Elizabeth Holmes and The Shell Game

Elizabeth Holmes and the Art of Repentance

In Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, there is a remarkable scene in which David visits a prison and encounters Uriah Heep, a man whose dishonesty and manipulation have finally landed him behind bars.

Heep has become a model prisoner. He is humble, obedient, grateful and apparently repentant. The prison authorities are delighted with his transformation. They proudly present him as evidence that their methods work.

David Copperfield, who knows Heep rather better than they do, is considerably less impressed.

There is something wonderfully unsettling about this scene. Dickens understood that a person who has spent a lifetime manipulating others does not necessarily abandon that talent upon entering prison. He may simply discover that the circumstances now require a different performance.

And that repentance, too, can be performed.

I was reminded of Uriah Heep while watching a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes titled You Can See Everything.

An interesting title. Go and play the shell game. You can see everything there, too.

Holmes, the founder of Theranos, who persuaded some of the most powerful and experienced people in America to believe in a medical technology that did not work as advertised.

What astonished me about Theranos was not simply the scale of the deception. It was how long it continued after serious evidence had emerged that something was terribly wrong. Again and again, I found myself wondering: How is this still going on? How can she still have these people defending her?

The First Human

The human brain is a peculiar piece of equipment. Nobody ordered it, nobody got to choose the model, and it arrived without an instruction manual. One day you discover that you exist, and before you know it, you're thinking about death, the infinity of the universe, or why your neighbour insists on mowing his lawn on a Sunday morning. Evolution has given us an organ that apparently doesn't know when to stop. And I consider that one of its greatest achievements.

One could argue, of course, that nature made a mistake. That it equipped an animal whose original tasks were simply to find food, avoid danger, and reproduce with a consciousness that reaches far beyond those requirements. A consciousness capable of observing itself, recognising its own mortality, and asking questions for which there may be no satisfactory answers. But why should that be a mistake? Just because an ability develops beyond its original purpose doesn't make it a design flaw. A bird singing when no female is listening is not necessarily a failed reproductive programme.

Perhaps our fundamental mistake is that we still look at life as though it were supposed to serve a particular purpose. We ask what consciousness is good for, as if it were a tool required to justify its existence before some committee. But perhaps consciousness isn't a tool. Perhaps it is what happens when nature exceeds its own expectations.

A stone lies on the ground. A tree grows. A dog runs through the forest, following a scent. A human being can do all those things, but can also stop halfway through the forest and wonder why he is there in the first place. He can look at the sky and imagine what that same place looked like ten thousand years ago. He can wonder whether the dog is happy. And then he can go home and write a poem about it that nobody wants to read.

What an extraordinary waste. And what an extraordinary abundance.

Switzerland, a Prison?

A few days ago, I came across a short video from Switzerland. Perhaps fifty seconds long. The first time I watched it, I was convinced the whole thing had to be staged. It was almost too perfect, like a little satire about Switzerland in which the screenwriter had decided to squeeze every national cliché into less than a minute.

I watched it again. And again.

No. This wasn't satire. Nobody was acting. It had really happened.

Finally, a Problem

I am a social worker and a single father. My daughter lives with me at least 90 percent of the time, probably closer to 95 percent. That's our everyday life, and I've long since grown accustomed to it. There's always something to do. Something needs to be organised, taken care of, discussed, or decided. Sometimes it's something important, sometimes something trivial. In any case, hardly a day goes by without life making some sort of demand on me.

Then my daughter's mother took her away for a week's holiday.

I happened to be on holiday myself. An entire week in which I didn't have to drive anyone anywhere, organise anything, or accommodate anyone else's schedule. I could get up whenever I wanted, eat whenever I wanted, and do whatever I pleased. The sort of existence millions of people probably dream about.

On the first day, I thought it was wonderful.

On the second day, too.

By the third day, I began wondering what on earth I was supposed to do with all this freedom.

Of course, I could have read a book. Or watched a film. Or gone swimming. I live in a region where lakes, swimming pools, and recreational opportunities are hardly in short supply. But somehow, none of it particularly appealed to me. The world had apparently decided to leave me alone for an entire week.

A remarkably inconsiderate decision.

What If Society Can't Get Much Better?

We have grown accustomed to judging society by its failures. Wars, violence, mental illness, loneliness, political radicalization, broken families, inequality, failing schools, drugs, crime. The list can be extended almost indefinitely. Open a newspaper in the morning and you could easily conclude that the experiment called civilization is approaching its final collapse.

But perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

We keep asking why society does not work better.

We might occasionally ask why it works at all.

The Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe did not have an especially flattering view of human beings. He regarded human consciousness as something of an evolutionary excess. We possess mental capacities far beyond what an animal needs to eat, reproduce and avoid being eaten. We know that we are going to die. We can imagine future suffering, relive past suffering, and observe ourselves doing both.

A deer presumably does not stand in a field at three in the morning wondering whether it said something embarrassing at a Christmas party twelve years ago.

A human being can.

