naked capitalism

craazyman says:

How All The Souls Go Flying and You Don’t Know Where

I remember Raj Rajaratnam. I met him once, in the mid-1980s when he worked as a tech analyst at a boutique investment bank. I was an analyst too, with a big bracket firm and I was checking around, just interviewing to see what happened.

I have a way of feeling things and sort of knowing things beyond logic or reason. Everybody does, but I suppose I just pay more attention to it, right or wrong. And I distinctly remember, now that he’s in the news, briefly meeting him during the round of interviews. He was their rising star, their golden boy. And I was fascinated by his name, the way the syllables flowed like waves overtaking each other. We probably talked for about 10 minutes, that was it. And I never saw him again.

But the main thing that I remember was that I could feel, in a clear and powerful way, that he wasn’t dead souled or flattened in that exhausted way that people get when they work at jobs that have no craft. And anything to do with moving money around has no craft, despite the formulaic cloak of rigor that academics drape upon it or the haughty and shallow cleverness dignified by the phrase “talent”. Even to this day, I can pull the memory and the images onto the screen of my mind, now that he’s in the news, of the feeling that I was speaking to someone essentially good souled and bouyant, hopeful, decent and fully alive. It seems sentimental to put it that way, but it’s just the way it seemed to me, speaking with him.

I remember so much, most of it not worth remembering and it’s weird to feel the changing perpsectives on the memories and what they mean now. Maybe it is worth remembering.

But he was one of so many in the money hunt that I knew and who got sucked in to the mirror logic of it all and lost their way in so many unique and strange ways. There were so many — indicted, arraigned, tried, sued, destroyed — one who shot himself in a car in the Hamptons after a few bad business deals. When I met this one he was a CEO and I was 23, a clueless analyst recommending his stock, and his respect for me transcended all artifice or pose, and it made my confidence soar. And 20 years later I read in the news he had killed himself because his company failed and he thought he had failed. He didn’t fail me, that’s for sure.

How they all fell into the whirlpool where the demons make them into soul food. Not sure what to make of this stuff about Raj Rajaratnam, except to think of the before and the after. And to think how so many fell into the pool where it’s all two dimensional and I can see how I, too, might have fallen in if things had gone a slightly different way. It’s so easy to lose your soul.

There’s a point where you begin to believe it all. That you have a kind of talent, that there’s an art in what you do and that when money comes your way it’s because you earned it through insight and effort, and everything begins to justify itself and explain itself in expanding self-consistent theories that achieve nearly the quality of an eschatology.

There is no way to make this logical. All you can do is channel it through intuition and approximate in words some final reality where truth resides. It doesn’t reside with the District Attorney or with McKinsey, for God’s sake not with McKinsey and all their formulaic and empty artifice, or with Mr. Rajaratnam. It resides outside of all their efforts and all their actions and the falseness of the whole scene, the essential falseness of them all as puppets of some inarticulated compulsion, lights the field of play for demons as if it were a stage. And all we can see are the bodies falling in and drowning in the sea of its lies.