It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1

percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent11—and where the richest eighty-five
people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.

That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain—
indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are
published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost
all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and
a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of
these sell more than a hundred thousand copies.12 Similarly, just four classical composers
(Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern
orchestras. Bach, for his part, composed so prolifically that it would take decades of work
merely to hand-copy his scores, yet only a small fraction of this prodigious output is
commonly performed. The same thing applies to the output of the other three members of this
group of hyper-dominant composers: only a small fraction of their work is still widely
played. Thus, a small fraction of the music composed by a small fraction of all the classical
composers who have ever composed makes up almost all the classical music that the world
knows and loves

90 percent of communication occurs using just 500 words, among many other things.
Sometimes it is known as the Matthew Principle (Matthew 25:29), derived from what might
be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more
will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.”

Instead of undertaking the computationally difficult task of identifying the best man, the
females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy.
They let the males fight it out and peel their paramours from the top. This is very much what
happens with stock-market pricing, where the value of any particular enterprise is determined
through the competition of all.

This is because anxious and depressed people are already stressed, particularly if their lives
have not been under control for a good while. Their bodies are therefore primed to
hypersecrete insulin, if they engage in any complex or demanding activity. If they do so after
fasting all night and before eating, the excess insulin in their bloodstream will mop up all
their blood sugar. Then they become hypoglycemic and psycho-physiologically unstable.22
All day. Their systems cannot be reset until after more sleep. I have had many clients whose
anxiety was reduced to subclinical levels merely because they started to sleep on a
predictable schedule and eat breakfast.

Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It’s an attribute that is unique in the
world of life. We can and do make things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of what we
are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a manner that is willfully blind).
Given that terrible capacity, that proclivity for malevolent actions, is it any wonder we have a
hard time taking care of ourselves, or others—or even that we doubt the value of the entire
human enterprise?

If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we

Truth

You can use words to manipulate the world into delivering what you want. This is what it
means to “act politically.” This is spin. It’s the specialty of unscrupulous marketers,
salesmen, advertisers, pickup artists, slogan-possessed utopians and psychopaths. It’s the
speech people engage in when they attempt to influence and manipulate others. It’s what
university students do when they write an essay to please the professor, instead of articulating
and clarifying their own ideas. It’s what everyone does when they want something, and
decide to falsify themselves to please and flatter. It’s scheming and sloganeering and
propaganda.

To conduct life like this is to become possessed by some ill-formed desire, and then to craft
speech and action in a manner that appears likely, rationally, to bring about that end. Typical
calculated ends might include “to impose my ideological beliefs,” “to prove that I am (or
was) right,” “to appear competent,” “to ratchet myself up the dominance hierarchy,” “to
avoid responsibility” (or its twin, “to garner credit for others’ actions”), “to be promoted,” “to
attract the lion’s share of attention,” “to ensure that everyone likes me,” “to garner the
benefits of martyrdom,” “to justify my cynicism,” “to rationalize my antisocial outlook,” “to
minimize immediate conflict,” “to maintain my naïveté,” “to capitalize on my vulnerability,”
“to always appear as the sainted one,” or (this one is particularly evil) “to ensure that it is
always my unloved child’s fault.” These are all examples of what Sigmund Freud’s
compatriot, the lesser-known Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, called “life-lies.”149

Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and
action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist. A life
lived in this manner is based, consciously or unconsciously, on two premises. The first is that
current knowledge is sufficient to define what is good, unquestioningly, far into the future.
The second is that reality would be unbearable if left to its own devices. The first
presumption is philosophically unjustifiable. What you are currently aiming at might not be
worth attaining, just as what you are currently doing might be an error. The second is even
worse. It is valid only if reality is intrinsically intolerable and, simultaneously, something that
can be successfully manipulated and distorted. Such speaking and thinking requires the
arrogance and certainty that the English poet John Milton’s genius identified with Satan,
God’s highest angel gone most spectacularly wrong. The faculty of rationality inclines
dangerously to pride: all I know is all that needs to be known. Pride falls in love with its own
creations, and tries to make them absolute.

A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie. With
the life-lie, particularly when it is based on avoidance. A sin of commission occurs when you
do something you know to be wrong. A sin of omission occurs when you let something bad
happen when you could do something to stop it. The former is regarded, classically, as more
serious than the latter—than avoidance. I’m not so sure.

If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your
character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears,
as it will, inevitably. You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide. And then you will
find yourself doing terrible things.

Only the most cynical, hopeless philosophy insists that reality could be improved through
falsification. Such a philosophy judges Being and becoming alike, and deems them flawed. It
denounces truth as insufficient and the honest man as deluded. It is a philosophy that both
brings about and then justifies the endemic corruption of the world.

deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism

With love, encouragement, and character intact, a human being can be resilient beyond
imagining. What cannot be borne, however, is the absolute ruin produced by tragedy and
deception.

