The Water Thief

by Nicholas Lamar Soutter

  “Dear, dear, dear. You know, I’ve heard it said that executives have very big egos, that we think the world revolves around us. Well, Charles, what would they say about you, sitting there, thinking that I would be moved by your opinion of me?”

  “You don’t even need these things,” I said. “Look at you, all of your money, your oriental rugs, your poker set, and your elaborate ornaments. You buy these things so you can feel important.”

  “Goodness gracious,” the man said, gently putting his hand into his coat pocket. “Is that what you think? My friend, I don’t spend money because I want to. Far from it. I do it because it is my responsibility, because it is the moral thing to do.”

  He pulled a cigar from his pocket, snipped the end, and put it in his mouth. “The economy can only function so long as we consume. Money is made to be spent. Just sitting there it’s worthless. When I buy things, I improve the lives of those below me. Why, I redesign this office at least twice a year just to keep people employed. And the people I employ, like good colleagues, spend the money that they earn. That money inexorably, albeit regrettably, even makes its way to people like you. I have built entire micro-economies with my spending, and kept many a colleague out of the gutter. That is respect, Charles. That is love.”

  “Yeah, you spend the money on yourself, showing off or giving it to your friends and family.”

  He lit the cigar and puffed a few times to get a good burn going. I took the opportunity to look at the swords, ancient blunderbusses, pistols, and other decorations on the walls.

  I wondered if they were real. I could snatch one maybe, but I doubted I’d make it past the elevator. Still, running him through with his own sword might have been its own reward.

  “I give money to no one, Charles. Giving is for communists. I do, naturally, have a savings, which I use to ensure my children get low-interest loans and stipends for their educations, help them become high-contracts. But I do this because they come from me, I raised them, and I know the corporation and its colleagues will benefit from their success. I can trust them with money far more than I could trust a stranger, more than I could trust you. My god, what would you do if you ever earned any real money? Keep it? That’s awfully selfish of you, don’t you think?”

  “I’d use it to help those who need it.”

  “That’s what I do,” he said.

  “No, no, I’d give it to them. I’d help them directly!”

  “Precisely why you can’t be trusted with money.” he said, stabbing the air with the smoldering cigar. “The poor cannot handle money, that’s why they’re poor. Give a poor man ten caps, and he won’t use that money to invest in the future, or to buy a ride to a job interview, or to get a book and read it. No, he will buy a bottle of potato vodka and be done with it. You’ve done him a terrible disservice. Now he’s lost self-respect, and he’s learned that he doesn’t need to earn money, that all he has to do is be poor and people will pay him. It’s a vicious cycle, and every day he’ll act even more pitiable to earn even more charity.

  “If, however, you had taken that ten caps and purchased something, if others like you did the same, then a factory would be built, and that man can be put to work. Oh, I believe you, my friend. I believe you’d show charity. That’s why you can’t be trusted.

  “The truth is that you’re selfish. You and your kind would drive our society to ruin out of a conceited desire to convince others of your altruistic nature. You’re the one trying to impress people. You talk about charity, taxes, a greater good, and about a social compact, because deep down you’re terrified of your own failures, because if you don’t convince people to take their eyes off of competition they might just see you for the failure that you are, Charles. And if they see that, and you haven’t convinced them of the importance of charity, where will you be?”

  “But you don’t have to give the poor money. You can create social programs—”

  “Ahhh,” he said, taking a deep drag from the cigar. “The leviathan…”

  “Government, it’s better. You know it is.”

  “Of course! Absolutely! Do you think I don’t like the leviathan?” he said, throwing his hands up. “It’s marvelous, my friend, simply marvelous. What I wouldn’t give for a leviathan—take everything I own, please, take it if you can build one.

