The Wisdom Of The Greater Fool
Jug Suraiya
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Who is the Greater Fool? The term was originally coined in stock market analysis and had a derogatory connotation. Investors will buy stocks of dubious value in the hope that there will be a Greater Fool on whom they can offload their investment at an even higher price. Eventually , a succession of Greater Fools will drive prices so unviably high as to create a bubble which bursts and leads to economic meltdown.However, a character in the television series, The Newsroom, has given a new twist to the term. According to her, by putting a greater value on something which the world of common sense regards as being of little or no consequence, the Greater Fool enriches all our lives by lifting us above the matter of fact and the mundane and giving us a glimpse of what lies beyond the horizon of everyday consciousness.
Poets and artists are Greater Fools, as are spiritual masters, scientists and philanthropists. In Darwinian terms, the Greater Fool would be the mutant which, by being out of genetic step with others of its species, could prove to be an evolutionary breakthrough.
A real life example of the Greater Fool was Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, who refused to patent it thereby losing untold millions by way of royalties which would have accrued to him because he wanted the whole world to benefit from his invention.
In fiction, the most celebrated Greater Fool is Cervantes's great mock hero Don Quixote, the delusional knight-errant who tilted against windmills which in his crazed imagination were evil giants which it was his duty to slay.
Clad in his rusty and tarnished armour, riding his scrawny mare, Rosinante, followed by his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, astride a donkey , and serenading the bedraggled whore whom he calls Dulcinea, Don Quixote is a figure of ridicule, a comical caricature.
But in his futile foolishness he assumes heroic stature, for he persists, against all reason, to see the world not as it is but as it ought to be. He refuses to accept what is real because he yearns for that which lies above and beyond the consensual conspiracy that society calls reality , and condemns as madness any challenge to its predominance.
In that he dares to dream the impossible dream, to reach the unreachable star, Don Quixote is indeed mad. It is a madness he shares with the Sufi mystic who, intoxicated with the wine of divine love, sings of the rapturous union which transcends all barriers and divisions of the mind so that Creator and created become one. In marketing terms, the Greater Fool is the ultimate disruptive innovator, the greatest risk taking venture capitalist who dares to bet against overwhelming odds and in doing so extends the boundaries of what convention has established as the realm of the possible.
In this sense, the very failure of the Greater Fool is a victory . In his vain glorious attempts to assume the role of an epic hero, Don Quixote is a laughable failure. But like the shield in which he sees a reflection of himself, his failure reflects a triumph of the ideal of chivalrous heroism, impossible though its actual attainment might remain. The protagonist of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea epitomises the spirit of heroism fated to be doomed: It can, and will, be defeated, but it cannot be destroyed.
It is the quest for a Holy Grail that matters, more than the unrealisable object of that quest. In his ceaseless search for knowledge, Socrates said that he was the most knowledgeable of men because he alone realised that he knew nothing. That is the vision, and wisdom, given to us by the Greater Fool.
Poets and artists are Greater Fools, as are spiritual masters, scientists and philanthropists. In Darwinian terms, the Greater Fool would be the mutant which, by being out of genetic step with others of its species, could prove to be an evolutionary breakthrough.
A real life example of the Greater Fool was Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, who refused to patent it thereby losing untold millions by way of royalties which would have accrued to him because he wanted the whole world to benefit from his invention.
In fiction, the most celebrated Greater Fool is Cervantes's great mock hero Don Quixote, the delusional knight-errant who tilted against windmills which in his crazed imagination were evil giants which it was his duty to slay.
Clad in his rusty and tarnished armour, riding his scrawny mare, Rosinante, followed by his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, astride a donkey , and serenading the bedraggled whore whom he calls Dulcinea, Don Quixote is a figure of ridicule, a comical caricature.
But in his futile foolishness he assumes heroic stature, for he persists, against all reason, to see the world not as it is but as it ought to be. He refuses to accept what is real because he yearns for that which lies above and beyond the consensual conspiracy that society calls reality , and condemns as madness any challenge to its predominance.
In that he dares to dream the impossible dream, to reach the unreachable star, Don Quixote is indeed mad. It is a madness he shares with the Sufi mystic who, intoxicated with the wine of divine love, sings of the rapturous union which transcends all barriers and divisions of the mind so that Creator and created become one. In marketing terms, the Greater Fool is the ultimate disruptive innovator, the greatest risk taking venture capitalist who dares to bet against overwhelming odds and in doing so extends the boundaries of what convention has established as the realm of the possible.
In this sense, the very failure of the Greater Fool is a victory . In his vain glorious attempts to assume the role of an epic hero, Don Quixote is a laughable failure. But like the shield in which he sees a reflection of himself, his failure reflects a triumph of the ideal of chivalrous heroism, impossible though its actual attainment might remain. The protagonist of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea epitomises the spirit of heroism fated to be doomed: It can, and will, be defeated, but it cannot be destroyed.
It is the quest for a Holy Grail that matters, more than the unrealisable object of that quest. In his ceaseless search for knowledge, Socrates said that he was the most knowledgeable of men because he alone realised that he knew nothing. That is the vision, and wisdom, given to us by the Greater Fool.
