As of next Friday, I will be walking the path of one of my all-time favourite pieces of travel writing, “Travels With a Donkey” by Robert Louis Stevenson. And travel writing, next to walking, is one of my favourite pastimes. I don’t want to say at the end…

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I have been reflecting this week on a provocative essay by Daniel Homola, “Your Bridge to Wealth Is Being Pulled Up,” which was shared with me by a client over the weekend. Homola’s central thesis is that artificial intelligence and robotics are severing the historical path to wealth creation for the “intelligent without capital” — that the premium trad…

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My original intention on picking up my metaphorical pen to start this essay was to set out my perspective that in a month in which years are happening - from the US Presidential Nobel Peace Prize aspirant deciding that starting one war might improve his chances of said prize more than (apparently) ending seven, to the miserable spectacle of a human fox hunt as the erstwhile Duke of York is run to ground and slowly savaged by a global media pack, a savaging which to this observer appears only assuageable through an ultimate blood sacrifice - and in which everyone is expected (and permitted) to have at least two entirely contradictory opinions on Iran, Israel, Ukraine, Gold, Inflation, the US-Dollar, the mid term elections, the end of Europe, the rise of China, BRICs, Russia, the shadow banking system, and whether or not America has enough ammunition or Germany enough liquid gas to make it to Easter. My perspective, to which I was fully intending to devote an entire essay, was, actually is, that none of these things matter. What matters — imho, OK not so ho - I surmise, is the intensity with which events, dear boy, are happening and what that intensity tells us about the point in our history at which we now find ourselves. In our urge to make sense of the noise - an impossible task guaranteed to absorb every cell of our frontal cortex - we are apt to forget that the sounds themselves are far less important than decibels and the intensity of the cacophony they combine to produce. The cacophony, in other words, is the message.

So, I was in the frame of mind to look for apposite literary covering fire for my hypothesis and my mind, as it is won’t to do, went straight to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Satan’s speech to his luciferian troops assembled in Chaos, readying them for the epic battle with God and the Angels. Something along the lines of

“My sentence is for open war: of wiles
More inexpert, I boast not: them let those
Contrive who need, or when they need, not now.
For while they sit contriving, shall the rest,
Millions that stand in arms, and longing wit
The signal to ascend, sit lingering here
heaven’s fugitives, and for their dwelling-place
Accept this dark opprobrious den of shame,
The prison of his tyranny who reigns
By our delay? No! let us rather choose,
Arm’d with Hell flames and fury, all at once
O’er Heaven’s high towers to force resistless way,
Turning our tortures into horrid arms
Against the Torturer; when to meet the noise
Of his almighty engine he shall hear
Infernal thunder, and for lightning see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage
Among his Angels…”

Paradise Lost Book I ~ John Milton

Stirring stuff and terrifying if you happen to be on the other side of it. I have a sense that the self-evident decay of the system under which many, probably most of us have grown up is now too obvious for even the most intransigent to ignore. Weak men (and women - looking at you specifically Frau von der Leyen and Ms Kallas) making bad times which are now ineluctably upon us. Satan’s host feels very much as if it is on the march already. Consequently, I don’t think it helps us much to opine on whether the US will achieve its objectives in Iran (remind me again, what are they?) or whether they have ever achieved any of their foreign policy objectives since the Marshall Plan or what this means for Russia or whether Mr. Epstein was indeed the Grandmaster of the Illuminati or just their private banker or any of the other questions which increasingly occupy the overpopulated and certainly intellectually overtaxed talking heads: we are moving into the denouement phase of post war socialism sold to us as liberal democracy and to the breakage of a system built on rotten money, whose ultimate objective was always its own absolute degradation. We have bigger fish to fry. The noises of war, distraction, corruption, accompanied by the creaking elicited from the erosion of bourgeois standards of normative behaviour and morals, managed by incompetents and ideologues whose only instinct is strip mine the trust and infrastructure built by previous generations are the easily extrapolatable outcomes we now witness. Not problems to be solved - it’s too late for that - but falling masonry to be avoided, preferably from a hill top in the distance.

That is what I was going to write about.

However when I pulled out my 1991 copy of the Folio Society’s “Paradise Lost” with its beautiful William Blake illustrations, I didn’t get much further than the Introduction, a magnificent piece of writing by the Miltonian fan boy, Professor John Wain taken from his essay “Strength and Isolation” (1960) where it served as the opening contribution in a 1960 book titled The Living Milton: Essays by Various Hands, edited by the eminent literary critic Sir Frank Kermode.

John Barrington Wain (1925–1994) was a prominent English poet, novelist, and literary critic. He is heavily associated with “The Movement,” a group of 1950s British writers—including Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis—who favored a straightforward, anti-romantic, and formally disciplined approach to literature over the modernist experimentation of previous decades. I could explain what arcane aspects of literary philosophy those various terms refer to, but your life will not be substantially enriched by the information. The magnificently named John Wain is famous for his 1953 comic novel Hurry on Down (which often gets him grouped with the “Angry Young Men” generation of British novelists), he was equally respected as a formidable academic. He was an Oxford graduate who taught at the University of Reading and later held the highly prestigious post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, as a fellow of Brasenose College from 1973 to 1978. The Folio Society “Paradise Lost”, of which I have an excellent copy, brought this otherwise obscure but brilliantly articulate academic to a broader public just before his passing three years later.

Instead of a long diatribe on the pointlessness of trying to figure out “the truth” of our current world in turmoil, I figured that you would be infinitely better served by reading an extract from Professor Wain’s truly wonderful essay in which he sets out his reasoning for his Christian faith and his belief in the Divine. His perspective is essentially mine, but better articulated and with more lightness of spirit and generosity of intellect that I could muster. William Blake once wrote “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans.”, as clear a call for having the intellectual courage to go figure stuff out for yourself as it is possible to articulate. This Truth is far more consequential than any other narrative truth that you might be otherwise grappling with. I do hope you enjoy it.

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Doomberg (23:00) : And if there’s a grand bargain between Trump, Putin and Xi, and I don’t think there is, but you can’t rule it out yet.

Grant Williams (24:02): No, but let’s game it out anyway because it’s worth doing.

Doomberg: The arc of that grand bargain is Putin gets Ukraine, Xi gets Taiwan and the US gets the Western Hemisphere basically. And that leaves the giant gaping question of Brazil, which we’ll come back to. But in a world where the Western Hemisphere gets its act together, and slowly but surely that incremental 10 million barrels a day of oil comes online, there’s less and less need for the Middle East, and China has a desperate need for the Middle East. And so, one could imagine the US ultimately washing its hands of the Middle East, although Trump’s seeming obsession with regime change in Iran would run counter to that, which makes us wonder whether a deal was struck. But if such a deal was struck or the US has unilaterally decided to go in that direction, both are consistent with the observable news flow, it’s bad news for Europe, terrible news for Europe, disastrous news for Europe, which has painted itself in an impossible corner of having a volatile and a relationship that is in perpetual conflict between Russia and China and the US all at the same time and mix in India while you’re at it.

I don’t know what the European Union’s overarching strategical objectives are, but that they’ve certainly picked every large enemy on the planet all at once, which we find amazing. And I’m sure we’ll talk about Greenland here soon, but what does that mean for Ukraine? Not bullish for Ukraine. What does that mean for Taiwan? It means that the Beijing aligned wing of the Taiwanese political scene, which is actually quite large, will rise in prominence and likely the outcome would be a Hong Kong style reconciliation between Taiwan and China, the mainland, without any shots being fired at all, which I think if you put truth serum into Xi Jinping would be his desired outcome. And so in that world, the true multipolar world, the US flexes its muscle in the Western Hemisphere, which includes Greenland and leaves Canada surrounded, and Europe is on an island politically and energetically floating along some giant ocean without an oar to steer itself.

And I think if the situation in Ukraine continues to devolve at the pace at which it currently is, that is going to be disastrous for the current slate of European leaders, Micron, Starmer, von der Leyen, Merz, Tusk, they’ll all be wiped out of power. And then who replaces them will decide the future of Europe, which is a whole other third dimension to all of this.”

‘The Week in Doom” podcast ~ Grant Williams (Episode 25 The World’s Gone Caracas! PUBLISHED: JANUARY 22, 2026 [Emphasis mine, although Doomberg was also quite emphatic, it has to be said}.

The Bear, the Snake, the Eagle and the Ostrich - a Fable

The key question raised here, is I think, the one of strategy and downstream of that the evaluation of the quality of critical strategic thinking in Europe. I have often held that in a business in crisis, the most important factor determining the ability to act appropriately is the admission that the crisis exists at all. Once leadership has articulated the words “we are in a crisis” if only in the boardroom, then the paradigm shifts and the way is opened for priorities to be set and actions to be executed that would be unthinkable in the non-crisis paradigm. European leadership in the last twenty years especially has seemed to me stuck in a paradigm which effectively denies that other countries, especially powerful ones have strategies and that those strategies will necessarily act - for good or, more likely for bad - on their own constraints, rooms of manoeuvre and optionalities. Denying that your competitive partners on the international stage have strategies at all and dismissing the mere talk of them as conspiratorial nonsense, is at best willfully naïf and at worst deeply irresponsible and dangerous. As ostriches throughout evolution have found, sticking ones head in the sand in the hope that danger will pass, does not help much (Actually they don’t and is fake news, but Pliny the Elder first pointed this out in Naturalis Historia in 78 AD and he was an expert, so science..).