  “But you can’t. It’s an idea, an abstraction, a fairytale. Nobody has ever gotten one to work; trying is no more productive than looking for the Easter Rabbit. The leviathan requires compassion. Compassion does not exist, Charles. It’s an illusion. Even your self-declared altruism, the money you would give to others, is motivated purely out of a desire to end your own agony at watching them suffer, to alleviate your own sense of guilt. I feel guilt too. I’ve simply learned to use it productively. By our very nature we do what is in our own best interest—we are incapable of doing otherwise. That is why the leviathans all failed—because they allowed, even encouraged, belief in fantasy.”

  “Compassion exists. I have seen it.”

  “It was an illusion. Have you read history?” he asked, taking another sip. He turned his back and strolled casually toward the far wall, as if daring me to grab a weapon and strike him. “Any history, it doesn’t matter…” he said. “Has there ever been a time when man did not betray his fellow man? A time when man’s urge to compete, to dominate, did not win out over this ‘compassion’ you believe in.”

  “It happens…”

  “Only by accident, only in errors of nature—predicted by Darwin himself, mutations which fight against the natural order of things,” he said, taking a moment to check the alignment of one of his paintings. “In short, Charles, only in you.”

  “I am not alone.”

  He turned back toward me. “We are all alone. We always have been, always will be. Convincing people otherwise, getting them to fight and die for the leviathan, religion, or a corporation, may have its advantage. But we are all alone. Wishing otherwise, no matter how hard you try, will not make it so.”

  He wants to break me. But he won’t. Not in a hundred years.

  “You are like a child, closing your eyes, thinking if you believe in something enough, sacrifice enough, devote yourself to it, then it must be true. You are like the religious zealot who blows himself up in the name of something he will never see or touch, convinced that the very act itself is enough to commit the reality.

  “Build a society on the premise that man will not betray man and you will fail. Surely you can see that. That is why the corporation is an absolute good; it does not expect more of us than we can do. It is based on the knowledge that everyone will betray everyone else. It thrives because it lives off greed and selfishness, our most basic instincts, the ones without which we would not be the dominant species on the planet. Align yourself with that state of nature, the state of corruption—allow for it, embrace it—instead of wasting time trying to ferret it out, and you’ll be a success.”

  “But you can’t build a society based on corruption.”

  “And yet we have.”

  “But it’ll fail.”

  “You underestimate the greed of man. The corporation is a boat far harder to sink than most people believe. In the end, no matter how bad things get, everybody wants it to survive. Everyone has a vested interest in it—from the CEO to the night janitor—and they will do anything to keep it going. The corporation is life, every one of us will defend it, no matter how corrupt it is, because it is us.”

  “No, I’ve seen the records. The whole system is going to collapse.”

  Reaching the end of his cigar, the executive went back to the writing desk and extinguished the remains in a black marble ashtray. “You’ve seen the records, but you don’t have the intelligence to decipher them. You say the system is going to collapse only because it’s what someone told you. Someone told you that Hobbes’ Leviathan was about democracy, good works, and the social compact, and you believed that too. But they lied. Hobbes believed in the brutal tyranny and absolut
e power of a single ruler.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Have you read his work? I swear to you it’s true.”

  “It’s about government.”

  “No, Charles. Hobbes called government the leviathan—not because it was big and bloated like the sea beast—but because the ruler of mankind should be like that biblical beast, answerable only to God.”

  “Corporatism will end. I swear to you. If not now, then someday. Even if it takes a millennia, your ‘great’ system will collapse.”

  “Of course it will,” he said sternly, turning toward me again. “I should hope it does. I believe in competition, in evolution. So I know we have the best system ever invented. But no system is static. If, in two thousand years, someone hasn’t invented a better one, then man certainly doesn’t deserve his place at the top of the ladder.”

  “But that’s the point,” I said. “When a corporation fails, when the system fails, the executives will walk away with all their money, and they will say they did the best they could, and that they deserve their compensation, and those who broke their backs every day for the company will get nothing. It’s not fair!”

  “It is the very definition of fair. It’s the workers’ own fault that the they walk away with nothing; they choose to. You can’t blame executives for being smarter than them.”

