Robotic Coolies

Nigel Aitkins - Wed 13 Apr, 2005

"...Western businessmen take pride in their workaholic schedules and their desire to succeed at all costs...but a Chinese philosopher shows the value of an hour awake in bed, taking time to relax..."

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
  - John Maynard Keynes (1936)
 
A subscriber approached me last month at an investment conference in Delray Beach and said, “You sure have a knack for picking winning stocks. How do you do it?”
 
“It’s very simple,” I said. Then I whispered in his ear, “Lin Yutang.”

“Lin Yutang?” he asked. “Is that a new Chinese trading system?”

“No, I’m afraid not. It’s a philosophy of life.”

He seemed intrigued. I went on to explain that Lin Yutang was a very unusual Chinese philosopher and writer who lived in both China and the United States, and understood both cultures. He is known as the philosopher of leisure and “letting go.” I quoted his most famous line - a line that usually angers Americans:

“The busy man is never wise, and the wise man is never busy.”

I made the mistake of writing this statement on the blackboard on the first day of class at Columbia Business School. A third of the students left and dropped the class immediately. (But those who stayed said it was the best class they ever took there. As one student said, “We’ve never been taught anything like this before at Columbia!”)

Yet there is wisdom in Lin’s statement. If you are too busy in your work, you don’t have time to learn new ideas, to discover new truths, to enjoy life’s little pleasures, or perhaps to pick a winning stock! Beating the market requires you to look down un-trodden paths, and you need the free time to do it.

Lin Yutang criticised most Americans for being too busy, and therefore too subservient to the business culture and the old ways. Slaves to their work, they worry themselves to death. In another startling statement, Lin states, “The three American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.” Gee, I thought they were American virtues!

Lin goes on to say, “O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilisation where men toil and work and worry their hair grey to get a living and forget to play!” He then offers the secret to success for the businessman (the ‘busy man’?) in this following statement:

“Actually, many business men who pride themselves on rushing about in the morning and afternoon and keeping three desk telephones busy all the time on their desk, never realise that they could make twice the amount of money, if they would give themselves one hour’s solitude awake in bed, at one o’clock in the morning or even at seven. There, comfortably free, the real business head can think, he can ponder over his achievements and his mistakes of yesterday, and single out the important from the trivial in the day’s programme ahead of him.”
 
Lin Yutang is a champion of the individual - “its unreasonableness, its inveterate prejudices, and its waywardness and unpredictability.” But in today’s society, the individual free thinker is being replaced by the soldier as the ideal. “Instead of wayward, incalculable, unpredictable free individuals, we are going to have rationalised, disciplined, regimented and uniformed, patriotic coolies...so efficiently controlled and organised that a nation of fifty or sixty millions can believe in the same creed, think the same thoughts, and like the same food.”

“Clearly two opposite views of human dignity are possible,” Lin goes on to warn; “the one believing that a person who retains his freedom and individuality is the noblest type, and the other believing that a person who has completely lost independent judgment and surrendered all rights to private beliefs and opinions to the ruler or the state is the best and noblest being.”

I dare say which of the two applies to Daily Reckoning readers! Lin dislikes the popular trend of compartmentalising people in groups and classes. “We no longer think of a man as a man, but as a cog in a wheel, a member of a union or a class, a ‘capitalist’ to be denounced, or a ‘worker’ to be regarded as a comrade...We are no longer individuals, no longer men, but only classes.”
 
Lin Yutang experienced the brutality of Chinese communism and the heavy-handed bureaucracy of Washington during the New Deal era. Needless to say, he has a low opinion of government. “I hate censors and all agencies and forms of government that try to control our thoughts.”
 
He also questioned the establishment economist and forecaster: “Perhaps I don’t understand economics, but economics does not understand me, either. The sad thing about economics is that it is no science if it stops at commodities and does not go beyond human motives...It remains true that the stock exchange cannot, with the best assemblage of world economic data, scientifically predict the rise and fall of gold or silver or commodities, as the weather bureau can forecast the weather. The reason clearly lies in the fact that there is a human element in it, and when too many people are selling out, some will start buying in...this is merely an illustration of the incalculableness and waywardness of human behaviour, which is true not only in the hard and matter-of-fact dealings of business, but also in the shape of the course of history.”

Lin Yutang was probably unfamiliar with the one school of economics that does take into account human behaviour: the Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

That’s why Mises’s magnum opus is called ‘Human Action’.
 

Regards,

Mark Skousen
for The Daily Reckoning

P.S. I’ve only scratched the surface of this brilliant Chinese philosopher. Lin Yutang has many more things to say about our culture and how to live a happy and fulfilling life...about growing old gracefully...the need for women in conversation....the evils of Western wear...the only way to travel (“buy a one-way ticket!”)...why he is a “pagan”...and his controversial views on smoking.

I encourage readers to buy Lin Yutang’s book, The ‘Importance of Living’. It was written in 1937, but in today’s’ hustle and bustle world, it is even more relevant.