How a Country Chooses Its Fools

So how did the cartoon win? In the summer of 1925, in a hot courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan agreed to defend a law against the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow put him on the stand and took him apart in front of the country. A newspaperman named H. L. Mencken filed dispatches that turned the old orator into a national figure of fun, and the dispatches were funnier than they were fair. Then Bryan died, five days later, and Mencken wrote an obituary that buried the man before the grave was dug. The prose was brilliant. It was also a kind of murder, a reputation killed while the body was still warm. A play came along a generation on, Inherit the Wind, and finished the job. The meme was sealed, and it has been copying itself ever since. 

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Not My Thing

In the spring of 1973, in a public school in Lincoln, Nebraska, a teacher handed me a paper armband and told me to wear it for the rest of the day. Mine was blue, and it carried a single printed letter, an "S." The children with brown eyes wore brown bands lettered "M". No one explained the letters to a room of eight-year-olds. I have spent the rest of my life arriving at what they meant. "M" for Master. "S" for Slave. The next morning the roles reversed, and the children who had ruled became the ruled. No one in that room was Black. The teacher said the lesson was empathy. 

I want to talk today about the book I built out of that morning, and out of fifty years of watching that morning return in new costumes. It is called Not My Thing: How We Teach Cruelty to Cure It, from the Armband to the Diversity Seminar. That armband was one early specimen of a method that has since grown into an industry.

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The Three Boxes

Picture a man in a bright room in a great house. In front of him sit three boxes. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He may open exactly one of them. Open the right box and he marries the cleverest and richest woman in the room and clears the debt closing around his friend's neck. Open either of the others and he leaves forever, sworn never to court another woman as long as he lives. The woman who waits for him loves him, and by the terms of her dead father's will she is forbidden to give him the smallest hint. Music plays. He reads the words cut into the three lids, he talks for a while about the gap between how things look and what they are, and he lays his hand on the dullest of the three, the lead, and wins her. 

That is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, and it may be the most rigged fair contest in the English language. Shakespeare wrote it in the fifteen-nineties. It never closed. You walked through a version of it this morning, and you will walk through another one before you sleep tonight.

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The Sound of a Bought Room

Let me start with a piece of paper. Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card circulated among the opera houses of Italy, a schedule of charges from a claque, one of the applause brigades that worked the great houses of Europe. Approval came in grades, and the grades came at prices. Polite appreciation cost little. Insistence cost more. Down at the luxury end, for a wild ovation at any cost, the price became a sum to be arranged. A psychologist named Robert Cialdini reprinted that tariff decades later in his study of social proof, where it sits among the laboratory findings like a fossil among X-rays, the same animal at two stages of preservation.Now move forward a hundred years. A company in West Palm Beach sold the same product from a drop-down menu, five hundred followers for ten dollars, more than two hundred million of them moved before a newspaper took the operation apart in 2018. The invoice was older than the empire that first printed it.

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The Off Switch

Here is the idea at the center of it. Money has come in two families for about as long as we have had money. There is value that travels by possession: the coin, the note, the bill in your pocket that asks nothing of anyone. And there is value that travels by permission: the tally, the ledger, the account entry that moves only when a chain of institutions agrees to move it. Neither family is wicked. A healthy monetary world has always kept both, because each covers the other's failures. The story of our moment is that the first family is being retired, and the second family is being wired to a switch.

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The Nearest Hand

There is a coin in your pocket right now, and there is an identical coin in someone else's pocket across town, and those two coins are worth different amounts. Same metal, same stamp, same date. The difference between them comes from how each coin arrived. One of them was spent early, while prices still belonged to yesterday. The other arrived late, after the prices had already risen to swallow it. That gap, between the coin in the nearest hand and the coin in the other pocket, is the subject of the book I am holding today.

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The Brittle Self

In the winter of 1393, the King of France gave his court an order that no one knew how to obey. He asked them not to touch him: not to brush against him in a corridor, not to take his arm on the stairs, not to embrace him on his name day. Charles the Sixth had become certain that his body was made of glass, and that one clumsy hand or one careless shoulder would shatter him on the floor of his own palace. He had the front of his clothing reinforced with rods, so that if he fell, the pieces of him might hold together long enough to be gathered up. He was a king at the center of a crowded court, and he spent his days in terror that the people closest to him would break him by accident. It is tempting to file that away as a medieval oddity, a story about one sick man six hundred years gone. 

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