Zapffe believed that we therefore developed various strategies simply to endure our own consciousness. We repress, anchor ourselves in beliefs and institutions, keep ourselves busy, distract ourselves, sublimate. Work, family, religion, art, politics and perhaps even philosophy are not merely parts of life. They also help us cope with knowing what life is.

If Zapffe is even partly right, a rather strange thought follows.

Kennedy’s Been Shot. Please Tell Me It Wasn’t One of Our Own Men

I am currently reading The Ghost by Jefferson Morley, a book about James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary and notorious counterintelligence chief. It is a fascinating book. Angleton inhabited a world in which suspicion was practically part of the job description, where intelligence services watched other intelligence services while simultaneously trying to determine whether they themselves had been penetrated. A world of double agents, missing files, secret operations and men who sometimes seemed incapable of telling the truth even when the truth would have been simpler.

Then I stopped at one passage.

It concerns November 22, 1963. John F. Kennedy has just been shot in Dallas. Morley describes Angleton being called later that day to a meeting in the office of Richard Helms, one of the most powerful men in the CIA. Then comes a remarkable sentence:

“The deputy director was worried that CIA personnel might be involved in the killing of JFK.”

Read that again.

The president of the United States has just been murdered, and according to Morley, one of the first thoughts occurring to a senior CIA official is that perhaps his own people did it.

Read literally, the scene is almost comical. Helms appears to react as though the CIA were some unruly bunch of teenage boys who had been left alone for the weekend.

Jesus Christ. What have the boys done now?

The Man Who Pulled the Plug

In mid-October, I was on my way for a swim at Bruggerhorn in St. Margrethen, a small lake with a campsite near the Austrian border. It was one of those autumn days when the swimming season has long been over for most people, but not quite for me. Near the campsite, I came across an elderly man, perhaps in his mid-seventies. He had a reddish face and the sort of appearance that makes it difficult to tell whether it comes from a long life, a fondness for good wine, or a general dissatisfaction with humanity.

Before I could say anything, he called out that he had pulled the plug. There was no water left in the lake.

I hadn't asked him anything. I simply wanted to go swimming. But apparently I looked like someone who ought to be informed that an entire lake had just been drained.

"Well," I said, "I suppose I'll have to swim without getting wet."

He laughed. Evidently, he had expected a response, though perhaps not that one. We had never met before, yet within seconds we had created a little comedy. He had suspended the laws of the world for a moment, and I saw no particular reason to restore them.

As I walked on, it occurred to me how much the man resembled W. C. Fields. Not merely because of his red face. There was that peculiar mixture of mischief, insolence, and grumpy dignity that made Fields so unmistakable. As though life had just presented him with another inconvenience, one he thoroughly disapproved of but found entirely unsurprising.

A Human Being Is Not a Diagnosis

We increasingly live in a world in which almost every form of human behaviour is given a psychological explanation. Every attitude, every decision, and every conflict can apparently be traced back to some psychological pattern.

Someone who avoids intimacy probably has attachment issues. Someone who seeks approval may suffer from low self-esteem. Someone who challenges authority might have a problem with authority. And someone who refuses to conform may be displaying signs of a problematic personality structure.

Things become particularly interesting when uncomfortable opinions are no longer treated as arguments but as symptoms. Instead of engaging with what someone says, we turn our attention to why they might be saying it.

This can certainly be illuminating. But it can also be an elegant way of avoiding the argument altogether.

Perhaps we have grown so accustomed to explaining human behaviour psychologically that we have overlooked a crucial distinction: being able to explain a person does not mean we have understood them.

And this is where philosophy enters the picture.

Counterintelligence in Everyday Life

James Jesus Angleton, the longtime head of counterintelligence at the CIA, had an unusual intellectual background for a man in his profession. As a student at Yale, he edited a literary magazine and developed a fascination with modern poetry, particularly the work of T. S. Eliot and William Empson. He was interested in ambiguity, hidden meanings, and the curious way in which context can change what a statement actually means.

Later, he encountered the same problem in a rather more dangerous setting.

A piece of information could be true and still serve the purpose of deception. A source could be perfectly honest and yet have been deceived himself. Someone might tell you something entirely accurate precisely because he wanted you to draw a particular conclusion from it.

Counterintelligence, then, was not merely concerned with what one knew. It was equally concerned with how that knowledge had come about and why it had reached you in the first place.

Someone once described Angleton's field with a remarkable analogy:

Counterintelligence is to intelligence what epistemology is to philosophy.

Behind this rather academic formulation lies a simple question:

How do we know what we think we know?

Angleton borrowed an image from T. S. Eliot. He spoke of a wilderness of mirrors, a place where reflections become so entangled that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real from what merely appears to be real.

You don't need to work for an intelligence agency to find yourself in such a place.

Suppose a colleague tells me that Peter is an idiot.

What Was Hitler’s Word Worth?

In a recent conversation with Jacob Rees-Mogg, Tucker Carlson asked a question that quickly became more radical than it first appeared. Why had Britain gone to war with Germany in 1939, and what had Britain actually gained from doing so?