Fourscore years of having the USA and to a lesser extent the UK look after the security interests of Europe both at home and on the high seas have led to a dangerously blithe unwillingness to engage in the sort of hard, trade-off based strategic thinking necessary to protect national and supra-national particular interests and, as a natural consequence, to neglect critical defence infrastructure. European nations and the EU in particular have convinced themselves after decades of skipping strategy classes, coz boring and irrelevant are just starting to wake up to the fact that their default position of lecturing the rest of the world’s powers from a position of supposed moral superiority is - as I would argue it always has been - indefensible and irresponsible. European states, especially Germany and the whole dishonest project of the EU is currently being exposed for what it is - in Doomberg’s words - “politically and energetically floating along some giant ocean without an oar to steer itself.”

I would be wrong in stating that the EU has not been directed by an overarching strategic imperative, one baked into its DNA by its founding intellectual architects. It certainly has. The strategy of the EU, which it was allowed to execute without much if any resistance until recently was to undermine and then ultimately replace the individual nation states that constituted its membership and to “manage” Europe on technocratic, rational and well-ordered (statist) principles thus avoiding the jingoistic inefficiencies and barbarous tribalist passions to which nation states have shown themselves to be regularly prone. Monet and his buddies conceived of a supra state in which the horrors of the preceding century of national chauvinism would be consigned to the dustbin of history and set out a strategic frog-boiling blueprint for how this might be achieved in increments and subtly so as not to alarm the individual nations whose demos would - with a few exceptions - never have signed up - ie. voted - for the whole monty. Which for the largest part they were never invited to do.

So, it is not as if the EU mandarins were not perfectly capable of formulating and then executing a long term strategic plan - their actions prove that indisputably. They have nonetheless proven themselves to be blinkered in the extreme in their ability to identify similar abilities in those with whom they are forced to share the global stage. So absorbed have they been in the grand project of creating a regulatory behemoth, abrogating ever more budget, power and self-appointed dominance over the entire continent, and so firm in the believe in the infallibility and moral superiority of their statist, welfare expanding and climate and social ideological program, that they react to even the slightest intrusion of evolving reality as an affront. And why they continuously ignore or misunderstand the deeply serious strategic imperatives of the geopolitical actors with whom they must needs interact.

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“Brushing that surface is a sense of movement, of breathing impermanence. This is how Nieto looked in mid-thought, in mid-life, at this moment; there is no straining after the definitive. The man is here, supremely conjured in paint, but the picture does not give all of him because there is always more within him. He is allowed his privacy, his secrecy,…

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Occasionally a phrase pops onto your radar that lodges hard in that part of the brain in which information of neuralgic importance is stored. The phrase contains a powerful truth which germinates and subsequently brings everything else sharply into focus, after which nothing appears quite as it was beforehand.

Julian Garran of MacroStraegy UK delivered a qualifying zinger in his conversation with Grant Williams last October when he pointed out that prosperity and standards of living are the downstream consequences of previous investments into its capital infrastructure. Prosperity is a product of long term capital investments in the architecture of progress, be it roads, drainage systems, railways, telegraph lines or electrical grids and underground transport systems, hospitals and even prisons. Sounds obvious.

“Charlie Munger famously said, “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the behavior.” And I think that’s critical in a sense what this Wicksell spread stuff does is show you the size of incentives to allocate capital differently than the right way, the way that maximizes its value and maximizes the capital stock. And so the more that you see those incentives in place and the more you know that this behavior is happening, the more you realize that it begins to undermine the very fabric of society. And I think perhaps one of the biggest problems facing the global economy is that there’s an ignorance about what makes things work, at a very basic level, how does the world actually work?

And the main thing that distinguishes us from our ancestors who lived in caves and what have you, we’re no more intelligent than they were, the main thing that distinguishes us is that we’ve got this accumulated capital stock, everything that we see that’s human made around us from the buildings to the roads to the cars, the electrical grid, the sewage systems, and all of these types of things have built up over time using the surplus from work. And they provide this extraordinary foundation for the growth and for the standard of living that we all enjoy today. But if you don’t understand that, you might for instance, start to come up with some ideological idea [about why] that actually damages the capital stock. And one of those ideas could be, for instance, green policies, which while they’re well intentioned in most cases, end up making energy more expensive, which then makes it more difficult to build capital stock. And we’re starting to see the backlash to that now.

And then the other one is never wanting to have a tiny downturn, in which case you respond immediately to any threat of a take up in unemployment by chucking money at the system either through monetary policy or through fiscal. And a danger with that is that changes the pricing system by which business people will try and work out what the right thing to do, right way to allocate capital, and they’ll step away from looking at sustainable long-term returns and towards short-term speculation. And it’s the accumulation of that, those misallocations that put you in a fragile position. And it’s only by actually going back to the roots and working out how big this is, you realize something that you might be viscerally aware of, that this feels like a fragile economy that’s where the capital stock’s not growing or maybe shrinking and where people’s livelihoods may be going backwards rather than forwards. We can only really get at that by going to the root of why it’s happening, the incentive behind the behavior. And that’s basically policy, aggressive, easy monetary and fiscal policy is very damaging to the foundation of the economy, which is the foundation of socioeconomic wellbeing and of civilization itself.”

~ THE GRANT WILLIAMS PODCAST (transcript): Episode 109 Julien Garran PUBLISHED: OCTOBER 13, 2025 [emphasis mine]

More recently, Edelweiss Holdings plc Chairman Tony Deden wrote insightfully in a typically brilliant essay of “the hollowing out of democratic substance beneath the preservation of democratic form” stating “What is emerging is not simply illiberalism imposed from above, nor a relapse into overt authoritarianism. Rather, it is a gradual reorientation of democratic politics away from restraint and toward consumption—of capital, of institutional credibility, and of social trust.” [emphasis mine].

Capital therefore - the organising principles around which give rise to the -ism system - is (intelligently deployed) the foundation of prosperity. Full stop. Any system therefore that interferes with, constrains or otherwise disincentivises the formation and efficient deployment of capital must logically lead to the consequence of lower standards of general prosperity and social well-being. As Tony Deden acerbically points out, we are now in the phase of consumption of past investments be it the capital stock or institutions and their integrity or even the fabric of trust that holds societies together. These are all assets created from the behaviour through which aggregated surplus of earning over consumption become savings and then capital which is then deployed through the process of investment.

We know this to be true from personal experience. We work and save some surplus which requires us to forego immediate consumption. We then deploy those savings in creating assets which we believe will provide us with a higher standards of living in the future. It could be a washing machine or a house or an investment fund to provide income for retirement.

At an aggregate level, entrepreneurs are those who, using the Austrian term, invest in assets which form part of the structure of production, (ie are not consumptive goods in and of themselves, but provide the means by which eventually consumptive goods are produced). They access the aggregate savings markets through capital markets, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, but at heart entrepreneurial investment activity relies wholly on the availability of a pool of socialized savings to make those investments upon which future prosperity depends. This is not a difficult concept.

Let them eat cake

Everyone who has responsibility for an asset, whatever it is, knows three things. Firstly that to enable ownership they had to consciously accumulate and deploy savings, secondly that the asset requires maintenance if it is to remain useful and thirdly that it has an estimated useful life span. The toaster I bought as a student at Durham two score years ago is, to pick a random example, no longer with me (probably by a margin of two score years minus two) and when I was thinking about the path my life might take I was probably not imagining that the toaster might be accompanying me to the end of it. However I do know that I could probably have looked after it better and that had I done so, I might have deployed the £25 that its replacement cost by buying 20 or 30 shares of some toaster making enterprise (say Philips (PHIA.AS)) as an alternative, which turn would all other things being equal, make some meaningful contribution to supporting my consumption forty years later. Thomas Sowell is often quoted for his quip that “there are no such things as solutions, only trade-offs” which points to the fact that every decision to do something simultaneously implies a decision not to do a myriad other things. In this context it means that the decision to consume or invest determines outcomes that have far reaching consequences stretching out into the distant future. Capitalism is simply the system by which today’s surplus is converted (or not) into prosperity enabling assets in the future. It is the essence of jam today or jam tomorrow...

Returning to Sowell and the consequences of trade offs, it is patently true that most individuals and no societies can simultaneously have their cake today and eat it tomorrow no matter how ardently they may wish it. They can have their cake and eat somebody else’s tomorrow. They may even be able to avoid ever having their own cake to eat and live off other people’s cake for quite a long time, but the point will come ineluctably when there is no cake left at all. At the risk of flogging this metaphor to death, the path from cake to no cake is not linear and it is experienced in the latter part of the journey as a paucity of cake, with diminishing levels of cake quality and slice size, followed by a migration to bread which is called cake and then to just bread and from thence to crumbs. The fiction of plentiful supplies of cake in the face of the bitter experience of general cakelessness is usually the last thing to be given up. It feels very much as if we are the “cake for me but not for thee” phase of the cake cycle and that the prospect of a general absence of cake is edging ever closer.

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“Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes.”

Exactly 500 years ago this year in 1526, William Tyndale published his translation of the New Testament from Greek into English. A decade later, on the 6th of October he was executed as a heret…

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In the early summer of 2009, I found myself sitting in my conference room with a gentleman who had just travelled a few hours from Wuerttemberg in the south-west of Germany to talk to me in Starnberg, Bavaria. It was around seven o’clock in the evening and warm sunlight was illuminating our conference room. My guest was finance director of a well-respected manufacturing business, one of those family-owned and run Mittelstand companies that represent(ed) the very best of German industry and which give (gave?) Germany its reputation as a respected economic powerhouse and producer of enviable trade surpluses. I knew the head of the family and President of the company and, as my guest told me, he had been instructed to come and talk to me with regard to a challenge he was facing, although he had not, secretively, told me the nature of the challenge when he made the appointment. I was flattered of course, but his demeanour suggested that he was unsure what good this meeting was going to do him and I suspect he would rather not have had the prospect of driving three hours back home on an evening much better suited to barbecuing. He was here under duress.

