Rich and Poor (possible beginning for a new book)

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1. 
There is the expression: you catch more flies with honey than you do with poison. But I have realized this is only partly true. Because unless your goal is to breed flies, you also need at least a little bit of poison to finish them off. Looking back on my life I now wonder: what was the honey and what was the poison? How often did I confuse the two and with what results? The standard rags to riches story is a tepid, sugary cliché, and the ways I have often used it to charm and increase my opportunities in life, and how I will continue to do so here, is one of the many poisons that harms me daily to a similar degree that I have damaged the many who have stumbled into my path. To make yourself a legend you tell your story one way, and to make yourself a martyr you tell it differently, with different emphasis. Both ways are of course corrupt but the results differ. I’ve never been good at introducing myself, one reason that I prefer everyone already know who I am before I arrive. It was never my intention to write a memoir. I’ve never understood why memoirs are so popular these days.

The Persian philosopher Tusi (1201 – 1274 AD) writes: “If men were equal, they would all perish.” We need differences between rich and poor, he insisted, just as much as we need differences between farmers and carpenters. I wasn’t born rich. It took me twenty years of panache and gradual calculation to build my fortune. And if I had children, which I do not, and if like me they had not been born rich, which is rather unlikely, it is even more unlikely they would be able to repeat my success. The world no longer contains such opportunities, and this generalized lack of opportunity is a condition me and my kind had some small part in creating. Or not. Perhaps we only rode the waves of our time, and, if none of us had been born, others would have done the same. But it was us and not others. Much like some people are rich and others are poor. We can say that some people are rich because others are poor but it changes nothing. The roulette wheel spins and the numbers that come up are the ones that win. If you were a left wing activist in Germany in the twenties or thirties there would be little you could do to stop Hitler. And yet it’s important to believe there is always something you can do, to lie to yourself a little, because then at least you have a shot. Miracles do happen but they are extremely rare. My situation was not a miracle. Just a great deal of charm and ambition, and being alive in an age when such things were still possible. Plus precisely the right degree of luck. But of course, like all of us in these positions, I don’t believe in luck. We all believe, like any good asshole, that success is nothing more or less than the result of our genius.


2. 
I will kill him. It will solve nothing and help no one, but, for me at least, it will bring something to an end. The poor must kill the rich, one at a time, at every opportunity. One man kills another and the message is clear, your wealth is cruel and unnatural. You can put fences, guards and dogs around your home, so you are like a prisoner in your own life, but if you are rich you will live in fear. You will fear your servants. You will look out the window of your limousine and, at every traffic light, wonder if each and every passerby has a gun and bullet with your name on it. It is only that the killing must be completely random. The victims having nothing in common other than their wealth, the killers nothing in common other than their poverty. The message should be clear: if you are rich you can be killed at any time. The police would arrest millions but there would always be another poor man that could suddenly snap. We would only have to kill ten to start, to strike fear in the hearts of every billionaire in the world. And he will be the first. I will see to it.

On a social level, people have to look after each other, but on an ethical level, each of us has to look after ourselves. If you are a billionaire it is because you have done evil in the world. You have exploited and caused untold misery. You have bent laws and governments to your will. I don’t want to shoot him. I want to strangle him with piano wire. I don’t want to escape. I want to be caught and explain my idea to the world. I want to be executed. I now have nothing to lose. We will all be forgotten. But if ten of us manage to kill billionaires those ten will be remembered forever. Our poverty will become history. Wealth is impersonal but we will make it personal again.


1.
Violence has always been a last resort. So much is possible without violence, but so much more with just the threat of it, and even more if you occasionally go over the top. I am not a violent man. Therefore I must work with violent men. Violent men I can trust. There are two kinds of violence I have made use of in my work: violence connected to a government and violence that takes place without any government knowledge. Both have their very specific, but separate, strategic dangers. When you can convince the government to do your violence for you the benefits are obvious, but there are also clear pitfalls: the government might lose popularity, be voted out or overthrown, and your business, having been closely associated with that particular government, might have to go as well. This scenario has played out in my professional life several times. However, even if this were to happen all is not lost, because there is still the possibility to convince the new government to continue working with you. Violence without the use of government is considerably more costly, since all expenses are your own, but what you lose in the form of money you gain in agency and independence.

