DACHVARD

Commencement address delivered at Harvard School, June 13, 1986.

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Now that Headmaster Berrisford has selected one of the oldest and longest-serving trustees to make a commencement speech, it behooves the speaker to address two questions in every mind: Why was such a selection made? And how long is the speech going to last?

I will answer the first question from long experience alongside Berrisford. He is seeking an enhanced reputation for our school in the manner of the man who proudly displays his horse, which can count to seven. The man knows that counting to seven is not much of a mathematical feat but he expects approval because doing so is creditable — considering that the performer is a horse.

The second question, regarding length, I am not going to answer in advance. It would deprive your upturned faces of lively curiosity and obvious keen anticipation, which I prefer to retain, regardless of source.

But I will tell you how my consideration of speech length created the subject matter of the speech itself. I was puffed up when invited to speak. I immediately considered Demosthenes and Cicero as role models and anticipated trying to earn a compliment like Cicero gave when asked which was his favourite among the orations of Demosthenes. Cicero replied: "The longest one."

However, I also thought of Samuel Johnson's famous comment on Paradise Lost: "No one ever wished it longer." And that made me consider which of all the twenty Harvard School graduation speeches I had heard that I wished longer. There was only one — that given by Johnny Carson, specifying his prescriptions for guaranteed misery in life. I therefore decided to repeat Carson's speech in expanded form, with some added prescriptions of my own.

After all, I am much older than Carson was when he spoke, and have failed and been miserable more often and in more ways than was possible for a charming humorist speaking at a younger age. I am plainly well-qualified to expand on Carson's theme.

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Carson's Prescriptions

What Carson said was that he couldn't tell the graduating class how to be happy, but he could tell them from personal experience how to guarantee misery. Carson's prescriptions were:

I. Ingest Chemicals

It is easy to understand Carson's first prescription — ingesting chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception. I add my voice. The four closest friends of my youth were highly intelligent, ethical, humorous types, favoured in person and background. Two are long dead, with alcohol a contributing factor, and a third is a living alcoholic — if you call that living.

While susceptibility varies, addiction can happen to any of us through a subtle process where the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. And I have yet to meet anyone, in over six decades of life, whose life was worsened by overfear and overavoidance of such a deceptive pathway to destruction.

II. Envy

Envy joins chemicals in winning some sort of quantity prize for causing misery. It was wreaking havoc long before it got a bad press in the laws of Moses. If you wish to retain the contribution of envy to misery, I recommend that you never read any of the biographies of Samuel Johnson — because his life demonstrates in an enticing way the possibility and advantage of transcending envy.

III. Resentment

Resentment has always worked for me exactly as it worked for Carson. I cannot recommend it highly enough if you desire misery. Johnson spoke well when he said that life is hard enough to swallow without squeezing in the bitter rind of resentment.

For those who find it impossible to quit resentment cold turkey, I also recommend refraining from the Disraeli compromise. Disraeli, as he rose to become one of the greatest Prime Ministers, learned to give up vengeance as a motivation — but he did retain some outlet by putting the names of people who wronged him on pieces of paper in a drawer. From time to time, he reviewed these names and took pleasure in noting the way the world had taken his enemies down without his assistance.

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Munger's Additions

So much for Carson's three prescriptions. Here are four more of my own.

I. Be Unreliable

Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you master only this one habit you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great. If you like being distrusted and excluded from the best human contribution and company, this prescription is for you.

Master this one habit and you can always play the role of the hare in the fable — except that instead of being outrun by one fine turtle you will be outrun by hordes of mediocre turtles, and even by some mediocre turtles on crutches.

I must warn you: if you don't follow this prescription, it may be hard to end up miserable even if you start disadvantaged. I had a roommate in college who was severely dyslexic. But he is perhaps the most reliable man I have ever known. He has had a wonderful life — an outstanding wife and children, and a career as chief executive of a multibillion-dollar corporation. If you want to avoid a result of this kind, you simply can't count on your other handicaps to hold you back if you persist in being reliable.

I cannot pass by a reference to a life described as "wonderful so far" without reinforcing the "so far" aspects of the human condition — by repeating the remark of Croesus, once the richest king in the world. Later, in ignominious captivity, as he prepared to be burned alive, he said:

"Well now do I remember the words of the historian Solon: 'No man's life should be accounted a happy one until it is over.'"

II. Learn Only from Your Own Experience

Minimize what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead. This is a sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement.

You can see the results of not learning from others' mistakes by simply looking about you. How little originality there is in the common disasters of mankind — drunk driving deaths, reckless maimings, incurable venereal diseases, conversion of bright college students into brainwashed zombies as members of destructive cults, business failures through repetition of obvious mistakes made by predecessors.

I recommend as a memory clue for finding real trouble through heedless, unoriginal error the modern saying: "If at first you don't succeed, well, so much for hang gliding."

The other aspect of avoiding vicarious wisdom is the rule for not learning from the best work done before yours. Perhaps you will better see the type of result you can thus avoid if I render a short historical account.

There once was a man who assiduously mastered the work of his best predecessors, despite a poor start and very tough time in analytic geometry. Eventually, his own original work attracted wide attention and he said:

"If I have seen a little farther than other men it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants."

The bones of that man lie buried in Westminster Abbey, under an unusual inscription:

Here lie the remains of all that was mortal in Sir Isaac Newton.

III. Stay Down After Reversal

Go down and stay down when you get your first, second, or third severe reverse in the battle of life. Because there is so much adversity out there, even for the lucky and wise, this will guarantee that in due course you will be permanently mired in misery.

Ignore at all cost the lesson contained in the accurate epitaph written for himself by Epictetus:

Here lies Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and favoured by Gods.

IV. Never Invert

My final prescription for fuzzy thinking and infelicity is to ignore the story they told me when I was very young about a rustic who said: "I wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I'd never go there." Most people smile at the rustic's ignorance and ignore his basic wisdom.

What Carson did was to approach the study of how to create X by turning the question backward — studying how to create non-X. The great algebraist Jacobi had exactly the same approach and was known for his constant repetition of one phrase:

It is in the nature of things, as Jacobi knew, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward. When almost everyone else was trying to revise the electromagnetic laws of Maxwell to be consistent with the motion laws of Newton, Einstein discovered special relativity by making a 180-degree turn and revising Newton's laws to fit Maxwell's.

It is my opinion, as a certified biography nut, that Charles Robert Darwin would have ranked near the middle of the Harvard School graduating class of 1986. Yet he is now famous in the history of science — precisely because of his working method. Darwin always gave priority attention to evidence tending to disconfirm whatever cherished and hard-won theory he already had. In contrast, most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They become people of whom Philip Wylie observed:

"You couldn't squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn."

Einstein said that his successful theories came from "curiosity, concentration, perseverance, and self-criticism" — and by self-criticism he meant the testing and destruction of his own well-loved ideas.

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It is fitting that a backward sort of speech end with a backward sort of toast, inspired by Elihu Root's repeated accounts of how the dog went to Dover, "leg over leg":

To the class of 1986 — may each of you rise high by spending each day of a long life aiming low.