So there we were, cold mineral water on the sunlit table, looking for a way into the conversation. The company he represented was, he told me, 113 years old and had been founded by the current 70-year-old patriarch’s grandfather. The business produced a range of highly specialised metal products for use primarily in the textile industry and had at that time an approximately 60% share of the relevant world market. The company generated just shy of €500 million in revenue, was highly profitable and 100% owned by the founding family, now approaching its fourth and fifth generations.

Our conversation was taking place, remember, in the summer of 2009. The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 had caused a shockingly deep and potentially (apparently) disastrous recession, which had required and continued to require gigantic stimulus and supportive fiscal and monetary intervention by Governments to prevent a systemic collapse of the banking system. The mood was one of uncertainty not to say fear that we were all doomed.

It is of course difficult to imagine now, given that nothing like that could possibly ever happen again, but in those days the world felt scary and it seemed as though only Warren E. Buffett recognised the opportunity in the crisis and even published a letter in the NYT in October 2008 at the depth of the panic, explicitly telling the world what he was doing.

Warren and my guest, evidently.

It appeared that this CFO was facing a dilemma unprecedented in the company’s 113-year history. The recession had caused such turbulence in their market place that a respected competitor was struggling and they were considering doing something they had never done before, namely pursuing an acquisition. They had no idea how to go about doing this and felt that the mere idea was risqué and not something that solid companies like their family business should be engaging in. However, the opportunity was so obvious that they were having a moment of temptation and were following Oscar Wilde’s dictum of yielding to it quickly in case it dissipated. Hence the conversation with me.

The opportunity led to another challenge. Interest rates had plummeted post-crisis to historic lows and the CFO reckoned that from a financial perspective, it would make sense to borrow the money for the acquisition. The problem was they didn’t know how to do that either, as in all the company’s 113-year history they had never borrowed a cent - or Pfennig - from the bank.

“What? Never?” was I think all I could think of to say. “No, seriously” he retorted and handed me a slim document that contained his company’s current financial statements. I don’t surprise easily when it comes to reviewing financial statements and have learned to expect the good, the bad and the downright ugly almost anywhere, but this was…, well I had never seen anything quite like this before.

The liabilities side of the company’s balance sheet showed shareholder equity of well over 65%, no bank debt, generous reserves and the rest made up of trade payables. The asset side of the balance was even more surprising and showed a split between fixed assets (this was a manufacturing business remember) representing the plant and equipment of 35%, zero value for the property because it had been depreciated years ago and 65% in working capital of which about 20% was accounts receivable, 15% was cash and 30% was in stocks of finished and unfinished goods: in other words this was a warehouse bursting with their products with a cash balance and some plant and equipment attached to it..

I think the look of astonishment on my face relieved me of the need to actually ask the question of what that meant, so he told me that this was how the company had always been run and that it was an article of faith for the family to always keep a high level of stocks on hand, so as, he explained, always to be ready to serve customers immediately. He went on to explain that the company had grown steadily over the previous century but especially in the post-war years not only because the general level of trade had expanded - that rising tide lifted all boats in their industry equally - but specifically because coming out of recessions (of which there had been 7 severe ones in the past 70 years) the family had noticed that its conservative balance sheet policy had enabled them to snatch market share from competitors in the early phase of every single recovery.

The family, he told me, now knew two things: Firstly, companies survive recessions by freeing up working capital, producing just enough to get by and focusing on cash. The weaker the company the more depleted and exhausted it will be by the end of a recession. It will have laid people off, run down inventory, shuttered machines, done only the minimum necessary maintenance work, reduced marketing, cut sales bonuses and maxed out credit lines. And secondly when the (inevitable) return to normal levels of business began, those companies would not have the wherewithal to ramp up production, finance a growing level of raw materials and supply customers needs quickly enough. They also knew that banks could not be relied on to provide increased facilities until it was obvious that the recession was over, by which time the opportunity to grab market share from slower competitors would be over.

And it had worked: for over 70 years this marvellous company had grown its market share precisely at the time when the competition was weakest by the simple dint of having enough stock on hand to serve customers that in the good times they had been unable to prise away from their attachment to competitive suppliers. They knew their product was good, but they also knew their competitors were producing comparably good products. Their advantage, which allowed them near-monopoly status at least for the first phase of the post-recession recovery was being strong within a short window of opportunity, whilst the others were weak.

Genius.

The compound effect of that discipline was an unassailable, dominant market share which jumped by ca. 5%-points after every recession bolstered by a fortress balance sheet and total control of their financial commitments.

Our conversation went on for about 90 minutes and I remember how much we both enjoyed it. The company never did make that acquisition (too much trouble) and never did have to find out how to apply for a bank loan, but made a killing in that depressed market of 2009 and 2010.

As an illustration of what master investor Michael Weeks, Chief Investment Strategist at Edelweiss Holdings, refers to as resilience - one of his most admired attributes in a business, it is hard to improve on. Of it, in his Edelweiss Journal No. 20 “Searching for Resilience”, July 7, 2021 he writes

“Resilience is an unseen aspect of economic life. We cannot count it or touch it. It doesn’t appear on financial statements. Yet its presence gives us assurance and allows us to sleep well at night, while its absence drives men and women to the unemployment office, machinery to the scrap heap, and businesses into bankruptcy.”

“The only real test for hard times is to survive hard times. It follows that resilience is not the same as looking good or having predictable financial results.”

“Resilience is not a destination. Seeking resilience means abandoning a narrow definition of success like sales growth or annual returns and instead becoming prepared for any eventuality that can cause serious harm. It is gained by pursuing new capabilities and flexibility, and by avoiding landmines.”

Edelweiss Journals Nr. 20 July 2021 ~ Michael Weeks

That set of financials and the story of one family’s adherence to a set of management principles anchored in a commitment to resilience has stayed with me ever since as a benchmark. I remember that evening thinking that it reminded me of a similar story of a company from a decade earlier with a famously conservative Chairman and controlling shareholder which ended completely differently - tragically - when he passed the reigns on to his successor.

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During a recent event organized by the inimitable Shannon Stanton on Nantucket this last October, I was invited to a conversation with Collective old timer Jason Buck, entrepreneur, investor and trader. Said interview was to be recor…

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Five conversations

This story starts with a conversation in mid August with my friend Nadja Taranczewski, Founder of Conscious U and a colleague in the Leading Edge community founded by and finishes more or less on a Sunday afternoon outside Trinity Church on Broadway & Wall St. in downtown Manhattan three weeks later. Nadja is a leadership coach based in Berlin and her relationships span the globe. She thinks deeply about money and the psychological effects of our relationship with it. She uses money consciousness as a gateway to personal development and as a framework for revealing limiting beliefs. Her insights are always powerful and her experience deep. I love talking to her.

I like to think that after an entire adult life spent learning about, handling, deploying, reflecting on and building an holistic philosophy as well as winning and losing large quantities of the stuff, there are no new tricks that this old dog could learn and that I have my own perspective on money and the role it plays in life well locked down. I thought as I headed into my conversation with Nadja on a warm sun-drenched summer afternoon in August from my perch in Upper Bavaria that she and I were going to opine on the deeper strands of money psychology especially as it pertains to business and entrepreneurship, like two expert brain surgeons dispassionately discussing some arcane aspect of neurological procedure. That was the theory at least. But as I have found out in theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is. Nadja has a way of penetrating defences that leaves one — well, defenceless. I have some areas - self-evidently - in which there is unresolved pain and which I have been exceedingly astute in protecting from exposure, even to myself. I am, it appears, not nearly as locked down as I thought I was.

But, in stark contrast to younger versions of myself, I am much better at dealing with skeletal surprises from the unopened broom closets of my subconscious. Younger versions would slam the door shut, rush to put a cupboard in front of the door and avoid that part of the house entirely. The older version can breathe deeply, recognise work to be done, allow it and takes a lesson from Friedrich Wilhelm Gauß, the mathematician whose face and cultural inheritance forms the theme for the old 10 DM bank note (a copy of which sits on my desk in a plexiglass frame).

Gauss suffered from chronic claustrophobia and would, as a child, be terrified of being alone in dark bedroom. His remedy was to measure and calculate the dimensions of the room and all the objects in it, running calculations of cubic centimetres and trigonometrical distances through his prodigious brain until he had mapped out his surroundings entirely. I learned that from him - eventually and after a lot of practice - and found that running towards and not away from the source of my anxiety and measuring it was as good a way of deconstructing and dealing with it as I could find.

All of which is to say that on that afternoon in August about three months ago I was left feeling more vulnerable and less sure of myself than I had been in the morning and my conversation with Nadja opened the matrix as it were to a heightened sensitivity that, through some compounding force of the universe, evolved into a series of increasingly intense conversations with five women over five days, culminating in my spontaneously jumping on a plane to Rome the following Monday. The gist of the conversations, the essence if you will, was a deepening awareness of what it means to stop thinking and start feeling, a consciousness of how much my head was getting in the way of my heart (or gut - I am still trying to get the hang of my own somatic landscape) , where my instinctive intuitive understanding is located. I have been told all of my adult life that I needed to relax my fiercely aggressive frontal cortex in my interaction with life and to listen to my heart, but I never really knew what that meant or why attempting to understand things (with my head, I presume) was per se a bad thing. It is not that I am unfeeling or lack emotional intelligence, I believe (I almost wrote “I think” there but realised that sort of defeated the point of the sentence) I have been given a generous portion of both, it’s just that my natural process is to feed my experience of life through my intellect before validation. I need mental models to make sense of the world before I can allow it rather than a) listening to and then b) trusting fully in my visceral response. I suspect I am not alone in this.

These five conversations - all entirely unrelated to each other, with some planned and some serendipitous - however allowed and then fomented a new level of awareness of what that meant and - importantly to me - how to recognise when thinking processes were indeed being and in the past had been entirely unhelpful. In a word, I found the off switch. Which, to quote Robert Frost, has made all the difference. This piece is about the journey prompted by those conversations and about finding faith in the oddest of places.