If all of this sounds too abstract, and perhaps heartless, one would be correct in assuming that I have seen very little violence first hand. I mention these facts because I believe something similar happens to all of us. You drive your car knowing it is disastrous for the environment, and yet continue to drive anyway. You drive your kids to school, knowing the very car you’re driving them in will make their future more environmentally precarious. You read the newspaper and feel the things within it that disturb you are completely disconnected from your daily actions, when of course they are not. If you completely dedicated your life to changing just one of them, something might budge. But you don’t because you don’t feel that strongly about it. You think it is terrible but not so terrible you are ready to drop everything and take action. Myself, I would of course prefer to run my business without any recourse to violence, but also, I have to admit, I don’t feel so strongly about it. And if I were to do so, it would be impossible to remain competitive. Profits would suffer. Like all of us, the assholes, I have a responsibility to my shareholders.


2.
There is of course a reason, an incident, behind my desire to kill him. I was not born poor. I became poor. Not as a direct result of his actions, but more indirectly, through grief. I experienced a grief so severe I could not work, think or exist. This period lasted for about ten years and I remember very little of it. But there is one thing I remember with absolute clarity. During the years of oblivion I stopped reading literature and stopped reading philosophy. I would occasionally read the newspaper but never managed to get very far. The news all seemed too far away. What I did start reading was corporate shareholder reports. By the end of ten years, just before I was evicted, my apartment was completely packed with them. I would go to business chat sites and post notices asking stockholders to send me their old ones, that I was collecting them, and literally hundreds started arriving in the mail. Clearly the stockholders had no idea what to do with them, were happy to see them go, forests and forests of the stuff. I would read them obsessively, against the text, as if every proudly announced profit concealed an environmental crime or worse. As if they were not documents of enrichment but of destruction. There was a great deal of truth to my analysis, but this activity was clearly not good for my mental health. It was a way to drive myself insane with anger and it worked. I spent god knows how many years driving myself mad in precisely this manner and might still be doing so today if I had not been forced to leave the apartment. Sometimes the things that harm us most are also our saviors.

With the eviction at the forefront of my mind I started piling up the reports in the alleyway behind my building. It took me an entire week to move them all, I couldn’t believe how many I had collected or how big the eventual pile was, like a mountain of pure greed. The night before they kicked me out I set fire to the mountain and watched it burn for five hours. I expected fire trucks and police but none came. I expected the whole city to burn but the flames kept to themselves, much like the neighbors who I suppose decided to mind their own business and not call the police. As I watched, I imagined it was the corporations themselves that were burning: their headquarters, the CEO’s, the private security companies hired to protect them. I imagined that for every forest that was clear-cut, one corporate headquarters building burst into flame as if by magic. For every mother forced to watch her infant starve to death on the third world wages her husband brought in, one CEO would spontaneously combust. I remember that fire. For five hours I fantasized until the last embers turned black at the brink of dawn. That night was the first step of my long journey back to sanity, towards a more coherent worldview, and also the first kernel, the very beginning, of my eventual plan.


1.
Capitalism is not the simple desire to make a profit. Capitalism is the fantasy that growth can continue at a consistent rate indefinitely. When a child is young it can not yet imagine being an adult, so it thinks it will keep growing forever. The fantasy that you can grow forever is exhilarating, one of the many aspects that make children seem so alive. We live in fantasy, all of us, all of the time, to a greater or lesser extent.

Business, on the other hand, is the simple desire to make a profit, along with, if you’re a lucky, a desire to produce something useful in the world. If you are running a business in this day and age, you are of course doing so within the framework of capitalism. Business is the yoke, capitalism the shell. You cannot write a business plan saying: we just want to make enough money to be comfortable and after that we have no particular desire to grow. (Or you can but it would be difficult to find investors.) You need to project annual growth, as much as possible.

When I was young I could not possibly imagine obtaining wealth. My parents never spoke of such things, and I believe they never thought much of them either. My father worked every day and took whatever money they gave him. It was enough to get by, most of the time. I would watch my parents carefully, full of childish suspicions, thinking, or was I only hoping, that there must be some easier way. Or perhaps I was hoping no such thing. There are so many details we fill in imaginatively when we tell stories from the distant past. My parents both died when I was still poor, and sometimes, in more reflective moments, I wonder what they would think of all this: the private planes, posh restaurants (where occasionally I spend more in one night than they would have spent in six months) and endless waves of work, meetings and then more work.

