HOW TO HAVE SOMETHING MOST BILLIONAIRES DON’T
And learn to love your destiny!
Hello.
I have not calculated how much your diplomas cost in time and money. Whatever those ballpark figures are, they surely deserve this reaction from me today: Wow. Wow. Wow.
Thank you, and God bless you and those who made it possible for you to study at an American university. By becoming informed and reasonable and capable adults, you have made this a better world than it was before you got here.
Have we met before? No. But I have thought a lot about people like you. You men here are Adam. You women are Eve. Who hasn’t thought a lot about Adam and Eve?
This is Eden, and you’re about to be kicked out. Why? You ate the knowledge apple. It’s in your tummies now.
And who am I? I used to be Adam. But now I am Methuselah.
So what does this Methuselah have to say to you, since he has lived so long? I’ll pass on to you what another Methuselah said to me. He’s Joe Heller, author, as you know, of Catch-22. We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch-22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed worldwide over the past forty years?”
Joe said to me, “I have something he can never have.”
I said, “What’s that, Joe?”
And he said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
His example may be of comfort to many of you Adams and Eves, who in later years will have to admit that something has gone terribly wrong—and that, despite the education you received here, you have somehow failed to become billionaires.
Well-dressed people ask me sometimes, with their teeth bared, as though they were about to bite me, if I believe in a redistribution of wealth. I can only reply that it doesn’t matter what I think, that wealth is already being redistributed every hour, often in ways that are absolutely fantastic.
Nobel Prizes are peanuts when compared with what a linebacker for the Cowboys makes in a single season nowadays.
For about a hundred years now, the most lucrative prize for a person who made a really meaningful contribution to the culture of the world as a physicist, a chemist, a physiologist, a physician, a writer, or, God bless him or her, a maker of peace, has been the Nobel Prize. It is about a million dollars now. Those dollars come, incidentally, from a fortune made by a Swede who mixed clay with nitroglycerine and gave us dynamite.
KABOOM!
Alfred Nobel intended that his prizes make the planet’s most valuable inhabitants independently wealthy, so that their work could not be inhibited or bent this way or that way by powerful politicians or wealthy patrons.
But one million dollars is only a white chip now—in the worlds of sports and entertainment, on Wall Street, in many lawsuits, as compensation for executives of our larger corporations.
One million dollars in the tabloids and on the evening news is “chump change” now.
I am reminded of a scene in a W. C. Fields movie, in which he is watching a poker game in a saloon in a gold-rush town. Fields announces his presence by putting a one-hundred-dollar bill on the table. The players barely look up from the game. One of them finally says, “Give him a white chip.”
But the cost of a college education, a minor fraction of a million dollars, is anything but chump change to most Americans. Have academic degrees been a way to become famous and rich in the past?
In a few cases. You can no doubt name a handful of celebrities who came from here. But most graduates, any place you care to name, have been of use locally rather than nationally, and have commonly been rewarded with modest amounts of money or fame—or sometimes, more’s the pity, with utterly undeserved ingratitude.
In time, this will prove to have been the destiny of most, but not all of you. You will find yourselves building or strengthening your communities. Please love that destiny, if it turns out to be yours—for communities are all that’s substantial about the world.
All the rest is hoop-la.
And for your footloose generation, that community could as easily be New York City or Washington, DC, or Paris, or Houston—or Adelaide, Australia, or Shanghai, or Kuala Lumpur.
Mark Twain, at the end of a profoundly meaningful life, for which he never received a Nobel Prize, asked himself what it was we all lived for. He came up with six words which satisfied him. They satisfy me, too. They should satisfy you:
“The good opinion of our neighbors.”
Neighbors are people who know you, can see you, can talk to you—to whom you may have been of some help or beneficial stimulation. They are not nearly as numerous as the fans, say, of Madonna or Michael Jordan.
To earn their good opinions, you should apply the special skills you have learned in college, and meet the standards of decency and honor and fair play set by exemplary books and elders.
It’s even money that one of you will get a Nobel Prize. Wanna bet? It’s only a million bucks, but what the heck. That’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, as they say.
