Interest Rates, Aging Hippies and the Return of the American Polymath
Why our institutions don't really work all that well
In America you’re known by what institution you’re a part of. Having an affiliation is important — crucial even — to be taken seriously. Without an institution you’re a threat. No one knows how to place you. And so they come for you.
We’re company men and society types. At least among our alleged elites. Our liberal elites love themselves an institution. To the extent that fentanyl is a problem — and it is — it’s because it destroys institutions — chief among them the family — not so much because it destroys men.
In much of the rest of the world you’re more rewarded for who you are. You’re an elite and certain things are expected of you by birth. The question of your life is always “will you live up to your potential? Or be a dilettante?” To the extent that Europe is experiencing degrowth and deindustrialization I think we have our answer.
But not here. You’re distrusted if you don’t have an institution. It’s your protection but it’s also your leash. Nothing is more dangerous than a person independent enough to think for himself. You might quibble with how independent these polymaths were — it’s easy to devote yourself to study when you have actual slaves performing duties for you. But every society has enslaved persons. Do you think the human beings trafficked into our country are anything but slaves who will push up the slumlords’ rents (as his commercial real estate rent goes down) and who be warm bodies for the industries most allergic to automation?
You can judge a society by the extent to which their polymaths take advantage of their slaves to expand the commonwealth rather than their own personal enrichment.
Both Massachusetts and Virginia are commonwealths for a reason. A friend of mine is fond of saying that “everyone wants slaves” but they just don’t want to call them that. Maybe so. Don’t we all kind of know that what AI is all about is reducing wages and rendering us into disposal, replaceable, redundant laborers? The root word — robot — is Czech for slave. A wise policy would be to target those industries which are most dependent on immigrant slaves but we are not a wise country; we’re an emotive and angry one. Ironically, our anger is often used to enslave us. Bibi Netanyahu says he can “move the United States” and truer words were never spoken.
I think this is ultimately why people so love Trump. He can say the things no one can else can. I think it’s something about temperament. Some of us had the f*ck you mindset long before we had the f*ck you. Aristotle says that the man who has no need of the polis is either a beast or a god. To some extent Americans are a bit of both and Trump is just an extreme American — the sort of caricature of an American you’d create in a Kremlin drawing room. It’s not hard to see him as a kind of Ayn Randian figure — even more American than the Americans, more capitalist than the capitalists. The party hacks or machine pols of the Republican Party never stood a chance. Trump is alive and that is the source of his strength. No one would mistake him for free but he does seem to wrestle with his chains.
I think our institutions struggle to know how to address such a figure. Our institutions, especially our colleges and congressmen, are drawn to liquidity. They’re drawn to the action. And yet our institutions are repeatedly being clowned by events largely of their own making. Part of the reason we have tenure is to promote good scholarship but we see time and again that college leader after leader was essentially faking it. You’re right to wonder how much of our science, our health care, our companies, our marriages, our food, our lives are totally fake.
Which brings me to my central point:
The higher the interest rate the more real the possibility of polymathic power.
Robert Friedland calls this the “revenge of the real economy” and I think that’s right. No projects get undertaken without raw material, after all.
When you study our history it’s always the polymaths who drive our country forward. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of our greatest leaders often have traits that are not exactly safe in a world of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. They’re ornery. They’re disputatious. There’s even a book called The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America. They’re unwell but they’re excellent. Everybody is too busy getting therapy or having mental illness diagnoses or being filled with pills.
There’s been a bit of stolen valor in recent years when it comes to polymaths. You see it in Elon Musk. You see it in Peter Thiel. You see it in these figures who aren’t exactly polymaths and definitely aren’t American.
Polymaths are dangerous because by inspecting things the whole system collapses. There are polymathic periods of American history. I’d argue that the 1960s were one such period and I’d argue that there was a concerted effort to jail those polymaths by the Nixon White House.
I think often about these three bits from two American authors — Steinbeck and Robert Heinlein.
"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is the one thing which by inspection destroys such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it, and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If that glory can be killed, we are lost."— John Steinbeck, East of Eden, p. 131.
Heinlein also loved the American original.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Years later the science fiction author’s relation — Marc — would get busted alongside Robert Friedland selling LSD to law enforcement agents in an elaborate form of entrapment.
So it’s especially interesting to study and talk to old polymaths before they pass from our world into legend.
This oral history is vastly preferable to the hagiography of a Walter Isaacson, which is about sanitizing while fibbing about these types rather than giving you a real sense of where they are going.
Friedland rejected Isaacson’s overtures. He disliked Steve Jobs’s second wife who runs the Atlantic and was palling around with Ghislaine Maxwell and publishes David Frum. “Oh Steve,” to borrow a phrase.
Friedland knew Steve Jobs and Friedland was arguably his first business partner. They had plans around buying timberland. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Jobs was a bit autistic, Friedland says, and he would lose his patience and go a bit crazy.
Friedland has no formal training in mining and yet he is crucially important to U.S. objectives in subsaharan Africa, West Africa, and Central Asia. America needs Friedland and his approach to resource extraction if we’re to stave off our peer competitors.
You’ve got to have your guys on the ground, living amongst the people, getting to know them, eating their food and sleeping with their women. Friedland is the son of survivors and so he knows a thing or two about surviving. Friedland's father survived three years in Auschwitz while his mother worked as a forced laborer during the Holocaust.
“If you hang around drug dealers, you’ll become a drug dealer,” Friedland says. “If you hang around miners you’ll learn a thing or two about mining.”
He backed the movie Crazy Rich Asians but now the Asians aren’t so rich. They’re crazy poor Asians. They’re going through a lot, bless their hearts.
Today Friedland — at the age of 73 — is essential to the Lobito corridor. He envisions a Freedom Corridor in West Africa. He says that Amos Hochstein — one of the leading thinkers in the energy security sector — wants him to help our strategic objectives in Kazakhstan and Central Asia.
In other words, if you’re a weird guy you’re going to like Robert Friedland. I did.
Much of the post-World War II order was built by aging hippies and trustafarians.
They knew when to follow the rules and what the secret rules were. To some extent this sort of thing was corrupt but it wasn’t corrupting. It was, in a weird way, efficient. It wasn’t the sort of autistic government some imagine we might get if all the human things are bled out of our system.
The word you’re looking for Charles is Sui generis.
Or, maybe it’s “American.”