  “Nobody chooses to fail.”

  “Of course they do. Not taking what is rightfully yours is a choice—the choice of inaction. LowCons outnumber executives a hundred to one. They could raze the entire city if they wanted, and take the money you say we owe them. But they never do. That is why they are LowCons. That is how I know they deserve to be LowCons. They choose it. And we walk away with the money because that’s what we choose.”

  “Because they won’t kill you?” I scoffed. “Because they aren’t violent?”

  “Exactly. Nature is violence. You can only survive off the death of others. Plants, animals, whatever you choose to eat, we all commit violence against other living organisms. We murder so that we may live. Violence is not pleasant, and I would not wish it on anyone, certainly not myself. But anyone who refuses to resort to violence when needed is choosing to be selected out. I did not create that system, Charles, it is nature.”

  “But we’ve evolved beyond that! That’s the point of civilization, to stop the violence, to overcome that part of our nature, to be better. It’s part of nature, but it’s not the sum total of our human experience.”

  The man laughed. “Of course not. Corruption, coercion, intimidation, are all techniques to avoid violence, to create civilization.”

  “But that’s the same thing. All of those lead to violence. The inevitable conclusion of capitalism is war!”

  The man smiled broadly, like he was proud of me, and yet somehow like I had set myself up as the punch line of a perfect joke.

  “Lenin said that. The First World War was commonly held to be started by the assassination of an archduke. But that was just an excuse. People are assassinated all the time. What Lenin discovered, what truly frightened him, was that the war was the result of a capitalist boom. Germany was growing, and it needed more leverage to compete with other nations and satisfy their growing economic demands. But they could no longer purchase what they needed, so they took it. Japan did the same thing decades later. Lenin was a smart man but, as communists are so apt to do, he missed the point completely.”

  I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking. But I did.

  “Then what is the point?” I said.

  A malevolent grin broke over his face.

  “Capitalism is war.”

  I looked down at the floor.

  “Man’s state of nature is war, war with himself, war with all that which is around him. What you call ‘civilization’ is nothing more than a set of constraints used by people with power to wage war on people without it, to dominate them using the minimum possible effort.

  “No war on this planet has ever been about anything other than economics, about who controls the resources to create and sustain life. Even religion is nothing more than a means of mobilizing troops to economic ends. The belief in a supreme being, when leveraged properly, is an invaluable motivator of human assets, nothing more.”

  “But in a state of war, you’re constantly in danger. The next bombing, the next attack, a corporation might kill you.”

  “My god, Charles, you don’t know the half of it,” he laughed. “Do you think it’s the thought of other corporations killing me that keeps me up at night? No, it’s that one of my own colleagues will take me out. That bombing at the coffee shop last week, the one with which you are so familiar? Like a common MidCon, it never even crossed your mind that maybe the bomber wasn’t from Kabul at all. Maybe the bomber was Ackerman.”

  I shook my head. “The reports said that he was Kabul!”

  “Who wrote those reports? Perception Management, people like you, people who lie. Maybe our CEO needed an excuse to attack Kabul without violating the Karitzu’s free-trade pact. We could have tricked an Epsilon into making the attack and warned the police ahead of time, let the bomber get just close enough to make a point.”

  “You mean—a colleague did that?”

  “My god, you truly are stupid. What I’m saying is: there’s no way to know. And frankly, who cares? The reality doesn’t matter, only the perception. And as a loyal employee I perceive exactly what Ackerman tells me to.

  “But more to the point—I’m fully aware that I’m at least as likely to die at the hands of a colleague as I am from another corp. Half my bosses want me dead, since I’m competing—quite capably, I might add—for their jobs. I make myself indispensable, which protects me, but it makes me a threat too. Being an executive is to walk a tightrope far more treacherous than any MidCon could possibly understand. I can do it only because nature has selected me to. It is a burden, of course. But it is one I carry for you, for all my colleagues, whom I love—even though you hate me for it. It’s what makes me better than you, that level of selflessness.”