Evolutionary Intelligence, Oestrogen and Tuscany

Conversation number three was with Emily Lane - another Leading Edge colleague - the founder of Evolutionary Intelligence Academy and a mystic, I guess would be the correct description of someone who has trained their psychic intelligence to the point where she is able intentionally to channel spiritual wisdom from the ether. William D. Wattles, writing in the early years of the 20th Century, refers to this spiritual intelligence as “Original Substance”. Well, Emily, an international Irish woman of indeterminate age who was a successful global corporate executive until a near life-ending experience some twenty years ago forced a radical change in both perspective and consciousness, teaches people how to connect to this original substance. She has a reputation that appears to be global given the people I have met from all parts of the planet who have worked with her and admire her greatly. Emily gave a presentation to our Leading Edge community on the Wednesday evening of this now watershed week for me in August. She was both fun and deeply impressive as she guided a group of some forty of us through that least intimate of all media - a Zoom call - for 90 minutes. A voice inside me told me that this was someone who could teach me more about how to develop that as yet fragile skill of genuinely listening to intelligence beyond the mind, so I signed up for a mastermind class she was offering to our group immediately and noticed on her website that she was about to host a week long retreat in southern Tuscany that following week.

In my “in for a penny, in for a pound” state, I booked that as well, confident that I could clear my schedule for the week despite having planned to leave for a long trip to the US immediately on my return. Emily vets her participants closely and so we scheduled a call for the following day. She warned me that I would be the only male in a group of eight other participants plus her and her co-host, but assured me that it would be beneficial to experience “male energy” in the room, so all good. I was in.

My final conversation was with my wife whose enthusiastic support for my adventure I was naturally keen to elicit. Those of you who have been married for a few decades will have a good idea of how that conversation went. “So, let me get this straight: you are heading off to a six day retreat in Tuscany with nine women none of whom you know, for an experience whose exact purpose you are at a loss to articulate, one week before you are due to leave for almost a month. And you’re leaving tomorrow. Oh, but they are going to be doing yoga which you have always told me you despise. Am I missing anything?”

Nonetheless, duly blessed but with the advice not to do a runner on day two (she knows me so well), off I set.

My purpose with this letter is definitely not to write a travel journal, so I will spare you the saga of landing in Rome on the day of a train strike and attempting to hire a car for my three hour drive to Castel del Piano, a proto-refugee experience in which my Gaussian measurement skills assisted in accurately calculating the probable length of my wait given that there were thirty people ahead of me each taking at least eight minutes to process their rental car and between two and three assistants at any one time (about an hour and ten minutes). Absent will also be any mention of the rescuing of two of my co-retreaters who had relied on there actually being trains to catch from Rome and our delightful journey in torrential rain up to our destination along with my sense that whatever else this trip had in store it was going to be a giggle. I will pass over all of those details.

The photo above is taken from Emily’s website as an inspirational underpinning to the retreat offer. It suggests medieval tranquility and manicured, slightly dilapidated but otherwise romantically situated (I have to stop myself sounding like an estate agent) sophistication with wide views of rolling, vine covered hills, parsed by iconic alleys of cedar trees with the only sound being provided by the chirping of the crickets in the long grass.

Actually Castel del Piano couldn’t be further from that bucolic Florentine idyll, although granted it is on a hill. It was pissing it down we arrived and didn’t really stop for days.

Southern Tuscany is much harder terrain, riven with deep valleys and gorges, thickly forested and providing few of those gently rolling fields ideal for the agriculture of wine, olives and fruits. The towns are visibly poorer and a quite a bit grottier than their cousins some 20 kilometres to the North in towns like Montalcino and Montepulciano, famous for all the right reasons. The whole region lies in the shadow of Monte Amiata a massive mountain with a peak of some 5,657 ft of elevation. I could write a whole piece - and probably will - just on this magnificent cathedral of a mountain with its ancient oak forests, beech and birch churches, steep banks, endless maze of trails and dense undergrowth, home to a large and vocal (if a grunt is vocal) wild boar population, to which I retreated on day four after eyeing it hungrily all week.

(See below for trail link and map)

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“Seems, madam? Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems.’ ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor windy suspiration of forced breath, no, nor the fruitful river in the eye, nor the dejected ’havior of the visage, together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, that can denote me truly: these indeed seem, for they are actions that a man might play; but I have that within which passeth show; these but the trappings and the suits of woe.”

Hamlet ~ Act I, Sc. 2 (William Shakespeare)

Roger Mitchell - entrepreneur, podcaster, a yoda-in-the making of the sporting world and probably, alongside Billy Connolly, one of the best products of Glasgow since the end of the industrial revolution - recently published an essay on his Albachiara.net website entitled “Meaning Amidst Chaos”, which now that I think about it, also means that Roger is a writer, although he takes great pains to deny it. It is a splendid piece, that reads like a collage artfully constructed from an eclectic collection of magazines. Rolling Stones, Outstanding Investors Digest (gee, I miss that), Glasgow Weekly (what do I know?) and whatever magazine football aficionados read come to mind.

I’ll get to the substance of the essay in a minute, but not before pointing out that several months ago Roger also penned an essay in a series of five reflections commissioned by Grant Williams and headed “Fin de Siècle” for his widely read monthly “Things That Make You Go Hmmm..” newsletter. (Disclaimer: I was one of the other four contributors). That essay “The Answer was here all the time”, On the back of both of those essays, Roger was invited to discuss his perspectives on Demetri Kofinas’ “Hidden Forces” podcast for his and Grant Williams’ “Hundred Year Pivot” co-production entitled “Boomer Blues”. In this hauntingly frank and in places wistfully melancholic conversation Roger lays out his framework for viewing the world in which we now find ourselves, saddened by the prospect that whilst the Boomer and Gen X generations, in Harold MacMillan’s famous phrase “never had it so good”, our children are finding the world a much more challenging and complex place to navigate than we did. In retrospect, at least.

Roger’s hymn - with a verse dedicated to each of the big themes of unaffordable housing, paucity of income and therefore inability to build savings, erosion of moral standards and normative behaviours, erosion of cognitive facilities and the decline of concentration, along with the replacement of logic and reasoning by feelings - is punctuated with a chorus of faith, a hallelujah if you will, showing that behind the dark, depressing clouds representing those oppressive themes the sunlight of a higher purpose breaks through the gaps, but is revealed to be ever present then, now and in the future.

Roger is a man of faith himself, a traditional Catholic whose life has been structured and informed by the rituals, rites and structure of that church. He tells us that the antidote to the creeping sense of purposelessness, exhaustion, anxiety and emptiness experienced by the Boomer Generation - at whose tail end he is - is an orientation to the eternal truths, the ever present sunlight and clarity afforded by the Christian Gospel and the belief in the example of Christ as the path to salvation. Those are my words not Roger’s but that is how I interpret them. He writes specifically:

”Either way, nihilism has run its course. It clearly leads to absolutely nowhere and this penny is suddenly dropping for a lot of clever people. Hardened atheists, artists, intellectuals, in a steady stream, now all seem to have ended up on a road near Damascus".

and

“The answer was indeed here all the time, and we do still need His love, after all we have done. People shouldn’t be afraid by any of this, maybe thinking back fearfully at all the blood historically spilt in the name of one God or another. Because you don’t even need to ‘believe’ if truth be told. Faith is a gift not given to everyone at the same time. If at all.”

ending with an exhortation

“so anyone feeling the Boomer Blues should read perhaps only four newsletter - none of which you will find behind a paywall: those of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”

I disagree with none of this in principle, but I am still left unsatisfied and I am unsure why precisely. I listened to Roger’s mellifluous Glaswegian brogue explaining his thought processes, mildly hypnotised by his lucidity, frankness and the weaving of the narrative of his life into the arc of history in which that life played out, an arc highly sympathetic to me as it neatly describes my own, although from a sociological categorisation I am officially an early Gen-X-er whilst he is a tail end Boomer. Put us both in a box and give us a good shake and you will find that the two are virtually indistinguishable. I nodded in agreement and noted that his interviewers Grant and Demetri were deeply sympathetic to the description of the malaise and welcoming of his “faith is the answer” antidote with what felt like relief. Thank you for saying it, they seemed to be intimating. There was further nodding of heads in the framing of the malaise within the context of the coming to an end of a saeculum or era, dated from the end of WW II and lasting some 90 years and neatly compartmentalised into four generational buckets, with the Boomers constituting the numerically largest and chronologically initial generation born in to that era. Followers of Grant and Demetri and regular readers of mine will recognise this framework as the Fourth Turning.

Nonetheless and head-nodding aside, there is something missing for me, something that I need to add to the conversation or framing in order for it to know what we need to do next, other than to renew our faith and sit down and study the writings of the Apostles.

The clue to what that might be was given by Roger at the end of his interview and whether consciously or not reintroduced as the core theme to his “Meaning Amidst Chaos” essay. Towards the end of his Hundred Year Pivot interview Roger states

“In a world since the War, certainly where the God has been money, undoubtedly money, when that game is up now, macro and micro level, macro level, the debt is there, and micro level , the social contract is gone. And one of the main candidates for that meaning has to be spiritual. It has to be.” (emphasis mine)

and then in his later essay he notes

“The nihilism of sport: To be clear, there is valid nuance in all of the above debates. A person of intelligence could argue them both ways. But is that the point? The Manchester City/EPL war could go in either direction, but the future of the sport shouldn’t be about who can afford the best lawyers. We should all know what is right.” Know what is our duty of care to the societal and community asset of our games.”

