Consider his woeful lot…
A man is thrown unaskingly and unwillingly into this wicked and wrathful world.
He is then dangled cruelly between two infinities — one behind him, one ahead of him — knowing his earthly candle will flicker, fade and fizzle.
While he lives, he careens through space aboard an inconsequential chunk, wheeling around an inconsequential star, itself squatting in an inconsequential corner of an inconsequential galaxy.
That inconsequential galaxy is cast among an infinity of inconsequential galaxies.
Sit down momentarily in contemplation of these bleak realities… if you can summon the steel.
If you do not descend immediately into the deepest depression, you — friend — are one stoutheart. Believe it!
Please Delude Me!
Alas, a full and honest trial of the facts would send us all forever under the bed, hopeless and resigned.
No one would budge a jot in the course of his day.
So why must we peer defiantly into the fathomless pit? Why must we take the cold bath stoically and bravely?
Who can denounce the former beauty, whose face is presently wrecked with age, who wishes the mirror would show her a beautiful fiction?
Who can denounce the desperate, last-chance bankrupt seduced by the one-in-one billion odds “get rich quick” scheme?
Or who can denounce the still-wanting-to-believe voter who clings to the delusion that we need merely elect better politicians?
Who indeed?
Happy Delusions
Here are certain deceptions men cherish — cherished because they help him through this sorrowful vale…
That wise and learned experts from ivied institutions can repeal the granite laws of economics…
That deficits do not matter, that the ledgers need never square, that the scales need never balance…
That prosperity springs from the printing press, that money and wealth are identical twins…
That is, that the addition of water to wine yields more wine instead of less wine. That is, that diluting the purchasing power of money yields not less money but more money…
That the free lunch has existence…
That negative interest rates are positives…
That plunging the nation into debt will raise it up into wealth…
That the Bureau of Labor Statistics is an actual Bureau of Labor Statistics…
That honest government exists…
That democracy — the theory that the individual may be a dunce but that 330 million dunces are Einsteins — is a superior form of government…
And perhaps the most enchanting and permanent of all the world’s delusions:
That this time is different.
How many stock market evangelicals, presently aflame with zeal for artificial intelligence stocks, are infested by this delusion?
- “Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.”
It Only Gets Worse
Now let us heap Pelion upon Ossa, as the Greeks would style it.
That is, let us proceed from bad to worse.
Come a man’s demise, the odds are excellent that he will boil in pitch for all eternity.
This I have on infallible biblical authority — 1 Corinthians 6:9–10:
- Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters… nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
Ninety-nine percent of humanity thus stands condemned — and 100% of the District of Columbia.
I am of course among them. I am guilty on five counts. Yet here I deceive perhaps even myself.
I concede, grudgingly, that I may be guilty on six counts — perhaps all seven if truly honest.
My sole consolation is that I stand among multitudes who sort into the same sinful category.
Yet imagine confronting eternal perdition in the absence of delusion.
Confronting Reality Is Far Worse Than a Stock Market Crash
In conclusion: The world would simply be unendurable without comforting fictions to stroke our hair, caress our gills and hold our hand.
Might some of the world’s delusions invite calamity? Almost certainly.
I have the stock market close in mind. Millions of deluded investors will likely be cleaned out.
But whatever miseries its collapse may inflict… they cannot approach the miseries of life without comforting delusion.
“All are lunatics,” said the great scalawag Ambrose Bierce… “but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.”
And who wants to analyze his delusion? Who wants to be a philosopher?
Yours in hopeless and eternal delusion,
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News