Allow me to get sentimental for a moment (as if it was possible to stop me.) I spent a great deal of time in the hospital with my father in the weeks leading up to his death. He was a quiet man, didn’t talk much, as was the fashion for men of his generation, but in the hospital we talked like we’d never talked before. He told me so many things and what I grew to understand, what I had never understood before, is that he had lived his life afraid. I didn’t want to be afraid, and in one of our last quiet moments together I told him so. I was wrong, he told me, carefully explaining, wanting to set the record straight before it was too late. From the outside it might look like fear, might have appeared that time and time again he had backed down, but inside he had always been content, always felt he had remained focused on the things that were important in life: his family, being relaxed, working efficiently and with integrity, enjoying the small pleasures that each day is kind enough to grant us. He seemed pleased to have explained all this and, not wanting to argue with a dying man, I agreed with him, thanked him for his words, told him they were beautiful and true.

But even then I thought he was lying, both to me and to himself, and that he had in fact lived his life in fear. (I still wonder today whether he knew he had failed to convince me or if I had managed to reassure him.) What’s more, it was then I realized that in our last intimate talks, by telling him I knew he was a coward, by seeing through him like that, I had somehow gained the upper hand. I was no longer only his child but also something else, someone who had something on him, who had some small power over him, and he was now afraid of me too. Saying what he did, that he had always been content, was just another way of backing down, like he had his entire life. Later that week he died. I cried when the doctor phoned me, in fact I cried a lot, but, nonetheless, I was never going to be like that. I was never going to back down.


2. 
His book, his autobiography, is in my hands and fueling my rage. I saw it in the window as I was walking by a bookstore and the coincidence struck me like a hammer. I quickly shoplifted one, there’s no way I was giving that bastard more money, and am reading it now, still amongst the early pages. What strikes me most is his strange mix of pathos and showmanship. He has doubts, endless moments of doubt, but each and every time he overcomes them and finds his way towards doing exactly the most evil thing he can come up with. It is masterful the way he humanizes himself, since we can all relate to having little moments of struggle each and every day, only to turn it around, or inside out – always this constant rejection of basic human values in favor of his own endless egotism. He is honest, self-aware, constantly including himself among the avaricious assholes who have created a world that, if he is honest with himself, not even he wants to live in anymore. But, at the same time, he is strangely proud of having created this world. For him it was an act of will. I would read a few pages then violently throw the book across the room, do something else for awhile, or do nothing, before curiosity eventually gets the best of me and begrudgingly, like a chastened slave, I walk across the room to pick it up off the floor and continue reading. Even after twenty pages the book looks like it has been through a meat grinder. I was throwing it as hard as I possibly could. But then, after a few days, I start to feel stupid and put the book aside. I’m only half way through but it’s enough for now. There’s little in the book that would help me get closer to him, but much in it that might help me win his trust once I eventually do.

There are three private security companies he regularly signs contracts with and I have now applied for jobs at all of them. My resume is only partly forged so we will have to see how thoroughly they check. I have three chances but, for now, I am only waiting for a phone call. While I wait I read about security, about bodyguards, about bulletproof jackets and armored cars. For money I am washing dishes a few nights a week in whatever place will take me. I work quietly and efficiently, without incident. I don’t need much money so work as little as possible. I keep my phone turned on from nine to six, in case I am called in for an interview, then, in the evening keep it turned off. I talk to almost no one and, when I do, keep the topics light, making lighthearted jokes whenever possible. My heart is not light but, for short stretches, I believe I get away with it. I would find all this beyond boring if I was not so focused on a single goal, a goal that will end my freedom but, hopefully, start something much larger. Life without a goal, without a fulcrum, without a single point of intensity around which everything else can swirl, is not particularly worth living. My life, however dull, is.

Three months go by before I get the first interview and the time allows me to thoroughly prepare. On my way there I shoplift a second copy of his book to read while I wait. It is a careless risk, since if I was caught my entire plan would be sabotaged, but it is a risk I take because I believe my interest in him will serve me well with potential employers, and bringing my own destroyed copy would be out of the question. While in the waiting room I read from where I left off and, once again, have an unbelievable urge to hurl the book across the room. I restrain myself, but possibly the men sitting on either side of me can feel my anger, feel my body tense. From that point on I only pretend to read, instead using the time to eavesdrop.