“Eigentum verpflichtet.” states Article §17.2 of the German post war Constitution making it, interestingly, the shortest sentence of any article in any constitution. It means “Property obliges” (which isn’t very good English, so maybe “Ownership creates obligation” would be preferable). Only it doesn’t anymore - property is just a means to an end and the end is always financial. Buildings can be flipped, companies saddled with fees and debt and then sold on repackaged as fast as possible to ensure highest possible IRR and so on. Property has become surgically separated from the responsibility that attends it and which used to be and fundamentally still is inseparable from it. Sports franchises are milked for maximum viewing rights and merchandising and tickets priced out of the reach of any but corporate sponsors. Ethics are outsourced to HR themselves the extended arms of governance enforcement laws: performance over substance, seeming over being.

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Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.”

~ Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse (“High Windows” - 1971)

“My daughter, when I was in my 30s, went school at Stanford. I couldn't stand it. She was so far apart. And so I'd think of reasons to make trips out there, try to come up with a little business or something. I go out there with her. I get an old office downtown Palo Alto, Jean goes to class with her. I said, you know, I need to get some things going out here if I want to spend this kind of time. So I went over to Brentwood, about 20 or 30 miles from San Francisco, and I bought about 25 lots like I was going to build 25 houses, except I drilled four gas wells. And those four gas wells in 18 months paid me enough money for me to buy the Dallas Cowboys. Paying attention to my kids actually led to me getting involved into the passion of my life. And all along, what I was trying to do is hang out near my daughter.

Lot of things happened that you didn't have planned or don't have the strategy for. Now I'm not saying I've done anything right, but I made my mind up long time ago I was gonna work with my kids. They're involved in everything. They involved my leasing, oil and gas, real estate, and so when I got the Cowboys, I got it so that we could all work together. I thought I was doing it for them, but the one that got the most out of it was me.

I just know it's not gonna be this time, but you're gonna be sitting here sometime in the future, laying here sometime in the future, and this room is gonna be full of your business associates and the people you worked with all your life, and more than likely, your children and family are gonna be there because they're your children and your family, but you could have them there, because they're the people you spent your life with, you worked with, you fell down with, you got up with, not just Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's who you want to be with.

So when that time comes like this, it's a celebration of your life, and you're not wishing you got to spend a little more time seeing a few more suns come up. That's the trick. That's the trick because that's going to be your glory. I'm pretty proud of them Cowboys; I'm pretty proud of the stuff we've done in oil and gas. It pales in comparison to how proud I am to have lived my life working with my kids. You got a chance to do something about that. I hope you will.”

~ Jerry Jones (Owner of the Dallas Cowboys and legendary Texas entrepreneur and oilman) in a cameo appearance on “Landman” (S1E9 at 09:20) talking to Monty Miller (Jon Hamm) , the billionaire owner of M-TEX who is lying in a hospital bed after another heart attack. [See also David Senra’s outstanding Founders Podcast episode #379 ]

A little over two years ago I published a piece entitled

reproducing the list of twenty “rules of life” that guides Orthodox Jews in the ordering and execution of their daily lives and presented by Berel Solomon on his YouTube channel. Rule #18 is

# 18 Teach your children how to make a living and earn their keep. This is the primary duty of a father towards his children. If you do not, you are encouraging them to steal or be dependent on others.

This one piece of wisdom stuck with me more than any of the other nineteen and I have been chewing on its implications ever since. At the time our eldest was 23 years old and our youngest just 18. Our little brood was emerging from the sausage factory of modern education and beginning the wonderful and - from the parental perspective only - mildly terrifying task of making their way in the world. Gnawing in the background of my reflection was the question of whether I and my wife had done a good, fair or miserable job of preparing them for business of life, its hand raised urgently and demanding an answer. I had none that I could rely on.

Basic Training

My wife of 25 years and their mother is blessed with a ruthlessly practical streak and an intolerance bordering on pathological antipathy to procrastination and not attending to shit that could be done immediately, knowing in her infinite wisdom that jobs, tasks, phone calls, the small activities of daily life that can all be completed in less than five minutes have a tendency to metastasize exponentially into larger problems when not attended to in short order, indeed create lengthy tailbacks and traffic jams of Lake-District-on-a-bank-holiday-weekend proportions as all the downstream activities begin to get snarled up and put on interminable hold due to the non-attendance to shit that could and should be done NOW. I mention this because much as this was not a popular (mild understatement) regimen to pubescents of either sex (we have a brace of both), and at times led to Gaza levels of conflict and attestations of eternal hatred, it has prepared them more practically for a life in which getting shit done is well over half the battle in the quest for economic utility than my more cerebral support. David Allen, author of the famous and popular 1990s productivity guide points out that

”Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.”

Or more pointedly, not starting tasks that need attending to when they need attending to. Navy Seals like to say that under pressure a soldier does not rise to their potential but sinks to the level of their habitual training. So in matters of GTD (or in my parlance GSD), frugality and the ability to stand in the face of conflict, their training at their mother’s boot camp has prepared them excellently for whatever life might throw at them.

However, as Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon series, points out in his excellent autobiographical “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”, Nietzsche’s comment that “‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’ sounds clever, but it’s a loser philosophy”. GTD is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success in life, or to reframe rule #18, to earn a living AND be happy doing it. Finding work to do that aligns with your talents and that is useful to others is, I believe the primary objective: getting things done quickly and efficiently is a handy basic training but it doesn’t answer the question of whether you are moving in the right direction or even doing the right thing in the first place.

The Journey of The Father is Embedded in the Son (or Daughter)

Our children grew up in an entrepreneurial household — I have been running my own business since before the first of them arrived mewling and puking on the planet — so they have imbued a perspective that is conditioned by that - ups and downs, both financial and emotional, and the roller coaster that accompanies the vicissitudes of a life spent as the offspring of a professional opportunist, poet manqué and generalist.

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That primary primary task now having been completed - “it’s in the post, sir. Should be with you any day” (translated from the original Bavarian) - the secondary primary task is now to unpack and reorder my books. This is taking much longer than expected because I keep distracting myself from the unpacking-sorting job at hand by coming across some tome or other, long lost from memory and browsing it or perhaps even sitting down on one of the many unpacked boxes in the old hay barn to study it more intensely. A bit like this only not as smart.

One great surprise was the number of boxes that had remained in storage in Ireland for a decade and to which I never managed to get around to attending. These included the large volume collections of the Encyclopedia Britannica as well as the German equivalent Brockhaus, as well as, to my delight, books that I had forgotten ever having owned at all. One such bears the irresistible title “Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? - The Encyclopedia of Modern Life” published 20 years ago in 2005 by a brace of writers named Steve Lowe and Alan MCarthur who may well have gone on to win Pullitzer prizes for subsequent works but I somehow doubt it. It must have been popular because (astonishingly) it was republished 5 times in the same year. I suspect in damp downstairs loos across the United Kingdom in houses great and small copies of this little book are mouldering away for the amusement of guests bored of staring at school, University and regimental photographs credentialing their host’s long passed youth. They must be somewhere.

Section C (it is an alphabetical collection) starts with the entry

“Cafés that charge excessive amounts for a mug of shit tea”

A pound? A fucking pound? I know what tea costs! I make it all the time!

and follows with

“Cafés that charge excessive amounts for a set breakfast but try to justify it by putting a bit of basil on the tomato” under which headline we are told

I know how much basil costs, too!And it’s not the £2 you’ve just slapped on the price of my breakfast. It’s much less than that — slightly over £1.99 less. Why don’t you just have done with it and move your family into my fucking house?

The whole book goes on more or less in that tone and style so this is definitely not a recommendation (although the entry a few pages later on “Charles, Prince of Wales” is worth the £9.99 entry price all by itself.) The £2 breakfast premium did prompt me to look up what a full breakfast (two eggs, sausage, black pudding, beans, tomato and toast) cost back in 2005. Answer: around £4 to £6 in London and between £3.50 and £4.50 outside. Today a similar London breakfast costs around £14 to £16, often more (outside of ludicrously overpriced hotel dining rooms). The computed rate of inflation which this range implies is from a low (£6 then to £14 today) 4.33% to a high of 7.18% with an average 5.65%. The official CPI figure for the average rate of inflation for that period is a tick over 2%.

Another way of looking at this is by asking how many breakfasts an ounce of Gold would have purchased in both periods (a technique that I first saw used to brilliant effect by Ronnie Stoefele’s Incrementum team in their annual Oktoberfest Index measuring the fluctuation of the number of Mass of Bier that 1oz of Gold would have bought over the past 75 years). In this case the average price of 1oz of Gold mid year 2005 was some $435 resulting in a breakfast to gold ratio of 87. Today (using a cable rate of $1.33 and a gold price of $3,270) that ratio is 154 implying that either Gold was seriously mispriced in 2005 (too cheap) or today (too expensive). I suspect the former, as a longer term view of the Gold price and another interesting ratio would seem to suggest.

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The editorial beating heart (literally) of these Pitchfork Papers has this last week been uprooted and moved from the tranquil rural environment of the southern county of Wicklow, nestled between the heather-decked Wicklow mountains and the pristine beaches on the eastern fringe of Ireland to a Bavarian alp (or alplet to be more precise) some forty five minutes South East of Munich where it is now surrounded by cows instead of sheep and commands a fairly spectacular view of the mountains to the South. Leaving a much beloved Ireland and moving (back) to Germany (your correspondent spent some 27 years of his young and then not so young adult life in and around Munich and raised his family there) was prompted entirely by familial considerations - all four of our children have now reached the age of attainment and chosen to return to the country of their conception and childhood, having decided - not without some justification - that their prospects of advancement, mate-finding and quality of life were significantly higher in Munich and its environs than in rural Ireland, which as they all reminded me at times during the last year was entirely my choice and not theirs. Cue Fairy Nuff, one of my favourite Irish spirits. Four children have now evolved into four plus a grandson, so the idea of keeping their mother and now grandmother away from her expanding brood was not one that was ever going find a consensus in the Star Chamber of our marital Parliament, a decidedly non-democratic institution at the best of times. So here we are.

