Calculators

by Igor Smirnov

We all calculate in the sense of weighing up possibilities, eventualities and options. We are, in an important sense, calculators. Our technical world has rather tended to push this use of the word to one side in favour of those things computers do best, rather than those more interesting things we do best.

Yet highly successful people also tend to be highly successful calculators. Check out this quote for example.

The thing for him to do was to get rich and hold his own--to build up a seeming of virtue and dignity which would pass muster for the genuine thing. Force would do that. Quickness of wit. And he had these. "I satisfy myself," was his motto; and it might well have been emblazoned upon any coat of arms which he could have contrived to set forth his claim to intellectual and social nobility.

Theodore Dreiser – The Financier (1912)

Dreiser’s main character (the financier himself) is Frank Cowperwood, modelled on the tycoon Charles Yerkes. Cowperwood is portrayed as a charming, insightful man, who from his early teens is almost entirely concerned with calculating his own personal interests, which he sees as primarily financial.

Luck and bad luck play their part, but successful calculators such as Cowperwood usually calculate their way out of even the most painful setback.

Two key aspects of Cowperwood’s power are his ability to calculate possibilities and a corresponding habit of using that ability in all aspects of his life. Almost machine like in his calculating habits, the modern reader is left wondering how many Cowperwoods there are in the real world.

Because there is no real defence against the habitual, obsessive calculator who is able to shift life’s vagaries in his favour, is there? Anything and everything can be brought into the field of calculation. However inexact the calculations may be, they only have to tilt the wheel slightly to tip the balance in the long run.

So what are our defences against obsessive political calculators who make calculation their full-time occupation? Endlessly determined to tilt the wheel in their favour, they never stop, never look at anything from any angle which hasn’t been calculated, sifted and evaluated as to its potential for personal advancement.

Of course we have one obvious defence in that the modern world is too complex for them. They can’t tilt the wheel far enough, frequently calling the odds incorrectly, frequently taking themselves, and us, down the wrong path. Maybe this is the problem, the inability of our leaders to calculate the odds in an over-complex world.

But as for the bigger and more successful calculators standing behind our leaders - I suspect their ability to calculate is relatively unimpaired, their determination to tilt the wheel in their favour remains just as powerful as  Cowperwood's.