Dr. Heisenberg

Field Note: November 4, 2024

Money, it must be said, is the chief administrative burden of existence, a force whose gravitational pull borders on the obscene. I was reminded of this while watching an old YouTube artifact: a former mafioso, now rebranded as a moderate-Republican philosopher and life coach. His own father, he noted, had been what one might call a chairman of the board in that same family enterprise. This scion of crime recalled his paterfamilias’s singular piece of wisdom: “Money is power.” A revelation of truly biblical simplicity. And how telling, to have it delivered from the purest, most unvarnished vessel of human impulse? At least criminal underworld is honest about its business model.

Against this landscape, one sanctuary endures — a quaint nature preserve where the dollar sign is not yet the apex predator. I speak, of course, of academia. It is the only ecosystem I have ever known, from boyhood to this day, where one is not instantly submerged in the sense of navigating a terrain of sophisticated fraud and elegantly costumed larceny. A remarkable, perhaps miraculous, exception. I consider universities to be modern-day churches. My immersion into the upper echelons of American academic life has, I am pleased to report, only confirmed this long-held conviction.

Which brought me to this afternoon, riding alongside Professor Pigou as his car hummed through the streets. We had fallen into a conversation on the glorious pageantry of the American tax system — that peculiar ecology populated by two distinct species: one that dutifully renders unto Caesar, and another that simply… doesn’t. A perfect, Darwinian equilibrium. “Why,” I asked him, “do you bother with the ritual, when so many of your peers treat it as optional?”

He turned to me, his face illuminated with the beatific glow of a man who has just solved a particularly intractable theorem. “Because,” he announced, “I make a lot of money.”

I nodded, considering this in silence. The conclusion was immediate and bifurcated: either the good professor was presiding over a fantastically profitable artisanal meth operation from his faculty office, or his definition of “a lot of money” belonged to an altogether more innocent, and therefore pitiable, era.