Those of you have read these Pitchfork Papers for a while will know that I am by conviction a late cycle Libertarian (ie an erstwhile free market, “leave me alone” conservative when that term used to mean something) Christian who has found himself on the wrong side of the cultural fence and well outside the Overton Window, somewhere closer to the Overton tradesmens' entrance round the back by the coal shed for the best part of the last fifteen years. Heading back to Germany from Ireland at this particular point in both countries respective trajectories has me feeling like a Tutsi deciding to head home to Rwanda in the summer of 1994 - not exactly brilliant timing.

Just so there is no misunderstanding - Ireland is far from a paragon of institutional governance. It is run by midwitted numpties with mind-numbingly parochial perspectives and fully in thrall to the EU’s globalist, woke, puerile climate worshipping infatuation, replete with a state controlled media (RTE) and a compliant press (one blessing of this move is that I now no longer have to breathe the same air as the ghastly Fintan O’Toole, Idiot in Chief of the Irish Times, who has the singular distinction of having singlehandedly redefined the boundaries of elitist smugness and condescension over the past decade) to rival any of the current European contenders for the covetted Pravda prize. Given the importance of incentives in all human activities, it is as well to understand that for most Irish politicians living as they do in a system free from Opposition, the primary goal is to be seen and noticed as a good European (or EU lackey) so that the option of a cushy sinecure in Brussels with jobs, pensions and expense accounts for the whole family remains viable when they have served their time as useful rubberstampers of EU directives in Leinster House.

Ireland’s singular advantage to those of us in the erstwhile small c conservative diaspora, is that the toxic radiation of this policy environment is largely confined to the Greater Dublin area where all the virtue signalling takes place, leaving rural Ireland to get on with life much as it always has, pace the disruption caused by the relocated migrants and refugees foisted on the country by said masters in Brussels. Ireland is too underpopulated and its law enforcement (civilian and military) too small (and nice) to ever effectively enforce an authoritarian diktat on its population. They couldn’t go all General Franco even they wanted to and anyway the Irish population has had more than enough practice over the past, say 1,000 years in dealing with authoritarian elites better organised, intelligent and principled than the current lot. It is still very much a country in which you can be left to your own devices and in which, as my wife pointed out a few weeks ago, citizens are given the benefit of the doubt as a matter of principle when interacting with the State and its officers.

Which brings me to Germany and my for-the-time-being new and erstwhile home.

Where to start?

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Disruptive Technology

Early exposure to technological disruption - whether positive or negative - often shapes entrepreneurs' later approach to innovation and business management. A powerful example of this is Andrew Carnegie’s family experience in Edinburgh, Scotland in the first half of the 19th Century, where his father was one of many private hand-loom operators to whom the job of weaving cotton into cloth was outsourced, in a distributed raw materials processing model. From The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie and the Gospel of Wealth, we learn that "The change from hand-loom to steam-loom weaving was disastrous to our family. My father did not recognise the impending revolution, and was struggling under the old system. His looms sank greatly in value..."

Worse perhaps than the actual fact of technological disruption was Mr. Carnegie Snr.’s unwillingness to accept the reality of this profound technological advancement and the subsequent obsolescence of his capital and skill. This unwillingness to accept translated itself into depression and a sense of victimhood which prevented him from that most important of survival responses, adaptation. It did not take long for the Carnegie family to become destitute and only with the assistance of family and friends were they able to scratch together the wherewithal necessary to pay for the family’s passage to America, in the hope of finding work, income and a restoration of their fortune and dignity in the new country. The rest, as they say, is history, at least as far as Andrew is concerned - his father’s subsequent fate was not further commented on in his numerous biographies.

The early experience of the devastating effects of innovation profoundly shaped Carnegie's approach to technology. From victim to victor: while Carnegie's father was ruined by technology, Andrew became one of its greatest beneficiaries by embracing and investing in innovations at every stage of his career.

I have thought of this story often in the past year, whilst watching and reflecting on the changes being wrought within the marketing services industry as a new wave of technological innovation in the shape of AI cut and continues to cut broad swathes through a sector previously thought to be more or less immune to it. One of my best friends runs a highly successful boutique marketing services business in the US which has been around now for some three decades and we talk often about the profound changes taking place and the damage being done to participants in that market. He is unusual in that he has always maintained a deep “tech bench” in his business, rather than being exclusively staffed by creatives, writers and account managers with logistics skills. He is acutely sensitive to the emergence of new technological innovations and to the flow of technological adoption in the component parts of his industry and has been quick to evolve his firm’s offerings as paradigms shift. He was, for instance, early in recognising that the “website building” bonanza was becoming commoditised in the early teen years of the new millennium and responded by shuttering that offering entirely by 2015 and moving to higher value added digital marketing services. In the early ‘20s he recognised that the constant manipulation of the Google algorithm and the proliferation of content was destroying the efficacy of the previous SEO-based approach to marketing with its focus on clicks and reframed his firm’s offering away from that to a more targeted content and email nurturing focus in service of genuine business development for his primarily B2B clientele.

In late 2023 he saw the potential for both disruption and productivity being offered by the emergence of AI, notably Chat-GPT, Claude and other early providers and directed his tech team to begin building a specialised content writing tool for digital marketing. Within six months he was telling me that the quality of content production from the algorithm, given their ability to write highly specific prompts, was matching the creative output of his best writers and within nine months was able to create entire strategy briefs, extracted from deep subject matter and industry research. In combination with other AI based process tools, the technology can now identify innovative ideal customer typologies, simulate accurate target customer group responses, draft individualised campaign emails, extract the emails, pen Linked In posts, create and illustrate in-depth white papers, blog posts and other content and then execute the campaign, whilst constantly monitoring the feedback and results, as well as adjusting the campaign in a constant feedback loop to optimise the responses. All this can be designed and executed within an hour rather than the weeks and months a well-staffed agency would have needed to have expended in time and resources not even a year ago.

Google and Open AI’s new Deep Research tools, recently unveiled, are capable of doing this and more, if not for free then as good as, whilst producing both master and doctoral thesis level research papers which meet the highest standards of scholastic benchmarking. The ability of even a highly capable small firm to out-innovate the competition in the face of such rapid technological innovation and distribution is severely limited - it is becoming impossible profitably to outrun or outsmart this wave at its current velocity.

The results of all this innovation is breathtaking in its scope for productivity enhancement, i.e. increasing the output for a given quantity of labour or maintaining a specific level of output for a significantly reduced quantity of labour. In the case of AI derived marketing services (which are complex but not rocket science level complex) the reductions in time (the single most important factor in the provision of services to OEM customers) and labour, whilst potentially increasing quality and process efficiency are proving to be exponential. It is no exaggeration to say that the verb “decimation” (which literally means the removal of every tenth) is insufficient to describe the level of destruction of firms and jobs currently being experienced by this industry, many of whose participants do not even know what has hit them yet. I have not seen any reliable figures for what is likely to happen to the population of this industry, but given the current disintermediation and impossible-for-humans-to-match productivity increases it would not surprise me if at the end (which will come sooner than I dare predict) the small to medium sized marketing services firm in its current form will have gone the way of hand loom weavers.

My friend and a few others like him will be fine - if exhausted - as they, like Carnegie before them, understand the challenge posed by technological innovation and have the mental agility, technical competence and thought leadership capabilities to re-invent themselves. They are Schumpeterian heroes who can ride the wave of innovation and creative destruction, by letting go of previous paradigms and deeply understanding the constant underlying social need of their customers. Firms will always need to market to develop business and grow, just how they do it will be subject to change in paradigms of what is both possible and effective. It is as sure as eggs are eggs that the power of AI content and distribution, if applied to the (now) old paradigm of marketing, will break it and inflate the concept and quality of “content” to the point of zero utility. The new firms and leaders will be the ones who both recognise that and formulate a new paradigm, whatever that looks like.

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Writing to his mistress, Sophie Volland, in August 1759, the great encylopedist, man of letters and serial womaniser Denis Diderot congratulated himself (and presumably his chére Sophie) on the longevity of their relationship by writing

“La magie de la constance! La plus difficile et la plus rare de nos vertus.”

[The wonder of constancy! The rarest and most difficult of our virtues]

I have always found this self-congratulatory exclamation of constancy hilarious. Presumably Mme. Diderot was not quite as enthusiastic about her husband’s achievement and would have had a slightly different perspective on the “vertu” bit, but whatever you might have to say about the specific circumstances of the quotation, Diderot was definitely onto something with his description of the difficulty and relative rarity of maintaining anything, especially a virtue, for an extended period of time.

Benjamin Graham, in his excellent, but seriously under-read book “Storage & Stability” wrote in the Foreward, in respect of fiat currencies that

“All these inventions have one feature in common to distinguish them from the standard money of an earlier time. Their value and their stability depend upon the wills of men, mortal men, more certainly consistent than the rest of us. The dollar, the pound, the mark, the franc could be given a higher or lower purchasing power by administrative fiat. The financial authorities who bear this responsibility mean honestly to hold the value of money to a fairly definite level, but muscles tire and nerves falter.”

~ Benjamin Graham, Storage & Stability, 1937 [emphasis mine]

Given that “muscles tire and nerves falter”, constancy, or doing something worthwhile but difficult for an extended period of time is, well ‘difficile’ and we are hard-wired to avoid pain today even when the promise of joy tomorrow, or several tomorrows hence, beckons. The ‘jam today or jam tomorrow’ conundrum, the ability willingly and deliberately to delay gratification (not a subject the keepers of mistresses are particularly qualified to hold forth on - cucullus non facit monachum, as it were), is one our species has struggled with since the dawn of time and probably well before that. I would conjecture that the entire discipline and psychology of economics, that odd collection of activities Ludwig von Mises referred to as praxeology or the study of human action, is at its core an examination of how we express preferences and manage our requirements across time and in the face of our urge to have now what theoretically we could have much more of down the road. Carpe diem or perhaps not.