Carlson did not merely question the wisdom of the decision. He rejected the idea that Hitler had simply invaded Poland arbitrarily, pointing out that parts of Poland had been German territory before the Treaty of Versailles. He used this to challenge what he regarded as the conventional account of an unprovoked invasion. Britain, he argued, had involved itself in a conflict that ultimately helped destroy both its empire and its position in the world.

Rees-Mogg pushed back much more strongly. He rejected Carlson’s portrayal of Britain as the aggressor, pointing to Britain’s commitments to countries that had been attacked and arguing that Germany would eventually have attacked Britain itself. He described the Second World War as a classic struggle between good and evil and, at one point, reached for the familiar line that otherwise the British would now be speaking German.

Carlson’s answer to that was essentially: who cares?

The exchange became heated enough for Rees-Mogg to tell Carlson that he was “verging on defending Hitler.” Carlson responded sarcastically that perhaps he was a secret Nazi.

Strip away the provocation, however, and there is a serious historical question underneath it. Hitler did repeatedly indicate that he preferred an accommodation with Britain to war with it. Britain did emerge from the war victorious but enormously weakened. And it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether refusing accommodation with Germany was therefore the right strategic decision.

But Rees-Mogg’s weakest answer was also his most memorable one. Britain did not need to fear that everyone would literally end up speaking German.

There was a much stronger answer available.

What was Hitler’s word worth?

The Royals, Just Like Us

There are moments when history makes you wonder whether some of Europe's great political catastrophes might have been avoided with better public relations.

I had one of those moments when I recently learned something remarkable about the Prince and Princess of Wales.

They do the dishes.

Kate washes. William dries. They are, Kate tells us, “a good team.”

I had always assumed that somewhere within the considerable machinery surrounding the British royal family there might be a person whose professional responsibilities extended to plates. Apparently not. After dinner, Kate rolls up her sleeves, William finds a tea towel, and together they confront the remains of supper like any other married couple.

Perhaps they really do. Why wouldn't they?

What interests me is that somebody thinks we need to know.

Modern royalty has discovered something that its predecessors understood far too late. If you possess palaces, estates, staff and inherited privilege, you need not actually live like ordinary people. You merely need to provide regular evidence that you occasionally do ordinary things.

Looking back, one realizes how many monarchs suffered unnecessarily from failing to understand this.

Marie Antoinette, for example, had a catastrophic image problem.

Hide Behind the Protocol

This morning I read a strange piece of news from Tennessee. The state had tried to execute a woman by lethal injection. Two doses of pentobarbital had been administered, yet she was still alive. Eventually the execution was abandoned and she was taken to hospital.

My first reaction was not particularly philosophical. It was simply: How can you possibly fail at this?

Whatever one thinks about capital punishment, human beings have been remarkably successful at killing one another for thousands of years. There are certainly simpler ways of doing it. Yet somewhere along the way we decided that a modern state should not merely execute a person. It should execute a procedure.

That distinction is more important than it first appears.

An execution by firing squad makes the nature of the act rather difficult to misunderstand. People aim weapons at another person and kill them. Lethal injection transforms the same intention into something resembling a medical procedure. There is a bed, an intravenous line, chemicals, dosages, monitoring and a protocol. The violence has not disappeared. It has acquired administration.

This creates a peculiar problem. Procedures work wonderfully until reality does something that was not anticipated by the person who wrote them.

In Tennessee, the prescribed doses were administered, but the prisoner remained alive. At some point the protocol simply ran out of instructions. The procedure had reached its end. The person had not.

Freedom Without a Price Tag

During Covid, I learned something about freedom. The strange thing is that I barely noticed it at the time.

I was unvaccinated, and within a remarkably short period my life became smaller. I could no longer go to certain restaurants, hotels were out too, and travel became difficult or impossible. The restaurants did not bother me much. Hotels mattered even less. But not being able to travel touched something different.

It was less the journey itself than the possibility of it. Crossing a border. Getting into the car and driving somewhere else. Not having to wonder whether I would be allowed to book a hotel room in another country. Things I had barely thought about before suddenly became conditions.

Perhaps a large part of our freedom consists of things we do not even recognize as freedom while they are still available to us.

What surprises me almost more today than the restrictions themselves is how quickly I got used to them.

Life became smaller, so I arranged myself within the smaller life.

Swiss Problems

Swiss Problems: Switzerland Dispatches Police After Child Loses Booger

While wars continue, governments quarrel and international institutions struggle with the usual catalogue of human misery, Switzerland faced a problem of its own this week.

It began with a child's Nasenböögg.

This is a real story.

A woman was driving with her two young daughters from Konolfingen towards Interlaken. Near Wimmis, one of the children announced that she had a Nasenböögg and asked her mother to get rid of it.

For readers outside Switzerland, Nasenböögg is a Swiss German term for what English speakers would generally call a booger.

There was no tissue available.

The mother had recently cleaned the car and apparently did not want the Nasenböögg deposited somewhere inside it. She therefore tried to flick it out of the window.

Unfortunately, it stuck to her hand.