The room is full, it seems they’re interviewing a lot. Many of them know each other, have worked together in the past, and their conversations are friendly yet empty. If I get the job I will also need to talk this way so I listen carefully: sports, porn, a few of them have traveled and they speak about deserts, sand and heat, about burqas and exotic prostitutes. There are many terms, mostly slang, that I don’t understand. From the context I believe its either about guns or vehicles. I make mental notes, planning to look things up later, still pretending to read. Once inside the interview is straightforward. I make a good impression but I’m not as experienced as many of the other candidates. From the way they explain this to me, I have the slight feeling it might even work to my advantage. Perhaps there are placements where they prefer to train people from scratch. I have a dishwashing gig that night and go directly from the interview to the kitchen, where they make fun of me for being dressed up. I tell them I just came from a wedding, make up a story about the bride mistakenly saying ‘do I?’ instead of ‘I do.’ Everyone laughs. I don’t know where this story came from, I pulled it straight out of thin air. I’m pleased it got a laugh, eased any suspicions arising from the way I was dressed. The story came from my need to defend myself, protect myself. I wonder how many stories in the world emerge in precisely this way.


1. 
All of this is not to suggest, even for a moment, that I did not love and respect my father. While some friends might have advised me to edit the previous hospital scene out, it is my intention here to portray my life in all of its nuance and complexity. Of course, it is also true that we, all of us, are never quite as complex or clever as we think we are (or want to be.) In this respect I am not so different from anyone else.

The daily operations of a multinational corporation, one of the largest in the world, are understandably complex. How one deals with such astonishing daily complexity is the true test of ones character. If I compare myself to a few individuals in charge of rival corporations, I can see that my approach and style are almost completely contrary to the ruling wisdoms of the day. For example, while most companies aim for constant, year after year growth, I prefer periods of relative calm (that can sometimes last several years) followed by spectacular bursts of energy and expansion. It is within these sudden bursts, unexpectedly, that the entire world opens up. The impossible, for a brief window, feels possible again. It is important that within these bursts, as I like to call them, everything feels entirely unexpected, both for me and my many employees, that our daily reality is suffused with the purer elements of surprise.

Years of careful planning drain an endeavor of energy, while the sudden conquests I envision, in actual fact, cannot be planned. That is what we have learned. They rely on the irrational, on irrational decisions made by so many of the key players involved, myself included. Investors surging forth on violent waves of excitement or falling away when blindsided by off kilter fear. Rival CEO’s or executives having no idea how to react to an energy, and way of thinking, they have no interior experience with, panicking, signing up or caving in. When it all happens fast, the entire landscape can be rearranged before anyone realizes what has happened, in best case scenarios to my considerable advantage. Of course, all of these strategies, these desires, can easily backfire. Nonetheless, these are the risks, the challenges, the gambles, upon which my heart thrives.

I am scanning my memory for a suitable example, for the perfect instance that would accurately display my talents and proclivities. Or perhaps two examples, one during which we succeeded, the other leading to failure. In fact, I will start with the negative example. It is much more difficult to recall a negative instance, not because they have been so rare, but because I have a tendency to block them out, to remain focused on the present and future, where the action is. There was one memorable disaster that almost sent us spiraling into bankruptcy, but perhaps I will save that for later. It deserves a chapter of its own, since it was the time in my life during which I learned both the hardest, and most useful, lessons. And then again, I think to myself, why am I attempting to list examples like some mild, grade-desiring student. Examples are for peasants. When we remain within the realm of the abstract everything feels, becomes, possible. But when we descend towards the concrete our sense of possibility steadily narrows. Past unexpected takeovers, executed with panache, even takeovers of organizations that were somewhat larger than us at the time, maneuvers wildly lauded in the business press, no longer compel me. While the philosophies that made such actions possible remain present and alive, ready to tip the balance and throw everything back into chaos at any juncture.