All of which I mention by way of introduction to a fascinating conversation in which I was privileged to engage this week around the subject of long-term relationships in business in particular long-term relationships between investors and their general partners.

On the surface, it seems to present as a false dichotomy, one not even deserving of reflection. Of course you would want long-term relationships. What other rational objective could you have but to - at least before the fact - establish a relationship at all. My conversation partner - a gentleman in the fullest sense of the word, with decades of investing experience at the highest level of professional excellence - countered that it was by no means obvious that that objective was either the only one or the necessarily the most rational. He, in his practice, was constantly having to defend his conviction that relationships per se were better for business than what he referred to as a ‘transactional’ approach.

What do we mean when we say we seek a long-term relationship with our investors? 

We make the distinction between “transactional” and “relationship-based business activity.

In our minds “transactional” means exploiting our advantage and negotiating the best deal for ourselves every time. In this mode of operation, every deal is a fresh start and bears little or no relationship to past or future interactions. The deck is shuffled and dealt freshly every time. Transaction economics is adversarial and takes no account of the individuals on the other side of the negotiating table.

“Relationship-based” on the other hand is principally concerned with the individuals at the table and sees them not so much as adversaries but as partners, pursuing reasonably well-aligned and similar objectives. This paradigm actively precludes the pressing for maximum advantage. It is a fuzzier concept that is at its core “non-adversarial”. It conceives a single interaction not as a unique activity unrelated to the past or future, but as a link in a chain of interactions, each one building on the last and reinforcing the next.

Benjamin Franklin referred to the return on ethical behaviour in business as “enlightened altruism” and that the power of “doing well by doing good” was never underestimated by the wise businessman (see “Poor Richard’s Almanac”) whilst Warren Buffett in my oft-quoted Owner’s Manual refers to his principle as follows

I wrote about the deceptive nature of friendship in business a few months ago in a piece entitled “Forgive Us Our Trespasses”. In it, I described my own oft-repeated failure to recognize that a temporary alignment of business objectives along with perhaps a certain personal empathy is not enough the meet the criteria of a true friendship and that a business friend is possibly only a few rungs up on the dependability scale from a political friend. Once the mutual objective realigns, even if only slightly, the transactional nature of the arrangement reveals itself and raw self-interest takes over. And there is nothing inherently good or bad about this, it is just how the game is played.

So this is not about friendship per se, but about ensuring durability to the alignment of interest from which, no doubt about it, friendship may eventually result. The question is why bother and how to achieve that objective?

What are the Advantages to NOT regarding each Deal with a “transactional” Mindset?

Economically, the rationale behind building relationships is that they enable future transactions to be executed with significantly reduced friction and costs. Reduced friction expresses itself as

• Time saved: Investors can be approached and secured quickly without the need for intensive priming, explaining, and convincing to build understanding and most importantly trust;

• Reduced costs:  repeat business with an existing investor base dramatically reduces search, brokerage, transaction, and other costs, leading to better margins and/or the ability to offer better more competitive fee structures;

• Speed: Opportunities can be secured and capitalized on quickly if the organisation is confident in its ability to tap into existing relationships which may not even require anything more than a phone call and verbal commitment. 

• Referrals: Expansion of the available pool of capital happens geometrically when existing satisfied investors feel comfortable enough to recommend their friends and business partners to invest alongside them and at no (or minimal) cost to the General Partner.

It is a truism to state that business from existing customers is significantly more profitable and cost-effective than business from new ones. The NPV of the accumulated benefits to building and maintaining long-term relationships is enormous.

There is a further aspect to the deliberate nurturing of trusted relationships, namely that they are more energy efficient. Our brains consume in the region of 60% of the total energy requirement of the body. Thinking burns joules and they require replenishing. As a result of this basic fact, we have become adept at evolving strategies massively to reduce the necessity of burning precious fuel in order to make decisions. Often these come in the form of heuristics or little mental models that are triggered like macros in our minds and lead to actionable outcomes. All our prejudices are based on pre-packaged decisions about how a certain kind of people “are” and how we need to respond to them. Encountering a hooded person, likely a male on a street corner at night, we do not have the time or inclination to engage into an examination of their personality or specific history. We do not even have the time or inclination to ask whether they might be a boxer in training, or perhaps a monk with a modern sense of dress. We react instinctively, our body floods with adrenalin and we prepare for conflict and flight.

Inversely we have heuristics that allow us to build bridges of trust over which we can walk to transact. Those are usually some form of social proof - the recommendation of a friend for instance - or reciprocity or authority or any number of other “energy saving” devices that shorten our due diligence process. Building relationships through personal behaviour and experience creates the strongest bond of trust within the narrow field of relevance to the decision. Just because I trust you to look after a portion of my investment fund, doesn’t necessarily mean I would trust you to guide me on a climbing expedition. But once I trust you to run the fund, I don’t have to make that decision from scratch every time anew.

What Behaviours support the Development of Long-Term Relationships?

Whilst discussing the question of “how do we have to behave today in order to earn a long-term relationship of trust?” I remembered Pastor A.R. Bernard’s book “Four Things Women Want from Men” and was curious to see if his famous guide on how to build a lasting, supportive marriage - probably the most difficult of relationship structures - might yield insights valuable for framing the investor-principal or LP-GP relationship.

Turns out it does. Pastor Bernard highlights four key behaviours that are the prerequisites of a stable long-term relationship, namely

1. Maturity: “ Maturity is when you stop making excuses and start making changes”

2. Decisiveness: “Decisiveness is insight in action”

3. Consistency: “Consistency requires congruence between values and actions”

4. Strength: “genuine strength is a matter of integrity”

I found it useful to attempt to adapt these four pillars to the relationship between the General Partner and Limited Partners, based on the fact that the GP always has an asymmetrical knowledge advantage over the LP whose capital he controls. The outcome is indeed helpful and apropos in describing how we have to be to earn the right to be a steward of capital over time:

1. Maturity → realistic appraisal of risk and reward, caution, understanding of the cycle, realistic appraisal of timings, not overpromising, conservative underwriting and investment parameters, downside protection, holistic view of the interests of all stakeholders.
   
   The following table - which deserves its own letter and indeed got one here - describes mature or “healthy man” psychology.
   
   

   

   (from Making of Men ~ Dr. Arne Rubinstein)
   the essence of which is the concept of maturity embedded in a sense of community and responsibility for the whole (relationships) rather than just the individual (transactional).
   

2. Decisiveness → ability to execute, move fast on opportunities, full commitment to the strategy, formulate responses to crises and emergencies, cut losses, (re-)negotiate financing terms if necessary, say “no” with authority - both to projects and investors.

3. Consistency → adherence to the investment thesis across markets and cycles, clear congruence between words and actions, transparency in communication, and reliable responses to both positive and negative outcomes. Observable efforts to be true to articulated values, even (especially) when doing so brings personal discomfort or disadvantage, clearly articulated and congruent philosophy.

4. Strength → Balance sheet quality, fiscal prudence, patience, calm under pressure, ability to concentrate, self-control, ability to stand up to threats, humility, care for those in positions of weakness or dependency, willingness to lead, ability to keep things simple, experienceable discipline and emotionally safe culture of kindness in the workplace, reputation for excellence in the marketplace (with vendors, local government, partners).

These are behaviours embedded in positive values and expressed in guiding principles that influence and direct every single action every day.

At the end of our discussion, my friend paused, reflecting, and added “for all the rational arguments, I guess we behave that way because, well, it’s just the right thing to do and we feel a whole lot better when we do.”

And that is about the gist of it.

Yesterday marked a high watermark in the on-going hystericisation of public discourse in Europe as Elon Musk chatted inanely about German politics and space stations on Mars with Alice Weidel, the party chair and hopeful Chancellor candidate of the libertarian-conservative party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) while Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta…

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( a free subscription to anyone who can name the two gentlemen in the silly hats without resorting to Google, Perplexity or asking Grandad. Answers in the comments.)

Commerce can operate in well-worn patterns or there can be various levels of discovery involved. The process of active discovery is entrepreneurship. This need not be commercial. It makes pe…

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“Do not waste time thinking or talking about the shortcomings or wrong actions of plutocrats or trust magnates. Their organization of the world has made your opportunity; all you get really comes to you because of them. Do not rage against corrupt politicians; if it were not for politicians we should fall into anarchy, and your opportunity would be greatly lessened. God has worked a long time and very patiently to bring us up to where we are in industry and government, and He is going right on with His work.”
Wattles, Wallace D.. The Science of Getting Rich (p. 45) - 1910.

There is the moral of all human tales:
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but ONE page,—'tis better written here,
Where gorgeous Tyranny hath thus amassed
All treasures, all delights, that eye or ear
Heart, soul could seek, tongue ask—Away with words! draw near,
Lord Byron ~ Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto IV (CVIII) - 1818

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
George Santayana ~ The Life of Reason 1905

“Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
Gospel of St. Matthew, 6,27 -King James Bible

I recently had the privilege of attending an event hosted by Grant Williams and his fragrant co-host Stephanie Pomboy of Macro Mavens in Tampa, Florida and being invited to add my ha’pennyworth to the day’s discussions. The event - one of the most convivial and stimulating conferences I have attended - was populated by some 200 or more members of the eclectic community of investment professionals and amateurs, business owners past and present, family wealth stewards and principals and other souls from all walks of life, skills and geographies who constitute Grant’s enthusiastic audience. (The Virtual Pass to the event is still available here and dare I say it worth your while purchasing). It was a blast and I was privileged to have been invited to contribute. Here’s how Grant described the event in afterwards

If you didn’t join us in Tampa for the Super Terrific Happy Day, you missed out on a remarkable set of conversations featuring Felix Zulauf discussing the macro outlook post-election, legendary Mutual Fund investor Bob Rodriguez, who offered his own unique insight into the untenable fiscal situation facing the United States and how he is positioning for its impact on policy and markets and Sy Jacobs, who shared the keys to his success in long/short investing as well as where he's finding opportunity now in the financial space.