Real Life

Not long ago I came across an Instagram profile in which someone wrote that they were interested in real life.

I liked the phrase immediately. Perhaps because I flatter myself that I am interested in real life too. But the expression stayed with me, because once we speak of real life, we quietly admit the existence of another kind.

Unreal life, presumably.

And it occurred to me that we now spend a rather large part of our lives there.

Instagram itself would seem a reasonable place to begin. People photograph their food, their holidays, their children, their faces; they choose one image out of twenty, improve it, crop it, remove whatever does not belong in the story, and then wait to see what other people make of this small exhibition.

It is tempting to say that this has little to do with life.

Yet there sits a real person with a real telephone, spending twenty real minutes, perhaps forty, perhaps two hours, from a life that will not be extended by the amount spent on Instagram.

So already the distinction becomes inconvenient.

Take a child who wakes up, turns on a computer and plays for twelve or fourteen hours before going to bed again. My instinct is the conventional one. I want to say: Go outside. Meet someone. Do something. Live.

But he has been living.

Ukraine: Where Are the Children of the Rich?

I do not always have myself entirely under control. Occasionally I find myself on a news website, or on something that looks sufficiently like a news website to make the distinction academic. This happened to me the other day.

I saw a headline. I did not even read the article.

Perhaps this is becoming my McLuhan method of journalism: why bother with the content when the medium has already done most of the work?

The headline was an interview question addressed to Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv:

“Where are the children of the rich politicians fighting, Mr Klitschko?”

I have no particular desire to defend Klitschko. Nor is this an essay about whether one should admire Zelenskyy, support the Ukrainian government, sympathise with Russia, send more weapons, send fewer weapons, negotiate tomorrow morning, or fight until Thursday afternoon. There are already enough people who can explain the war in Ukraine to you with complete confidence.

I am not one of them.

When the Solution Invents the Problem

We like to think that institutions exist to solve problems, and very often they do. Yet institutions also have another, less obvious tendency: they begin to define problems in forms that can be handled with the tools already available to them.

This is not necessarily cynical, and in most cases it is not even conscious. A school cannot conduct family policy, a hospital cannot create friendships, an employment office cannot generate a regional economy, and an immigration authority cannot bring a war to an end. Every institution has a mandate, and without such limits it could hardly function at all.

The difficulty begins when those limits start to shape not only what an institution can do, but what it is able to see. At that point the intervention no longer simply follows the diagnosis. The intervention itself begins to influence the diagnosis.

Take an unemployed man who goes to an employment office. His CV is revised, his cover letters are improved, he attends courses, practises interviews and perhaps receives coaching intended to improve his confidence or application strategy. There is nothing wrong with any of this. A good application can genuinely make a difference.

But suppose the application is not really the problem. Perhaps the man is fifty-eight years old and spent thirty years in one industry until the company closed. Perhaps employers now demand qualifications that were never required when he entered the profession. Perhaps younger applicants are cheaper, expected to remain longer, or are simply regarded as more flexible. Perhaps there are hardly any suitable jobs left in his region at all.

No amount of coaching can create those jobs.

Meta-Montaigne: The Eye Cannot See Itself

I love Montaigne. I have read the Essays from beginning to end at least twice and keep returning to them, not because he offers a system, but because he offers something closer to a method of living. He can begin with horses, thumbs, smells, drunkenness, or some Roman anecdote and somehow arrive at death, friendship, education, or human nature. Even the word essai contains the method: an attempt, a trial, an exercise. Try something, see what happens, change your mind, try again. Perhaps that is why I have always felt such an affinity with him.

But Montaigne was only human, and this becomes particularly interesting when we look at one of the most famous experiments of his life: his retreat. In 1571, not yet forty, he withdrew from public life to his estate. In his tower he had his books, quotations painted on the beams, and apparently the intention of spending the remaining years of his life in liberty, tranquillity, and contemplation.

It is a beautiful image: Montaigne in his tower. Unfortunately, Montaigne himself seems to have had some difficulty living up to it.

My Life Is My Hobby

People occasionally ask me what my hobbies are. It comes up in those conversations where two people are trying to establish fairly quickly what sort of person they are dealing with.

I have never been very good at answering.

Not because I have none. Quite the opposite. I swim, I read, I write, I travel, I have become interested in philosophy, history, films, political events, people I meet by accident, and subjects of which, three days earlier, I knew absolutely nothing. Some of these interests stay with me for years, others disappear after a week, and occasionally I try something only to discover that I do not like it at all.

That seems useful too.

What I have never felt much need to do is turn these things into identities. I swim, but I do not particularly think of myself as a swimmer. I ride a motorcycle, but I do not feel obliged to become a motorcyclist. I read philosophy and literature more than is probably reasonable, but even here I hesitate to call reading my hobby.

Perhaps the difficulty lies partly in the word itself. A hobby sounds like a fenced-off section of life. There is work, there is family, there are obligations, and then, somewhere to the side, there is a little recreational compartment where one keeps cycling, photography, hiking, cooking, tennis, or reading.

I have never quite experienced life that way.

