Do the Dots Ever Connect?
I only met Paul Volcker once, sitting next to him at dinner after a conference at which he had spoken. His topic was emerging currency trends—this was sometime in the first decade of the 2000s—and I don’t recall whether anything that he suggested might develop came to pass. At the dinner's start, I mentioned to Volcker that while listening to him belittle the dollar I kept expecting to hear a call for a return to a gold standard. He replied politely, “When I was at the Fed, we hated gold.”
I already knew this. What I didn’t ask, because he was an honored guest, was, “What do you idiots think you’re doing rigging the price of money?” No matter, he could have responded that he hadn’t run the Federal Reserve for almost twenty years.
This note it isn’t about monetary policy, or about Paul Volcker, or about the quaint idea that there is a “right” price for money that may be arrived at by a cartel of central bankers. It’s about nutty people, and rational people, and the art of connecting dots. The question is whether the dots ever connect. But first, a digression on madness. The best known dot-connectors are cultists. Some of the pictures they discover are invisible to the normal eye.
You might not believe, for example, that almost thirty years ago, I was part of a global financial conspiracy that included Paul Volcker. Or that my wife Mira is the granddaughter of mob financier Meyer Lansky. Or that she tried to murder an East European immigrant (and war criminal) named John Demjanjuk. Or that her then-employer, the Anti-Defamation League, colluded with the CIA and the Justice Department to send an innocent cult leader to prison for mail fraud. Or that Henry Kissinger was a KGB agent. Or the Queen of England a drug trafficker. You might not believe this stuff because you most likely live in a world shaped by normal experience and you know that highly improbable things are seldom true. The more improbable things that get strung together, the less likely it is that the emergent narrative reflects reality. (An unknown person named Linda may be a librarian. But it’s statistically less and less likely as you add complexity that this random person is a librarian, and a feminist, and an animal rights activist, and a Republican, vegan, blues singer and poker player. The improbability goes up exponentially, not arithmetically. And that’s a chain in which none of the descriptions, taken by itself, is the least unlikely.)
A fair number of people believe things that are improbable at each step, and cumulatively are bonkers. They hold secret knowledge: esoteric stuff that provides an insight into how the world works that isn’t available to the rest of us. You can find it everywhere. Gold bugs can weave theories about global deception that make the Linda-chain look probable. Scientologists, Rosicrucians, Moonies all have their arcana. Alex Jones and Paul Craig Roberts will set your head spinning with exotic explanations of recent history. It’s the Dan Brown-novel version of reality. There are machinations behind the scenes, and we who know, really know what they are.
The search for coherence underlying this folly is reasonable. We want to understand the world, and it’s complicated. Questions of what we know and how we know it are difficult. Seeking answers, some intelligent people are drawn into the looniest belief systems.
In the eighties and nineties, the Lyndon LaRouche cult was ticked at my wife and her employer, the ADL, for a variety of reasons. Partly it was that her boss had described LaRouche on an NBC program as a “small-time Hitler,” and LaRouche not only lost his libel suit but also lost NBC’s counter-suit. Partly it was that Lyndon was in federal prison for mail fraud. (Some of his spear-carriers, tried in Virginia for bilking people through false loans, got up to 77 years.) At various times the cult took ads in The New York Times denouncing Mira, leafleted our neighborhood, Northern Virginia, D.C., and Maryland suburbs with “wanted” posters of her (in defense, it happens, of a Sobibór camp guard), and wrote bits of entertaining lunacy. In an article in Executive Intelligence Review, LaRouche acolyte Herbert Quinde disclosed, “By marriage and political affiliation [Mira] Boland is linked to the Wall Street financial arm of the Anglo-American ‘secret government’ apparat, which played a central role in the Iran-Contra scandal.” Quinde collected stray facts, then sat down and knitted his data points all together: me (a financial writer at the time), Paul Volcker, Walter Schloss, John Train, even Warren Buffett got roped in. There’s a reason mad people are called “dotty.” It’s all the time they spend working with a ruler, a protractor, a fine-point pen, and a field of dots. After a while, they can’t help but see patterns.
If you Google my wife’s name, to this day you’ll get hits from various sites linked one way or another to the LaRouche cult. She was far from their only target. LaRouchies confronted KGB mole Kissinger on his way to heart surgery. They ran around Manhattan distributing mock editions of The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review dedicated to outing lawyer Roy Cohn as a homosexual. You couldn’t fault them as lacking energy.