That’s not all, however!

Also present was legendary value investor Dave Iben of Kopernik Global, who talked about the opportunities he sees in both the resource sector and emerging markets, after a lively debate about the true nature of ‘value’ with Cathie Wood of ARK Invest (I moderated their conversation and, I have to say, it was not what I was expecting. At all).

The great Peter Atwater (author of The Confidence Map) joined Steph Pomboy for a chat with about how investors can try to divine where the markets are on the arc from ebullience to despair and Sir Steven Wilkinson raised just about every eyebrow in the room with a captivating discussion about what he sees as the possible end of the era of the Nation State.

The event took place in the week following the Presidential Election which handed President Trump an across-the-board mandate. The theme or red thread running through the event was the US fiscal deficit, which like some vast planetary body exerted its gravitational pull on every conversation, interview and perspective, looming ominously in the background or forcing its way centre stage to dominate an exchange. The unspoken conclusion that nobody quite seemed to want to articulate clearly was, or so it appeared to me, that the problem of the deficit would - could - only be solved through a deep and destructive crisis and that the consequences of that - ineluctable though logic would make that consequence appear - were simply too horrible and unpalatable to contemplate let alone articulate.

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” ~ Niels Bohr

The quotations chosen to preface this piece encapsulate the dilemma of thinking about the future, a dilemma with which I struggle continuously. To ignore it is to risk repeating the mistakes that a study of history would reveal. To spend too much time pondering future outcomes is to risk extrapolating in linear fashion that which is inherently dynamic. As Howard Marks has often quipped “Making predictions is largely a loser’s game” to which Benjamin Graham might have added: "I have never specialised in economic forecasting or market forecasting either. My own business has largely been based on the principle that if you can make your results independent of any views as to the future you are that much better off." Jesus was quite clear about the value of worrying about tomorrow (don’t) as was Wallace Wattles in his wonderful little book penned and published in 1910 in which he states that nobody who wants to be successful should spend their time worrying about stuff that is inherently none of their and all of God’s business.

What to do, given the weight of opprobium and scorn heaped on the heads of those who “forecast” by those who have proven themselves adept at making money and creating successful firms through long careers and multiple cycles? Does worrying about the potential resolution of an exponentially growing US fiscal deficit “add not one cubit to our stature?” (probably not): is it a waste of time to think about it, contextualise it or ponder its implications now or in the future? Is it pointless hot air production to opine on whether Elon Musk and his band of DOGEteers will succeed in slashing $2 trillion of costs from the Federal Government’s annual expenditure given the fact that 70% of that expenditure is earmarked for (apparently untouchable) entitlements (a wonderful weasel word loaded with such powerful emotional content), or defence spending or other aspects of Federal infrastructure deemed beyond the cost-cutting pale? Or $1 trillion or perhaps nothing? If “forecasting” is a waste of time, then why bother thinking about the future at all?

Murray Rothbard in the opening chapter of his America’s Great Depression points out that

“we live necessarily in a society of continual and unending change that can never be precisely charted in advance. People try to forecast and anticipate changes as best they can, but such forecasting can never be reduced to an exact science. Entrepreneurs are in the business of forecasting changes on the market, both for conditions of demand and of supply.”
~ Murray Rothbard - America’s Great Depression (Chapter 1, “Business Cycle Theory”)

and I take comfort in the fact that he states a given that “[p]eople try to forecast and anticipate changes as best they can. Forecasting is what we do.

The US Deficit in context

David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director in the 1980s and a staunch free-market supporter, has written a brace of essays recently on the parlous state of the Nations finances which map out the current situation and its inexorable mathematical progression as follows

A goal of $2 trillion of budget savings is crucial to the very future of Constitutional democracy and capitalist prosperity in America. In fact, the soaring public debt is now so out of control that the Federal budget threatens to become a self-fueling financial doomsday machine. So more power to the DOGE of Musk and Ramaswamy. In spades!

For want of doubt, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 on a call to bring the nation’s inflationary budget under control, the public debt was $1 trillion.

By the time Donald Trump was elected the first time it had erupted to $20 trillion, which has now become $36 trillion. And under current built-in spending and tax policies it will hit $60 trillion by the end of the current 10-year budget window.

Thereafter, however, soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable fiscal wildfire. On paper, the public debt would power upward unabated to $150 trillion by mid-century under the CBO’s latest projection. Yet even the latter is based on a Rosy Scenario budget model that assumes Congress never again adopts a single new tax cut or spending program and that the US economy steams along without a recession, inflation recurrence, interest flare-up, or other economic crisis during the entirety of the next quarter-century!

Of course, long before the public debt actually hits $150 trillion or 166% of GDP per the CBO’s current long-term projection, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.

In case you have not reviewed the evidence recently here is the annualised progression (in nominal dollars to be sure) of the US Federal Surplus/Deficit

or in percent of GDP

In 1970 under President Nixon the Budget deficit stood at a measly $11 billion and stands today at some $1.8 trillion. Over 50 years that amounts to a compound annual deterioration of 9.9% - some 7% points over what the statistics would have us believe is the average rate of inflation during that period. If the CBOs projection for the Budget deficit evolution over the coming decade - which assumes no changes in laws, no recessions, no increase in the level of interest rates and other fairyland “ceteris paribus” assumptions - holds true, then the COVID era levels of deficit spending will have become the norm well before that (see Peter G. Peterson Foundation analysis referenced below).

Forecasters and other latter day practitioners of market haruspicy will generally be wide of the mark by factors rather than fractions, but I would lay good odds on none of the current projections erring on the side of pessimism. The larger the deficit, the larger the levels of debt the more fragile and prone to shocks a system becomes quite apart from the prosperity and energy sapping effects of the current structure of governance.

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Starting Pitchfork Papers four years ago was, as I explained to anyone who wanted to listen and probably many who didn’t, an exercise in figuring out what I was thinking in a world which appeared to demand I pick a side, be able to argue robustly, passionately even, and have a unifying theory of everything based on immutable first principles. I found myself unprepared for the fist fight that the COVID pandemic episode morphed into. The pandemic response appeared to pit the people running everything against an amorphous highly distributed caste of resistors with the broad masses making up about 80% of the population more or less cowed into obedience and doing what the upper tier of leaders demanded of them unquestioningly. Writing seemed to be the only way to make sense of the muddle of values, principles and perspectives that until then I had only been aware of vaguely in the background, as sort of programming language of beliefs that had determined the rough trajectory of my life and work without ever intruding too far into concious decision making to become visible and recognizable.

My Christian faith, my acknowledgement of the benefits, both personal and societal, of a free market system based on property rights and the rule of law, and my understanding that there existed a constitutional framework (unwritten whilst I was in the UK, codified and fundamental in the German Grundgesetz in the decades I was living there and equally codified and fundamental here in Ireland in this country’s constitution) that was sacrosanct and allowed me to get on with the job of life whilst protecting my “inalienable rights” of free speech, integrity of person and other freedoms were the tacit framework within which I organised my existence.

I was not specifically political, not inflamed with consuming passion for some cause or other and therefore naturally conservative within social systems (in three different countries, four if you count the inordinate amount of - enjoyable and productive - time I spend in the US) in which most of the big questions seem to have been settled and in which there existed competing institutions who, whilst not always demonstrating pristine behaviour on an individual basis, could more or less be relied on to keep each other in check: The media saw its main task as speaking truth to power and delighting in exposing politicians either with their pants down (generally from the Right) or with their hands in the till (generally from the Left); the police were broadly representative of the indigenous culture (laissez-faire in the Anglosphere, efficient, meticulous and unsmiling in the Teutosphere); the courts were dependably independent; the civil service whilst acknowledged to be inefficient were at least assumed to be acting in their respective country’s best long term interests whilst the politicians were recognised as being broadly incompetent but bound at least by defined standards of normative behaviour (such as being at least desirous of balancing the budget and repaying debt assumed and taking personal responsibility for lapses in judgement or departmental disasters as ministers / Secretaries).

For many, the COVID pandemic response changed the comfortable concept of a benign balance of power between the various previously deemed independent beams of the national superstructure irreparably and gave rise to an initially uneasy and then visceral fear that the previous paradigm had been altered radically. At least to me it appeared as if the compact between citizen and state had been broken and reframed without any discussion or negotiation having taken place. When a member of Germany’s Constitutional Court felt empowered to tell his countrymen that “whilst their constitutional rights had not been cancelled (“aufgehoben”), they were currently unable to exercise them (“ausüben")”, the question became not if something had changed but how bad and irreversible it had become. Four years later that question is looming larger than ever and thoughtful participants in the game of life appear to be asking the questions I posited above in greater number. I would appear that at least for those looking hard at the evolution of our liberal democratic system and applying their analytical framework to it, as if the evolutionary DNA of our body politic is being decoded in ways that were never possible before, for the simple reason that the experiment has never been allowed to run this long in a more or less peacetime environment.

There are three essays to which my attention has been drawn in the past weeks and which I commend to you. They each provide a different but not mutually exclsuive answer to the questions of how did we get here and what is “here”? I have found each one of them useful in supplying a particularly clear perspective on the status quo and taken together offer a useful picture of the hole which might better help us frame an idea of where and how this ends and what follows.

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