My life itself seems to be the hobby.

Not Next Time

After Covid, a lot of people eventually said something you hear surprisingly often once something is over: Next time, we won’t do it like that again. We won’t let ourselves get swept up so quickly. Not by fear, not by outrage, not by enthusiasm. We’ll look first. We’ll think for ourselves. We won’t simply join in because everyone else is doing it.

It sounds reasonable. The problem is that next time never looks like last time.

Covid does not come back with the same name, the same images, and the same political arguments. Next time might be a football World Cup. An election. A scandal. Or something completely harmless. A solar eclipse, for example.

I watched this recently with some curiosity. Suddenly everyone was busy with it. People went outside, took pictures of the sky, sent each other messages and asked: “Can you see it too?” My daughter was bombarded with WhatsApp messages. Classmates posted photos. The same excitement seemed to be everywhere.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with a solar eclipse.

Growth Through Friction

Mandeville had an uncomfortable idea: a society does not live economically only from its virtues, but also from its imperfections. Vanity keeps tailors in business. Illness keeps doctors busy. Conflict gives work to lawyers. What appears morally or socially as a flaw can generate economic activity.

Perhaps this idea can be applied to modern service economies.

A society can grow not only because it produces more. It can also grow because it has more problems to deal with.

At first, there is nothing remarkable about this. After a hailstorm, roofs need to be repaired. More crime creates additional work for the police, private security and the courts. Cyberattacks increase the demand for IT security. Illness creates demand for medical services. In all these cases, economic activity is generated.

But this does not mean that society has become wealthier because of the underlying damage.

This is where the distinction between growth and prosperity becomes important.

When Dissent Becomes Conformity

Modern Western societies have a peculiar relationship with dissent.

We admire the person who questions. Schools teach critical thinking. Universities celebrate independent minds. Companies want employees who “challenge assumptions.” Liberal societies understand themselves as communities of autonomous individuals rather than obedient subjects.

The idea reaches back to the Enlightenment. Kant gave it its famous formulation: Sapere aude — have the courage to use your own understanding.

The word courage matters. Thinking for yourself becomes interesting precisely when doing so is uncomfortable. It is easy to tell someone to question authority in the abstract. It is considerably harder when the authority in question is your government, your employer, your profession, your university, your friends, or simply everybody whose respect you would rather keep.

There is a German word for courage that comes without such a price: Gratismut. Literally, something like “courage for free.” It describes the bravery of taking a supposedly courageous position when taking it costs you nothing. You challenge an authority everybody around you already dislikes or defend an opinion for which your own group will applaud you.

There may be nothing wrong with the position itself. The interesting question is why expressing it should count as courage.

There are, I think, two different problems here. The first concerns what becomes thinkable. The second concerns what becomes courageous.

Consider an ordinary workplace.

Your Thing Is Kind of Slow

A few days ago, the timing chain on my motorcycle snapped.

The bike had very low mileage, absurdly low mileage for that kind of failure, but there it was: dead. So suddenly I was back on a bicycle.

One evening the shops were already closed, and I had to ride to a 24-hour Migros, one of Switzerland’s big supermarket chains, instantly recognizable here by its orange signs. A 24-hour Migros is the sort of place that seems partly designed to reassure you that civilization has not completely collapsed after 8 p.m.

On the way back, I saw an older man in a battery-powered wheelchair struggling in the middle of the road. Something had fallen, or he had stopped for some reason, and I helped him a little.

His wheelchair was moving painfully slowly.

So I told him.

“Your thing is kind of slow.”

He said, “Yeah, I’m out of breath.”

The Product Is Shopping Too

Not long ago, I went on a date with a woman.

We took a walk around a lake.

She was in her early fifties and had three children. One of them was fourteen, right in the middle of puberty, and from the way she described it, the relationship between mother and daughter was not exactly easy at the moment.

None of that bothered me particularly.

People around fifty rarely come without baggage. Children, former marriages, complicated families, careers, strange habits, old injuries, mortgages, or a dog that cannot be left alone for more than three hours. Anyone looking for a person without a history is probably searching in the wrong age bracket.

Things became more interesting after that.

Throwing Snowballs at the World

When I was living in Kenya, I read Ivo Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicle, and one of its characters stayed with me.

Amédée des Fossés is a young Frenchman attached to the consulate in Bosnia, surrounded by people whose habits, assumptions and social rules are not his own. He could easily have responded in the traditional expatriate manner: by remaining French in the most tedious possible sense, constantly measuring everything around him against the way things were done at home.

Instead, he becomes curious.

He listens to how people speak. He picks up expressions. He notices their jokes, their habits, their little verbal rituals. And occasionally he throws their own sayings back at them.

People like him for it.

Not because he has become Bosnian. He has not. He has simply understood something useful about entering another world: you can spend your time standing outside it, or you can begin to play with what you find there.

I recognized him immediately because, without having thought much about it, I had already begun doing something similar in Kenya.

Life became easier once I stopped insisting that people behave according to rules I had brought with me. If someone said something strange, I learned how to answer. If there was a local expression, I remembered it. If people teased me, I teased them back.

