People Who Suck: A Selection from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin In the Game (2020)
“I will always remember my encounter with the writer and cultural icon Susan Sontag . . . . Sontag, who was being interviewed, was piqued by the idea of a fellow who ‘studies randomness’ and came to engage me. When she discovered that I was a trader, she blurted out that she was ‘against the market system’ and turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, just to humiliate me . . . while her assistant gave me a look as if I had been convicted of child killing. I sort of justified her behavior in order to forget the incident, imagining that she lived in some rural commune, grew her own vegetables, wrote with pencil and paper, engaged in barter transactions, that type of stuff. No, she did not grow her own vegetables, it turned out.
People in publishing were complaining about her rapacity; she had squeezed her publisher . . . for what would be several million dollars today for a novel. She shared, with a girlfriend, a mansion in New York City, later sold for $28 million. Sontag probably felt that insulting people with money inducted her into some unimpeachable sainthood, exempting her from having skin in the game. It is immoral to be in opposition to the market system and not live (somewhere in Vermont or Northwestern Afghanistan) in a hut or cave isolated from it. But there is worse: It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences. . . .
If you manage to convince yourself that you are right in theory, you don’t really care how your ideas affect others. Your ideas give you a virtuous status that makes you impervious to how they affect others. Likewise, if you believe that you are ‘helping the poor’ by spending money on PowerPoint presentations and international meetings, the type of meetings that lead to more meetings (and PowerPoint presentations) you can completely ignore individuals—the poor become an abstract reified construct that you do not encounter in your real life. Your efforts at conferences give you license to humiliate them in person. . . .
I was recently told that a famous Canadian socialist environmentalist, with whom I was part of a lecture series, abused waiters in restaurants, between lectures on equity, diversity, and fairness. Kids with rich parents talk about ‘class privilege’ at privileged colleges such as Amherst—but in one instance, one of them could not answer Dinesh D’Souza’s simple and logical suggestion: Why don’t you go to the registrar’s office and give your privileged spot to the minority student next in line?”—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin In the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Everyday Life (2020)
