Myths Make Me Madoff

This post’s pithy aphorism comes from Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, although I found it second-hand in Anton Chekhov's short story “Gooseberries”:

The falsehood that exalts we cherish more
Than meaner truths that are a thousand strong.

Chekhov’s story “Gooseberries” tells the story of a man who toils his entire life to purchase a plot of land and chew idly upon berries all day, in imitation of the landed gentry of 19th-century Russia. Once the man, Nikolay, acquires the land and finally has bushels of his longed-for gooseberries, his brother Ivan discovers that the gooseberries are actually quite hard and sour.

This realization leads Ivan to cite the aforementioned Pushkin verse, and the bitter gooseberries become a symbol for all the pleasant myths we use to cover up the unpleasant bits of our society. Some such myths that come to mind at the present moment are (for example) that the economic market will correct itself – albeit after life-upending turbulence – and that mysterious, intangible “market forces” are to blame for financial crises like the one many of us are currently experiencing, rather than the rabid greed most recently exemplified by Bernie Madoff.