Marx attempted to reduce history and society to economics, considering culture the
oppression of the poor by the rich. When Marxism was put into practice in the Soviet Union,
China, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere, economic resources were brutally redistributed.
Private property was eliminated, and rural people forcibly collectivized. The result? Tens of
millions of people died. Hundreds of millions more were subject to oppression rivalling that
still operative in North Korea, the last classic communist holdout. The resulting economic
systems were corrupt and unsustainable. The world entered a prolonged and extremely
dangerous cold war. The citizens of those societies lived the life of the lie, betraying their
families, informing on their neighbours—existing in misery, without complaint (or else).

Marxist ideas were very attractive to intellectual utopians. One of the primary architects of
the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, received a doctorate at the Sorbonne before
he became the nominal head of Cambodia in the mid-1970s. In his doctoral thesis, written in
1959, he argued that the work done by non-farmers in Cambodia’s cities was unproductive:
bankers, bureaucrats and businessmen added nothing to society. Instead, they parasitized the
genuine value produced through agriculture, small industry and craft. Samphan’s ideas were
favourably looked upon by the French intellectuals who granted him his Ph.D. Back in
Cambodia, he was provided with the opportunity to put his theories into practice. The Khmer
Rouge evacuated Cambodia’s cities, drove all the inhabitants into the countryside, closed the
banks, banned the use of currency, and destroyed all the markets. A quarter of the Cambodian
population were worked to death in the countryside, in the killing fields.

What about disabilities? Disabled people should make as much as non-disabled people. OK.
On the surface, that’s a noble, compassionate, fair claim. But who is disabled? Is someone
living with a parent with Alzheimer’s disabled? If not, why not? What about someone with a
lower IQ? Someone less attractive? Someone overweight? Some people clearly move through
life markedly overburdened with problems that are beyond their control, but it is a rare person
indeed who isn’t suffering from at least one serious catastrophe at any given time—
particularly if you include their family in the equation. And why shouldn’t you? Here’s the
fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the
individual. That sentence should be written in capital letters. Every person is unique—and not
just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership
cannot capture that variability. Period.

None of this complexity is ever discussed by the postmodern/Marxist thinkers. Instead, their
ideological approach fixes a point of truth, like the North Star, and forces everything to rotate
around it. The claim that all gender differences are a consequence of socialization is neither
provable, nor disprovable, in some sense, because culture can be brought to bear with such
force on groups or individuals that virtually any outcome is attainable, if we are willing to
bear the cost. We know, for example, from studies of adopted-out identical twins,190 that
culture can produce a fifteen-point (or one standard deviation) increase in IQ (roughly the
difference between the average high school student and the average state college student) at
the cost of a three-standard-deviation increase in wealth.191 What this means, approximately,
is that two identical twins, separated at birth, will differ in IQ by fifteen points if the first twin
is raised in a family that is poorer than 85 percent of families and the second is raised in a
family richer than 95 percent of families. Something similar has recently been demonstrated
with education, rather than wealth.192 We don’t know what it would cost in wealth or
differential education to produce a more extreme transformation.
 From Book: People power and Profit by : JE Stiglitz

Bankrate, in its 2017 annual Financial Security Index survey, found that 61 percent of
Americans could not meet a $1000 emergency without going into debt. Taylor Tepper. “Most
Americans Don’t Have Enough Savings to Cover a $1K Emergency,” Bankrate.com, Jan. 18,
2018, https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/financial-security-0118/.

Similarly, the Federal Reserve Board, in its Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S.
Households in 2017, based on the fifth annual Survey of Household Economics and
Decisionmaking, found that “Four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400,
would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing
money. . . . an improvement from half of adults in 2013 being ill-prepared for such an
expense.” It also found that “Over one-fifth of adults are not able to pay all of their current
month’s bills in full” and that “Over one-fourth of adults skipped necessary medical care in
2017 due to being unable to afford the cost.” Both of these results are consistent with the
finding of another survey, that 15 percent of Americans have no savings, and 58 percent have
less than $1000 in savings. See Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Report
on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2017,” Federal Reserve Board, May
2018, https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-report-economic-well-being-
us-households-201805.pdf; and Cameron Huddleston, “More than Half of Americans Have
Less than $1,000 in Savings in 2017,” GOBankingRates, Sept. 12, 2017.

The consequences of this misshapen economy and polity go well beyond economics: They
are affecting not just our politics, but the nature of our society and identity. An unbalanced,
selfish, myopic economy and polity leads to unbalanced, selfish, and shortsighted individuals,
reinforcing the weaknesses in our economic and political system.14 The 2008 financial crisis
and its aftermath exposed many of our bankers as suffering from what could only be called
moral turpitude, as they displayed high levels of dishonesty and a willingness to take
advantage of the vulnerable. These lapses are all the more stunning in a country whose
political discourse for decades now has been so obsessed with “values.”