A few weeks ago I was on the street and saw two children fighting. I like to watch children fight. One learns so much about human nature in the different ways each child enters the fray. Do they wait for an opening or charge forward without thought, take the punch as gasoline poured on the fire of their blind rage or dodge every blow as if not getting hit was the sole accomplishment possible. These children were younger than most, and they were laughing, they found their own pre-adolescent brutality almost ludic, so I assumed they must be friends. Nonetheless, their friendship didn’t prevent them from doing damage. One of them was bleeding from the face, so much blood I couldn’t spot the wound, and he was laughing, head-butting, working to get as much blood on his opponent as possible. Until the other one, the one not yet bleeding, grabbed the blood soaked jacket, managing to rip it straight up the seam, and they both stopped cold, stopped laughing, froze in tableau. “You ripped my jacket,” the bloody one said, as if not sure what his reaction should be, as if his opponent had broken some unspoken rule. It was a serious moment, unexpected. You never know what will happen, what might cause the dynamic to shift.


2.
Didn’t get the job but still have two more chances. I’ve been fully immersed in my private security research and am confident I will do even better next time, at the next interview, that each one will be better than the last. At the same time I am considering other strategies. If I cannot work as his bodyguard there must be other ways to get close, as a servant in his home or waiter at some function he is scheduled to attend. Luck, the good luck that is involved in getting any sort of gainful employment within the current dreadful state of our economy, will be one thing, and I do hope that I have some. But careful planning, searching for every possible opening or opportunity to get close to him, to get the piano wire close to his throat, will be much more important.

When I was a child we had a piano in the house and I would play every morning for three hours. If something happened, for example I overslept, and one morning could only play for two hours, I would spend the entire day feeling things had gone wrong, practice for an extra ten minutes for the next six days in order to make up the loss. I don’t know if I had the natural talent to become a concert pianist but I had dedication and never faltered. Today, I could easily give piano lessons and make more money than I do washing dishes, have an easier life, but then again I can’t because the memories are too painful. When the ones I loved needed me most, when it was time to fight, I was off somewhere playing piano for money and completely detached from their needs. That’s so long ago now I barely remember, I’ve blocked it out. Now I am focused on other questions, more pressing concerns, related but brought into the present, since that tragic story was just one among thousands, similar things happen every year, and it’s getting worse.

I am trying to remember the last time I played piano. I am guessing it was about fifteen years ago. But in fact there was no last time, there was no clear decision to stop. Only new obsessions that gradually devoured my days so there was eventually no time for anything else. But, still, I would like to recall the last clear memory I have of sitting in front of a piano to play. There was a competition, it might have been my last but possible there were a few more after. I believe I may have won, or at least come very close. I feel I had made an unusual choice as to what I played, Rachmaninoff or Scriabin. One never wins with unconventional choices but I was past the point of caring. And as I played my thoughts weren’t on the score, weren’t on the notes, weren’t on the beautiful instrument in front of me. All I felt was anger, an anger larger than music, larger than the world. My fingers hit the keys with an intent to smash them, to tear the piano to shreds. I didn’t hear the applause, sat at the piano and stared straight ahead. Someone had to come take me off stage, walk me away from the piano like they were helping an elderly relative up the stairs. I was gone. That perhaps wasn’t the actual last time I played but it might as well have been. My success meant nothing when placed alongside the realities of the day.

Today, while washing dishes, some music came over the radio. There wasn’t a radio in the kitchen, so I’m not sure exactly where it came from, from a car parked on the street just outside the door or from another restaurant kitchen across the alley, but I knew that music, had played it many times. Nonetheless, I could not remember which composer, nor the composition, and felt the melody enter me like a skin I had long ago shed. There was a time when I could have told everything about this music, and now all I knew was that it was something from my past. I listened, always knowing what note would come next, and felt pride at how much I had now forgotten. I had severed myself from the finer things, from sentimental resonances and connections that might later hold me back, might prevent me from doing what I knew needed to be done. And yet I still enjoyed hearing this music, in a rather workmanlike performance by a pianist who I believe had never suffered a day in his life. It was a ghost from the past and I didn’t mind. It said to me that the world still exists.

I must have stopped to listen because moments later my boss was yelling at me, telling me to get back to work, these dishes won’t was themselves, etc. I try to keep my behavior in the kitchen as normal and average as possible, so I chided myself for this moment of drifting away. For the next four hours I washed dishes with absolute calm efficiency. These jobs are only to survive and stay out of sight, a hiding place until the time comes to act. Sometimes I pretend that I don’t miss my former life but this is also a mistake. Of course I miss it. I would be stupid not to. It was so much gentler, so much more pleasant, than the life I live today. It is only a mater of focusing on what is most important, on the urgent matters at hand. Each man has to decide: a pleasant, empty life, or a difficult one but with meaning.

