On Suckers and Nonsuckers

After the crisis of 2008, it became clear what Fat Tony and Nero had in common: they were predicting a sucker’s fragility crisis. What had gotten them together was that they had both been convinced that a crisis of such magnitude, with a snowballing destruction of the modern economic system in a way and on a scale never seen before, was bound to happen, simply because there were suckers. But our two characters came from two entirely different schools of thought.

Fat Tony believed that nerds, administrators, and, mostly, bankers were the ultimate suckers (that was when everyone still thought they were geniuses). And, what’s more, he believed that collectively they were even bigger suckers than they were individually. And he had a natural ability to detect these suckers before they fell apart. Fat Tony derived his income from that activity while leading a life of leisure.

Nero’s interests were similar to Tony’s, except dressed up in intellectual traditions. To Nero, a system built on illusions of understanding probability is bound to collapse.

By betting against fragility, they were antifragile.

So Tony made a bundle from the crisis, in the high eight to low nine figures—everything other than a bundle for Tony is “tawk.” Nero made a bit, though much less than Tony, but he was satisfied that he had won—he had already been financially independent and he saw money as a waste of time. To put it bluntly, Nero’s family’s wealth had peaked in 1804, so he did not have the social insecurity of other adventurers, and money to him could not possibly be a social statement—only erudition for now, and perhaps wisdom in old age. Excess wealth, if you don’t need it, is a heavy burden. Nothing was more hideous in his eyes than excessive refinement—in clothes, food, lifestyle, manners—and wealth was nonlinear. Beyond some level it forces people into endless complications of their lives, creating worries about whether the housekeeper in one of the country houses is scamming them while doing a poor job and similar headaches that multiply with money.

The ethics of betting against suckers divide the two characters. To Nero one should first warn people that they are suckers, while Tony was against the very notion of warning. “You will be ridiculed,” he said; “words are for sissies.” A system based on verbal warnings will be dominated by non-risk-taking-babblers. These people won’t give you and your ideas respect unless you take their money.

Further, Fat Tony insisted that Nero take a ritual look at the physical embodiments of the spoils, such as a bank account statement—it had nothing to do with the financial value, nor even the purchasing power, of the items, just their symbolic value. He could understand why Julius Caesar needed to incur the cost of having Vercingetorix, the leader of the Gaul rebellion, brought to Rome and paraded in chains, just so he could exhibit victory in the flesh.

There is another dimension to the need to focus on actions and avoid words: the health-eroding dependence on external recognition. People are cruel and unfair in the way they confer recognition, so it is best to stay out of that game. Stay robust to how others treat you. Nero at some stage befriended a scientist of legendary status, a giant for whom he had immense respect. Although the fellow was about as prominent as one could get in his field (in the eyes of others), he spent his time focused on the status he had that week in the scientific community. He would become enraged at authors who did not cite him or at some committee granting a medal he had never received to someone he judged inferior, that impostor!

Nero learned that no matter how satisfied they could be with their work, these hotshots-who-depended-on-words were deprived of Tony’s serenity; they remained fragile to the emotional toll from the compliments they did not get, the ones others got, and from what someone of lower intellect stole from them. So Nero promised himself to escape all of this with his small ritual—just in case he should fall prone to the hotshot’s temptation. Nero’s spoils from what he called the “Fat Tony bet,” after deducting the cost of a new car (a Mini) and a new $60 Swatch watch, amounted to a dizzyingly large amount sitting in a portfolio, the summary of which was mailed to him monthly from (of all places) a New Jersey address, with three other statements from overseas countries. Again, it is not the amount but the tangibility of his action that counted—the quantities could have been a tenth, even a hundredth as much and the effect would remain the same. So he would cure himself of the game of recognition by opening the envelope containing the statement and then going on with his day, oblivious to the presence of those cruel and unfair users of words.

But to follow ethics to their natural conclusion, Nero should have felt just as proud—and satisfied—had the envelope contained statements of losses. A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion—in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. To sum him up, Nero believed in erudition, aesthetics, and risk taking—little else.

As to the funds, to avoid the charity trap, Nero followed Fat Tony’s rule of systematically making donations, but not to those who directly asked for gifts. And he never, never gave a penny to any charitable organization, with the possible exception of those in which not a single person earned a salary.