Negative rates, Immortality, & Frodo’s Ring - a podcast by McAlvany ICA

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The McAlvany Weekly Commentary

with David McAlvany and Kevin Orrick



Negative rates, Immortality, & Frodo’s Ring

November 6, 2019



"If you can come to terms with finitude and mortality, you tend to look to the future, and you tend to look at future generations, and what the significance of your life is, in time, and throughout future history, what it will be. To me, that is the point of legacy. Be careful in the decisions that you make. Be calculated in the commitments that you make, and be aware of the things that you are saying yes to, with all the costs and benefits that are attached to them."



- David McAlvany



Kevin: Part of today’s culture, Dave, has really been influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. I think if you had to compress what those stories were about, it is about resisting irresistible power, sort of the pull of immortality and full control. I bring that up because we all have that type of a ring pulling at us in different parts of our lives, and even in society today in the form of going into debt that people know would never be paid back in a lifetime.



David: It is fascinating that Tolkien chose the name Gollum because there is another description for that in Jewish literature which is yetzer, and you have a yetzer hara and a yetzer ha-tov. Yetzer halav is the evil inclination and yetzer ha-tov is the good inclination. So you can be imaginatively inclined toward doing the good, imaginatively inclined toward doing evil, and what you see in the Gollum character is where an evil inclination has ultimately destroyed who the person was, and remade the person in a tragic, and as you described, slimy kind of character.



Kevin: But they didn’t start that way. Of course, The Hobbit came first and The Lord of the Rings series came second, but it still had to do with the way the characters reacted to the ring, and of course, Gollum ultimately took his life, the despair of not having the ring, not being able to avoid the temptation, or resist. But he didn’t start that way. He started as a hobbit, a little bit like Bilbo and Frodo, but he succumbed to the ring.



I think of other scenes in that movie – Boromir, who was a human, who when he had the ring in his hand you could see he changed. We even see Bilbo, when he is older, he holds that ring and you can see just a slight change, and Peter Jackson does a great job with that. Gandalf, a wizard, and Galadriel, the elf – they also understand from a longer-term perspective that they can’t hold that ring for long because they can’t resist. I think it is only Aragorn who actually purposely resists the ring the whole time – walks away.



I may have the story wrong, but Dave, what I am trying to say with this is, do we have a ring right now? We have negative interest rates. We have men who are in power who are spending money that they know they will never have to pay back. So there is always a cost, isn’t there, to choosing immortality and compressing time?



David: I think that is the issue. We’re talking about prices that relate to a measurement of time, and so how do we see the future, when you talk about the yetzer and you talk about that character Gollum, we’re talking about the use of imagination, how we see the future. Sometimes we have a very truncated view of the future where it is a very short period in time and the decisions that we make in light of that truncated imagination are different than if we have an expansive view of time, both past and in the future.



There is a quote that stopped me in my tracks this week.

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