There were little linguistic doors everywhere. Most of them were insignificant. A phrase, a joke, an unexpected reply. But each offered the same choice: you could remain outside, or you could walk through.

What interested me about des Fossés was not simply that he adapted well to another culture. It was the attitude underneath it. Years later I would recognize something similar in Montaigne.

Replacing God With Followers

Leo Braudy describes in *The Frenzy of Renown* something much older than Instagram.

People want to be seen.

Alexander the Great did not need followers. He had chroniclers. Roman generals staged triumphs. Kings commissioned statues. Poets hoped their names would still be spoken long after they were dead.

The technology changes.

The need changes remarkably little.

Fame, after all, means something peculiar: other people should know that I exist. Better still, they should know that it matters that I exist.

An audience confirms my importance.

But human applause has one disadvantage.

It fades.

Ten thousand people know who you are. Why not a hundred thousand?

A hundred thousand know you. Why not a million?

There is no obvious point at which enough people have watched.

Then Christianity arrived with a rather elegant solution to the problem.

Perhaps you do not need many followers.

Perhaps you need only one.

God.

A Hierarchy of Seriousness

There are things in life that deserve to be taken seriously.

A child is ill. Someone you love is in danger. A friend dies. A family breaks apart. A decision may genuinely alter the course of another person’s life.

These are not occasions for irony or clever detachment. They are occasions for seriousness.

The strange thing is that we often use the same emotional machinery for almost everything else.

A delayed train. A bureaucratic letter. A rude cashier. A failed plan. A motorcycle that may or may not be worth buying. A conversation that landed slightly differently than we hoped.

Somehow the machinery starts up anyway.

We analyze, anticipate, rehearse, interpret. We assign consequences. We construct possible futures. A minor inconvenience acquires weight, then meaning, then sometimes an entire philosophy.

Perhaps one reason modern life feels heavier than it needs to is that we have lost the hierarchy.

Talk to Strangers!

This may sound like a rather modest challenge.

I decided to start talking to strangers.

Not for dating.

Not for networking.

Not because I need anything from them.

Just to see whether I can start a small conversation with almost anyone.

In Switzerland, this is more interesting than it sounds.

What Do I Know When the Machine Knows for Me?

Montaigne asked one of philosophy’s smallest and most durable questions:

Que sais-je?

What do I know?

In the age of artificial intelligence, that question has become newly urgent.

AI can now produce an answer to almost anything in seconds. It can defend a position, attack it, summarize the debate, generate counterarguments, cite sources, and sound remarkably certain while doing so.

That creates an obvious danger.

If I already believe immigration is disastrous, I can ask an AI to explain why.

It will.

If I believe immigration is essential to Europe’s future, I can ask it to explain that instead.

It will do that too.

The machine has not necessarily discovered the truth.

It may simply have understood what kind of argument I wanted.

Confirmation bias is ancient. Human beings have always searched for evidence that supports what they already believe.

What AI changes is the cost.

The Chätsy Effect

Mark Twain once wrote:

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.”

That was in 1887.

Twain had one decisive advantage.

He had never met Roman Chätsy.

Roman is walking down Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. Headphones in. Good mood. A Swiss television presenter sticks a microphone in front of him.

What are you listening to?

A podcast.

About what?

AI. Private credit. Markets.

Everything that makes markets go around, right?

Right.

A wonderful word.

It ends a sentence without requiring absolute certainty that the sentence has arrived anywhere.

On Using Tinder for Executive Research

There are sentences that should be kept in museums.

Not because they are especially wise.

Because they show the exact moment language leaves reality and hides in a Swiss mountain bunker.

A former chief executive of one of Switzerland’s largest banks is back in court again. The accusations are pretty serious: hidden business interests, questionable deals, private expenses paid by the company, expensive travel, nightclubs, strip clubs, hotels.

Complicated stuff indeed.

Corporate law is complicated.

Accounting is complicated.

Conflicts of interest are complicated.

Tinder is not complicated.

So the judge asks the banker about a Tinder encounter.

Freedom Has No Reset Button

I had another one of my weak moments and opened a tabloid.

The great sensation of the day was that a mid-forties influencer now had a six-pack.

Fair enough.

What interested me more was the philosophy attached to it:

“Change your energy and your habits. Create a new identity. Just make the decision. Every day, you can choose again who you want to be.”

It sounds uplifting.

Philosophically, it is rather thin.

Because life does not happen in a vacuum.

Of course people can change. They can lose weight, become stronger, learn new skills, leave bad habits behind, change careers, move countries, rebuild relationships, and sometimes alter the course of their lives quite dramatically.

But we do not wake up in the morning as blank pages.

Multiculturalism Needs a “We”

The best vision of a multicultural society is not one in which people erase their differences. It is one in which people with different histories decide to build something together.

One person brings a language, another a religion, another memories of another country. In an open society, nobody should have to surrender their past at the border. Difference can enrich a country. It can widen its imagination, its habits, its food, its music, and even its understanding of what a good life can be.