  “That’s not a life.”

  “Well, you can deny it all you like, but ignoring the truth does little to change it. This is us at our most harmonious with nature, our most productive—indeed our happiest, since for the first time in human history there are no laws, none at all. Every human being is free to do anything, so long as it is by the fruits of their labor. Only a very, very ill man would say this is a bad thing.”

  The man sat in the chair opposite me and took another sip. His tone became serious.

  “I like you, Charles, I really do. Your heart is in the right place, even if you’re too stupid to function. So I will do you the favor of being honest with you, of telling you something it takes most men a lifetime to learn. The only way to be an executive, and especially a CEO, is to be corrupt. The most corrupt always rise to the top the fastest. We are best suited to lead.

  “By corrupt I do not mean, of course, debauched or ungodly, or publicly amoral. No, by definition corruption requires a positive image against which the corruption occurs. One must be able to portray oneself as infallible, as better than the rest, as always being true to one’s word. One cannot, of course, run a business on those virtues; you’d be wiped out by a competitor that did not place such arbitrary limits on themselves. And you must corrupt yourself, Charles. You must convince yourself of your own infallibility in the face of any error of judgment. You must believe yourself superior to everyone.”

  “But I’m saying we don’t have to live that way.”

  “It’s the state of nature.”

  “We can evolve, we can make something better. We have language, we can work together in ways no animals can.”

  “And yet we remain animals. Life is difficult. I am sorry, but it is. And you’re weak, so you’d rather not face it. Too weak to compete, you blame nature; you blame capitalism, you blame the system—everything but yourself. My god, how could a system be right if the great Charles That
cher couldn’t sit on his backside all day and make a million caps doing so?” The man paused. “It’s sad, really.”

  “I worked hard.”

  “If that were true, you wouldn’t be here.”

  He put the glass down and glared at me. “You’re not even a man, when you think about it. A bit more like a dog, a creature that bites his owner’s hand out of fear. Incapable of independent thought, only reaction. Greed is the most natural instinct in the world, and yet somehow you find new and never before seen ways of fighting against it. You are a dud, Charles, one of nature’s failed experiments.”

  I looked at the floor. “My life is not a failure,” I whispered.

  “Oh, don’t think about it too hard. You cannot help what you are. It’s no more your fault that you can’t understand these basic principles than it is my fault that you will suffer for it. Most people function only barely above your level. That’s why they’re most people. It’s easier to believe that life isn’t that way, that there is such a thing as freedom and that anyone can do anything if they put their mind to it. That’s why executives need to spend so much time pretending success is possible for anyone. We have to manufacture hope, manufacture consent, and get people to want us to rule them. It’s a difficult job, and frankly I’m not paid enough for it. But I find a way to get by, mostly because it’s rewarding knowing I’m helping people.”

  My head hurt.

  “People aren’t that stupid,” I whispered.

  “Really? The single most basic economic principle in human history, known to every third grader in the world, is ‘buy low, sell high.’ We know it. It’s an axiom. If it weren’t, economics would fail to exist—there would be no system of making money; the universe would be in chaos.

  “But what happens in an economic boom? Nobody sells stocks, they buy them. Why sell when maybe the price might go up even more? When the market crashes, as it always does, what happens? People sell, because they don’t want to lose even more money. Buy low, sell high, a truism that nine in ten people can’t follow. If they could, there would be no casinos, no exchanges, no gambling at all. And lord knows, I wouldn’t make a dime on the markets. But I make money, a lot of it, because no matter how many times I tell people to buy low and sell high, nobody ever does. I can sit here and tell you everything I do to make money, exactly how to become rich and powerful, I can give away all the secrets to my success, and you wouldn’t follow them—nobody would. Because they’d think they know better than I do, that the world will give them what they deserve in due time. And you say I’m arrogant? You say people aren’t stupid? Thank God you’re wrong, or I’d never have become an executive.