When I got home I was exhausted, as is always the case after a dishwashing shift. I lay in bed but couldn’t sleep, so instead fantasized about the future, what it would be like if we managed to strike down ten billionaires, in seemingly unconnected killings, spread out over the course of several years. How, once the pattern became clear, journalists would speculate, what they might say about such an unprecedented phenomena. Some would of course condemn it, perhaps the press would feel forced to condemn it unanimously, but so many others, people from all walks of life, would feel an excitement difficult to describe, a sudden newfound sense of possibility, the energy of modern violence focused on a cause, towards justice. A warning shot fired against those who wish to debase our world. Of course, all of this is only fantasy. Who know what will actually happen once the piano wire has done its work. But I need these fantasies to stay focused, to maintain hope that my plan, however difficult to achieve, is for the best, that some new energy will be opened through my actions. I need to imagine what is possible.


1.
Allow me to describe a board meeting, not a typical one, but a telling instance nonetheless. Quite early in the meeting a chief marketing consultant, someone new, who I did not know very well, launched into his clearly prepared lines, that sales in some areas were down between two and four per cent, but of course he also had the solution. He spoke for a while, about packaging-marketing synergy, new techniques for making products leap off the shelf, before I interrupted. He wasn’t doing badly, managing to, more or less, hold the interest of all present, but I had no patience for him, the scale of his reflections was too narrow. “There are two ways of playing this,” I carefully explain to the room, “we can try to regain some traction in already played out, oversaturated areas, or we can search out new energies, blast forward into markets that, at the moment, perhaps do not yet even exist. If we think of profits as a map, where on the map is no one else going? This, of course, is where the real gold is to be made. None of this two or three per cent bullshit.”

The room always falls so silent after one of these jags of mine. Everyone feels they should deliver but no one knows what or how. For me, that’s always been the sweet spot, this not knowing, at the foot of a mountain, the only thing ahead an incredibly steep climb. You can barely see the mountain from where you’re standing and have little idea how long or arduous the journey might be. But you know the journey will test you, that something will happen, something good or bad, anything. However, a mountain is the wrong metaphor, because we all know what a mountain is. In these moments we are searching for something we don’t yet know, and as we move towards it we are always unsure whether or not it will actually generate profit. It is a gamble and the more you gamble the more you win.

Slowly the board meeting changes course and brainstorming begins. In the markets we are currently losing traction we have so many products and services available, a millions possible starting points any one of which could suddenly spark some new direction. Of course, a board meeting is not the proper place for this speculation, we have specialists in all of these areas, but I like the board to feel involved, to feel that their ideas matter even when they don’t. A board that feels involved is a board that will rarely turn on you, and I prefer all my operations to be mutiny proof.

There is one other moment from this particular meeting I would like to draw attention too. Agriculture remains one of the four pillars of our business model, and one that is unlikely to falter, since people will always need food. We have patented just slightly over twelve thousand different seed and crop variations over the past twenty-five years and therefore have a substantial stake within the global playing field. Many of our developmental products in this area remain obscure, things that no one wants, yet we believe, sometimes with little or no evidence, that we may be able to generate a certain degree of demand for them in the future. One such file is 122TOC (let’s see if the reader can guess what agricultural product lies behind this abbreviated patent number, and if you look it up on the internet you’re cheating.) 122TOC had become something of a running joke among the board, the result of a lengthy, research-intensive development process the end result of which seemingly has no practical application whatsoever. It is a tough, difficult to grow, inedible, awkwardly shaped plant of purplish hue. (Some might say much like my prose in this book.) At first we thought it might be used to make rope or cloth, but the price point ratios we exorbitant.

Often, at a meeting, when something doesn’t look good, someone might ask whether we’re embarking on another road to 122TOC. But at this particular board meeting the joke took another, perhaps more useful, twist. It was suggested we could set up a dummy corporation, an organization that, for all intents and purposes, appears to be one of our most serious upstart competitors. This ‘rival’ corporation would work to sell 122TOC seeds to farmers who had consistently rejected our products over the years, perhaps branding them as normal strains of organic wheat or rice. When the crops proved monstrous we would sweep in with the solution, offering, free of charge, to remove all strains of 122TOC from their fields, and in the process replacing them with our own genetically modified examples of rice and wheat. Probably nothing will come of the idea. In a way it is too silly and risky to be worth the considerable effort. But it is an interesting proposition, since it does offer up a solution to opening up one of the toughest markets to crack: those who have explicitly refused to make use of our agricultural services, whether for political reasons or simply out of an innate stubbornness (since farmers are nothing if not stubborn, an almost necessary trait in their vocation.)