But diversity alone does not create a community.

A society is more than people occupying the same territory. It begins when people accept some responsibility for one another.

Perhaps this was the weakness of one version of multiculturalism. It confused tolerance with asking very little of people. Come as you are. Live as you wish. The state will provide the rules, and peaceful coexistence will somehow take care of itself.

But a country is not a hotel.

Change the Context

A few days ago, I bought a second-hand wetsuit for almost nothing.

I want to swim in natural lakes more often this autumn. Before then, I needed to know whether the suit fit.

It was the middle of summer. The temperature outside had reached about thirty-four degrees Celsius. I live in an old wooden house that traps heat on days like this.

The plan was simple. Put the wetsuit on. Check the fit. Take it off.

Getting into it was surprisingly easy.

Getting out was not.

The suit gripped my shoulders so tightly that I became stuck. I pulled harder. I twisted my arms. I tried one movement after another.

Nothing worked.

The thick neoprene trapped my body heat. Each minute made the room feel hotter.

My daughter was not with me. Almost everyone in the house and the surrounding neighbourhood had gone away for the holidays. No one nearby could simply come over and help.

If I failed to get out of the suit, I had only one realistic option. I would have to walk out into the street, trapped in a wetsuit, and ask a complete stranger to pull me free.

For the first time, I thought: This is becoming a problem.

Moral Theatre

There are professions in which you are asked what you can do.

And there are professions in which you are asked who you are.

Social work belongs unmistakably to the second category.

Anyone applying for a position as a social worker will sooner or later be asked:

“Why did you become a social worker?”

The question sounds harmless. Yet it often asks for more than professional motivation. The applicant is not merely expected to explain a career choice, but to account for his moral origins.

An engineer is rarely asked why engineering became his calling. An accountant does not need to reveal her life story to justify working with numbers. A pilot can say, “I simply love flying,” without anyone doubting his ability to land an aircraft safely.

In social work, a different logic seems to apply.

It is often not enough to say:

“I work well with people. I am good at this profession. And it allows me to earn a living.”

That sounds too sober. Too professional.

What seems to be missing is a moral narrative.

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The Sleepwalkers

Today, on a Sunday, I only wanted to buy a few yogurts.

Instead, I found myself watching a small experiment in human nature.

A few weeks ago, the first 24-hour Migros supermarket in Switzerland opened in my village. There are no cashiers, no staff standing around to help. You scan your loyalty card or a QR code to enter, pick up your groceries, pay at the self-checkout, and leave. It is a system so simple that it could be explained to almost anyone in half a minute.

When I arrived, about ten people were standing outside the entrance.

They were not talking much. They were simply waiting.

Some held their phones against the scanner. Others tried their loyalty cards from different angles. They looked at the machine, looked at each other, then tried again. The bright afternoon sun had apparently made the scanner unreliable.

Yet the door kept opening.

Context Is the Real Product

A few weeks ago, the first 24-hour Migros store in Switzerland opened in my town. It is a small supermarket without staff. You enter by scanning your Cumulus card or an app. Curious to see how it worked, I went there on the opening day.

Instead of finding people shopping, I found a crowd standing outside the entrance. Nobody could get in.

The reason was almost comical. The scanner had been installed in such a way that the morning sun shone directly onto it, making it almost impossible to read the cards. Apparently the system had been tested extensively—except under the rather ordinary condition that the sun shines during the day.

I later wrote a short comment about the incident. Not only because of the faulty scanner, but because something else struck me. Why build an elaborate access control system if anyone can simply walk in behind somebody who is leaving? On paper, the system looked sophisticated. In reality it could be bypassed with almost no effort.

A local newspaper later mentioned the incident as nothing more than a technical problem during the opening, and I assumed that was the end of the story.

The Courage to Intervene

One of the first things I learned as a social worker was that techniques are overrated. Not because they are useless. Every profession needs methods, concepts and frameworks. They help us organise experience and give younger professionals something to build upon instead of forcing every generation to begin from scratch. But after sitting with hundreds of people over the years, another realisation slowly emerged. The same technique can produce completely different results depending on who uses it.

Some practitioners know every model by heart. They can explain every theory, every intervention and every assessment tool with impressive precision. Yet when they sit down with a client, very little happens. The conversation feels mechanical. Every question is technically correct, yet the person sitting opposite never really enters the room. Then someone else comes along. Perhaps they know less theory. Perhaps they could not even explain exactly what they are doing. But within minutes something changes. The client relaxes. The conversation becomes easier. Trust begins to emerge almost before either of them notices it. Whatever that difference is, it cannot be found in the manual alone.

Over time I realised that we spend countless hours learning techniques but surprisingly little time asking a much more uncomfortable question: who is the person using them?

The Pilgrimage

I have been listening to a lecture series by the historian Teofilo Ruiz. His own life is remarkable. As a young man in Cuba, he joined the revolution against Batista. When he became disillusioned with the Castro regime, he opposed it, was imprisoned, and eventually left his country to begin again in the United States. He worked ordinary jobs, studied at night, and eventually became one of America's foremost historians of the Middle Ages.

