The Doubts That Go with the Delusions in a Land of Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires

In summing up the delusions of what others have called "temporarily embarrassed millionairedom" Upton Sinclair in Money Writes! used Johann Pestalozzi's images of the fishes and the pike, in which "the little fishes" are told that "[f]or a million little fishes to be preyed upon by a hundred great pike is all right, because every little fish has an equal chance to become a pike," needing only "to grow sharp enough teeth, and eat enough of the other little fishes."

Of course, as Sinclair acknowledged, it may be that a great many of the fish were persuaded of this moral and practical insanity--but not all were, while even believers had doubts amid the inevitable "agonies of pain and fear" of a fish on the run from its life from ravenous pike. As a result they had to constantly reassure themselves and be reassured by others in the "faith that he or she will be a bit swifter or luckier than the others" and realize their "destiny for pikehood" in all its "glory," while those not so persuaded of the essential rightness of the arrangement are dismissed as "soreheads" and "grouches."

All this remains very much with us a century on, the delusions, the doubts, the dismissals of dissent, even as the vocabulary has changed, such that I think Sinclair would have an easy enough time understanding the use of terms like "beta" today.