Some might claim such practices are not ethical, and of course they would have many trenchant arguments in their favor. However, as every child knows, there is a certain charge of pure pleasure in doing something transgressive, in breaking the rules, coloring outside the lines. I won’t deny or underestimate the degree to which this frisson is one of the few things that occasionally makes our board meetings enjoyable. There is no harm in speculating, and I believe it is our very willingness to take such thought experiments as far as possible that helps us remain so competitive. In a dirty fight one must occasionally punch below the belt, though in this particular instance it seems 122TOC had us on the mat, was a complete write-off. Nonetheless, it was our continual hunger to keep searching for some novel use for this completely useless crop that kept me hopeful, let me know that as an organization we were still hungry and curious, because business is only truly exciting when you manage to do the impossible. Whatever the costs of the gamble, they are kept in balance by the intensive pleasures of a job well done.


2. 
Today I have another interview, the second. I spend the morning reviewing my notes, going over the details of everything I know about security and protection. The basic parameters are not so complex. The main rule is always to think of everything, every possibility and danger, anything that might or could go wrong. One group of agents circle the client at closer proximity, maintaining visual or radio contact, all the while intuitively judging what might be a reasonable distance, while another group cover the larger perimeter. You carefully check all hallways and passages, every imaginable hiding place. One sweep before the client arrives and another upon arrival. There are also a vast array of technological gadgets, but they all serve, more or less, two general functions: to comb the area for possible dangers, or to disarm and/or kill possible assailants. I carefully memorize product names and model numbers, using the same mnemonic devices I once used to memorize scores to assign each product its main and secondary functions.

Then there’s the considerable literature on how to avoid future litigation. Some of these documents recommend caution, while others, from what I can see the majority available, promote a more reckless approach. If working for an extremely wealthy client, most documents assume it will be reasonably easy to either pay off, or threaten, the assailants family members and therefore make potential litigation disappear. There are many scenarios concerning how to do so. What is important is to protect the core client at all costs, that is what he is paying for.

I take it all with a grain of salt, memorizing for content, thinking how to put all of these terms in my own mouth, to make them sound natural and convincing. I know, with job interviews, it is the energy you bring to the endeavor that counts most. That one must appear relaxed, confident and ready to take on any job. The interviewers are the boss, so it’s important to strike the right balance of confidence and subservience. I have the confidence to do what I’m told and to do it effectively. I have always had a talent for such situations. I am hungry for it, want the job, want to win, and my energy falls in line with my desire. There are several hours before the interview and I decide to go for a walk, lose myself in the city, let my mind wander. If I keep studying right up until the moment of the interview, I will arrive too tense. It is better to forget for a few hours, let my mind wander.

I find a park, one I didn’t know before, though in fact its not so far from my apartment, and am amazed how far from the chaos of the city the winding path seems to take me. It is a bright sunny day, calm in the park, and I think: this is perfect, this is just what I needed. Sometimes, during quiet moments like this one, I wonder if I could abandon my quixotic undertaking, give it up, and return to living a somewhat normal, though still haunted, existence. I haven’t yet gone so far, in practical terms it would still be possible to turn back. I wonder what else I might do with my life if I were to loosen my grip on this over-determined, single-minded pursuit. But I am not able to wonder about such things for long, since I know, for me, there is no turning back. I have made up my mind and am too stubborn to let anything short of death prevent me from reaching my goal.

The park is beautiful, large leafy trees and flowers in full bloom. I read once that Friedrich Hayek, the forefather of our reigning free market ideology, thought public parks were too socialist, that to enter one should first be charged a fee. But we still have parks. Things get worse but not as quickly as some might like. I don’t really have any positive vision of the future, don’t know what kind of world I’d like to some day live in or if it’s even possible to achieve something better than this. I only know that the billionaires are attacking us, again and again taking measures that serve no other purpose than to increase their own wealth and debase all other aspects of life. And when you are attacked you must fight back, in whatever way you can.



[Unfinished.]



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