The Hairdresser Where You Pay A Different Price
Tucked away in the Great Swiss Nowhere, in a modest little shop that smells faintly of old cologne and hair tonic, sits my retired hairdresser. He’s over seventy, still wields his scissors with precision, and charges me a humble amount of Swiss francs for a haircut that stretches well beyond the usual fifteen-minute clip-and-go routine. The real price, however, is not in francs—it’s in time.
A haircut here is an immersion course in world affairs. For one and a half hours, I sit under his steady hands as he teaches me how to fix the planet, a lesson at a time. He is the last of the diner philosophers, a man who knows everything about everything, just like Werner Erhard’s legendary diner guy.
Werner Erhard and the Birth of Self-Improvement
To understand the archetype of my hairdresser—the man who knows everything—we must take a detour into the world of Werner Erhard, the enigmatic founder of est (Erhard Seminars Training) in the early 1970s.
Before Tony Robbins, before self-help became a billion-dollar industry, there was est—a no-nonsense, brutally intense, confrontational self-improvement seminar that promised personal transformation through radical responsibility. It wasn’t therapy. It wasn’t feel-good affirmation. It was a hard slap in the face of your ego. Erhard’s central message? You are responsible for everything in your life—no excuses. Even if a piano falls on your head.
One of Erhard’s most famous monologues was about the guy in the diner—a late-night philosopher sitting at the counter, spouting off his grand theories of the world. He knows everything: what the government should do, how to fix international politics, the truth about marriage, the secrets to success. He has an opinion on everything—except himself.
And this is where my hairdresser steps in.
Putin, Trump, and the Axis of Evil
According to my hairdresser, the world’s problems all trace back to one or two familiar villains.
Putin? Evil.
Trump? Bad.
If I attempt to introduce nuance—perhaps point out that geopolitics is more complex than a Bond movie—he stops snipping, looks me straight in the eye through the mirror, and warns me:
"My ex-wife tried that with me. She’s a conspiracy theorist now."
The message is clear: questioning his narrative is a slippery slope into madness. His ex-wife started asking questions, and now, who knows? Maybe she’s wearing a tinfoil hat somewhere in the Alps.
Much like Erhard’s diner guy, he has absolute certainty in his worldview. The world is not a messy, ambiguous place full of competing narratives—it is simple, clear, and already solved.
A Discounted Haircut, at a Cost
I don’t pay much for the haircut—sometimes, he even refuses to take my money. But I pay another price. The price of listening. A hair tax in the form of unsolicited wisdom. The irony is not lost on me: I go in to get my hair cut, and I leave with a head full of things I never asked for.
He is a good man, no doubt about it. A craftsman of the old world, where every trade was an art, and every customer a captive audience. But sometimes, as I sit there, enduring another detailed dissection of global affairs—delivered with the absolute certainty of a man who has never doubted his own conclusions—I think to myself:
"Maybe I should just grow my hair long."