nourishing obscurity

A poorly written article on MSNBC looks at Madoff’s current situation in prison and the lawsuit against him, among others:

The lawsuit goes to length to compare Madoff’s prison existence with his deluxe former life, including photos of his yacht and homes and claims that he ran an office rife with drug use and sexual escapades.

According to the allegations — their source isn’t specified — Madoff deployed an employee to get drugs from 1975 to 2003, fueling an office so cocaine-laden insiders dubbed it “the North Pole.”

Office parties featured topless waitresses, employee affairs were common and Madoff kept a list of his favorite pretty masseuses in his personal phone book, the lawsuit said, claiming investors’ money helped pay for it all.

This is so depressingly familiar and ties in with other posts at this site.  Sitting in the lounge of my hotel in Frankfurt a few years back, having just finished a discussion with a group of businessmen and about to walk out to the Mercedes taxi, the “Madoffness” of their lifestyle was so apparent.

It’s a lifestyle of “no rules for us”, “smart money is never your own”, “live high and talk fast” and an overweening arrogance that you’ve got all the answers and you’ve got the money making schemes, not always Ponzi schemes.  It’s the fast lane, the Billionaire Boys Club, even though there were power-dressed women there as well.  The movie Changing Lanes was about this sort of mindset and lifestyle.

It’s a question of personality clashes in my case.

These people have a perfect right to make their killings, with judicious use of their resources, to live their fast and loose life and look down their noses at the sheep – some people say that I do that in my own way.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that there is a point where it goes beyond rational, where it really sucks people in and gives them a false god they serve obsessively, it’s all about image rather than substance, about clever accounting rather than about solid gains.

Already my terminology here is a dead giveway.

My accountant and friend for many years was most successful, he drove an above average car and was very, very busy.  We’d dine out and he’d tell me, from his investment adviser friends about ways to minimize tax and had some tips on what to invest in .  Though fiscally conservative – he’d not get caught with his pants down – he also believed that your money should work for you.

He skirted around the edges but never joined the fast lane per se.    He retained a sense of proportion.  His money at that time was in commodities, bricks and mortar.

Fine.  That was his type of person, I was a professor type, another friend of mine was an engineer – rough and ready, called a spade a spade and hated teachers.  It takes all types.

When a dodgy moral compass, powerful ambition and a very loose connect with the average pleb [in their eyes] or maybe even because of one’s former experiences with nothing to show for one’s labour, combine in one person and when that person progressively meets more of the type as he claws his way up the slippery pole, he can go the way of Richard Nixon – surrounded by gatekeepers like Haldeman, ruthless men who’d stop at nothing and our climber is intoxicated by that and by his own success.  Or maybe they become a John Dean.

At times it seems all too easy to dupe people and then the line is crossed – one does dupe people and intends to square it later.  But as Leeson could tell you, it never happens that way because something gets inside, something deep in the brain and whatever heart there once was is set aside and is now kept in a box.

I’ve seen true ruthlessness in the eyes of certain people I’ve met that I was constantly meeting and every single one of them had that restless jauntiness, that inability to get down to anything meaningful in conversation.  They’d tap the armrest or the table if kept at a topic for longer than three minutes and there was a lot of rehearsed evasiveness.

I’ve been at a Madoff type cocktail party and have seen how I was instantly appraised but the joke was on them because I seemed to be kocher in their eyes, which in fact I wasn’t.

Someone who snaps and kills someone has this madness.  Someone setting up a business has it.  I know I quote Christie a lot but this seems apt:

“He’s got on wonderfully in the world and naturally he wants something to show for it but many’s the time I wonder where it will all end. It’s like a runaway horse,” said Lady Coote. “Got the bit between its teeth and away it goes. He’s got on and he’s got on and he’s got on until he can’t stop getting on.

He’s one of the richest men in England – but does that satisfy him? No, he still wants more. He wants to be – I don’t know what he wants to be! I can tell you, it frightens me sometimes!” – from “The Seven Dials Mystery”, 1929

Anyone who gets obsessed about things, e.g. using the internet late at night, has entered this madness.  If someone tried to take you away from it and you snapped at that person, you’ve got the madness.

Another word for it is possession.  Something’s got into these people and reason has flown out.  That was Madoff.  He began the scheme in a small way, it got bigger and bigger and the rest, as they say, is history.  Alcoholism, sex obsession.

Last  Sunday I had a boat design problem which obsessed me and I must have done so many variants and then forced myself to leave it alone and do other tasks but had to come back to it because it was niggling.

When a couple fight, you can trace the path of the madness.  When one introduces past history with a malicious twist to the lip – that’s the madness, that’s the evil.  When the other goes ballistic and loses self-control – that’s the madness, that’s the evil.

Somehow we have to recognize it when it gets into us, even if we are already inclined to brush it off as criticism and it’s so hard to stop ourselves, especially if “self-control” is not our second name.

You might call all this just human nature.  I think of it as an outside entity possessing us.  Either way, the madness sure does grip and there’s no arguing with it.  It then takes the deed to be done or some big shock to come out of it and see where we were lemminging off to.

Filed under: Politics & economics, Society & human issues