How John's mind works

John H. of Bronte Capital writes a good financial blog -- one of the best out there, when he has the time to write it, that is, which, to our chagrin is not often enough. It is also a task from which, alas, he has lately allowed himself to be diverted to make the sort of blog entries of which the blogosphere has far too many already: you know, the sort that sport millions of hits and tens of thousands of comments, but whose point is something windy along the lines of "all Japanese/not-all Japanese are Nazis" or "Hillary wears/does not wear army boots". (The basic publicity concept being: if you violently stir the beehive, the bees will fly).

His most recent beehive-stirring-post is an exercise in political sermonery -- of which, we should think, the internet already had more than enough -- and true to the sermon genre -- it is copiously tinged with self-loathing.

The sermonery upbraids the Thai middle classes for denying the poor their vote and then -- shooting them.

(Fair enough, I suppose, about the shooting bit, though in their defense, I suppose, it could be said that the Thai government was acting in defense of private property, a principle which a financial adviser like John should not take lightly if he values his job. But John wheezes on the voting: he mistakes the right to vote for a moral principle. The view is unexamined -- a surprising thing in a man who examines so well the books of banks. I mean, can there really possibly be a natural universal human right to vote? The answer should be plain: voting is a practical mechanism we resort to because it works, not because it is somehow divinely instituted. In Thailand it has not worked for quite some time: what could possibly be the point of voting yet again?)

But I don't wish to debate any of that. Rather, I am moved by something else: when he condemns the Thai middle class, he speaks of people like me. His point is this: in the course of researching an investment idea he'd talked to a lot of Thai middle class, liked them and -- is now riven with self-loathing for having liked them -- now that they have rejected the results of the ballot box (he says) and have shot at demonstrators. I feel moved to reassure John: there is no need for self-loathing: he bears no responsibility for the crimes of the Thai middle class, whether real or imagined. They are people like him in some way; but all people are like him in some way.

John's Thai outburst is interesting in many ways. First, it is interesting to see how compartmentalized his mind is: a cool, rational, skeptical financial man can turn out to be a hot, passionate, "principled" political animal; "principles" in this context meaning something rather special: i.e. "strongly held beliefs of uncertain universality". The more uncertain a principle, the stronger the emotional commitment required to hold on to it.

Second, the post underscores the surprising proximity of moral opprobrium and self-loathing: John was inspired to write his post by the fact that he had identified with Thai middle class. Was John equally firebrand about the Burmese military shooting monks three years ago? Probably not, I imagine: he'd not identified himself with the Burmese military; therefore, there was no temptation for self-flagellation; therefore there were no condemnatory articles. Moral opprobrium would seem a kind of narcissistic navel-gazing, then.

And third: it shows that the best of minds are never safe from the rhetorical temptations of demagoguery (says Lord Vader: "the dark side... is easier... faster"). John can discuss dispassionately aspects of silicon wafer production; but disagree with his political views and you are confronted by cheap rhetoric. "Should we shoot people because they make less than $500 a year?", he asks at one point. How can we convince John that he is obliged to live up to a higher standard of discourse? That for someone of his stature this kind of discourse is simply not allowed?