Our habits define us.
Nietzsche challenges us to ask...
Are these habits born from courage and inventive reason, or from countless small acts of cowardice?
The creation of self begins with the choices we repeatedly make.
So, if Keynes was right that the long term need not trouble us because, in the long term, we are all dead, one wonders why civilisation bothered inventing medicine.
Why hospitals?
Why doctors?
Why sanitation, pensions, education, property rights, infrastructure, vaccines, savings, investment, agriculture, engineering, or children?
The entire edifice of civilisation is an argument against short-termism. We treat illness today so life may continue tomorrow. We build institutions so strangers may cooperate beyond the hour. We save because consumption is not the only altar before which mankind must kneel.
The long term is not some abstract kingdom inhabited by economists after lunch.
It is where consequences live.
Bad money, bad incentives, bad policy, and bad institutions do not vanish because a clever man made a joke about mortality. They compound. They metastasise. They arrive later wearing an invoice.
A society that refuses to think beyond the immediate moment does not become practical.
It becomes decadent.
And decadence, unlike Keynes, has always had an excellent grasp of the long run.
On Afrikaner capital formation
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early 90s Adrian Gore, a young actuary who worked at Liberty Life, wanted to start a new kind of health insurer that promoted wellness
Gore pitched his idea to Laurie Dippenaar, GT Ferreira, and Paul Harris, the founders of RMB