Perhaps that is why I enjoy listening to him so much. He does not speak like someone who merely studies history. He speaks like someone who has travelled through it.

In one lecture he made a passing remark that has refused to leave me. He spoke about pilgrimage, not simply as the medieval journey to Santiago or Jerusalem, but as a way of understanding life itself. It was almost an aside, the sort of comment that could easily disappear into the next sentence. Yet it lingered. I found myself thinking about it long after the lecture had ended.

It made me wonder whether a pilgrimage has ever really been about the destination. We tend to imagine it as movement through space: roads, mountains, shrines and sacred cities. But perhaps the real destination has always been the traveller. Perhaps the road matters because of what it slowly changes in the person walking it.

Oversteering

Yesterday, while I was on holiday in Istria, Croatia, a man suddenly collapsed in the restaurant where we were having dinner.

He lost consciousness twice. During the second collapse he was completely unconscious. Within seconds, people around him began to panic. His partner immediately reached for a glass of water. She was convinced that the heat was to blame and that he simply had not been drinking enough. In her mind, the explanation was already settled. He was dehydrated, and the obvious solution was to make him drink.

I stopped her.

An unconscious person cannot safely swallow. Trying to force water into someone in that state can cause them to choke and block their airway. In trying to solve what she believed was the problem, she was on the verge of creating a far more dangerous one.

The incident stayed with me for the rest of the evening.

Switzerland Should Not Exist

Years ago, while studying in Zurich, I wrote a paper about William Tell.

At the time, I argued that Tell was one of the key figures holding Switzerland together. Here was a country divided by language, religion, culture, and geography, yet somehow united by a shared story. Tell, I wrote, provided a common symbol around which Swiss identity could form.

Looking back, I am no longer convinced.

In fact, I suspect I had the relationship backwards.

Not because myths are unimportant. Nations need stories. Shared narratives matter. They help people imagine themselves as part of a larger whole.

But I had mistaken the story for the foundation.

The older I get, the more I suspect that William Tell explains far less about Switzerland than most Swiss people would like to believe.

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask

At some point, I realized that I am often preoccupied with a different question than most people.

Not because I am particularly philosophical.

But because I am a social worker who takes his profession seriously.

When someone sits across from me and says, “My life isn't working.”

I can immediately reach for interventions. Program A. Program B. Coaching. Therapy. Occupational support. Integration measures. Conditions and requirements.

There is no shortage of those.

Our society has no shortage of programs, concepts, and interventions.

But before I do anything, a much more fundamental question presents itself:

What is actually going on here?

The Goal Is Not Obedience

One of the first disappointments of childhood is discovering that your parents do not know nearly as much as you once believed. For a time, parents appear almost omniscient. They know where everything is, how things work, and what to do when problems arise. To a young child, they seem remarkably certain about the world.

Eventually, however, the illusion begins to crack. Children notice that adults disagree with one another. They discover that their parents make mistakes. They realize that many decisions are made without certainty and that much of adulthood consists of navigating situations for which there are no obvious answers. What looked like wisdom often turns out to be a mixture of experience, judgment, guesswork, and luck.

At that point, parents face a choice. Some attempt to preserve the illusion. They conceal uncertainty, present judgments as facts, and maintain an appearance of confidence even when they are unsure themselves. I have generally chosen a different approach.

This is not because I believe children should be burdened with adult concerns. Quite the opposite. Children should not become therapists for their parents, nor should they be asked to carry emotional burdens that belong to adults. There is, however, an important distinction between sharing one's burdens and sharing one's reasoning.

What I try to make visible to my daughter is not every detail of my inner life but the process by which I arrive at conclusions.

The Dreamer

There is a bakery near where I live. The pastries are good, the coffee is good, and the service is efficient. Yet if I am honest, none of those things is the main reason I go there.

The real reason is a woman from the Dominican Republic who works behind the counter.

I have known her for years, though not in any meaningful sense. Ours is the sort of acquaintance that develops naturally between people who occupy the same corner of everyday life. The baker. The bus driver. The person at the post office. Familiar faces who become part of the landscape of one's existence without ever becoming close friends.

What makes her remarkable is not anything she says or does in particular. It is her mood.

She is always in a good mood.

And I do not mean the professional cheerfulness that some people adopt as part of their job. I mean something far more genuine and far more puzzling. She looks as though she is having one of the best days of her life. Every day.

In a country like Switzerlandd where even spontaneity feels scheduled, her unapologetic happiness is impossible to ignore.

The Bible Shelf

The other day I visited Aligro, a Swiss cash-and-carry supermarket.

If you have never been to one, imagine a place where everything is sold in quantities suggesting that you are either running a restaurant or preparing for the collapse of civilization.

Ten liters of ketchup.

Twenty kilograms of flour.

Coffee measured in units normally associated with industrial production.

I like these places. There is something refreshingly honest about them.

Nobody is pretending that you only need three paper napkins.

Then I noticed something unexpected.

A shelf of Bibles.