Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Radical Truth, Radical Transparency….. or Megalomaniacal Narcissism? An eternal truth in our besotted, money culture is how we unceasingly valorize those individuals who are able to achieve conspicuous levels of wealth. A case in point: the recent publication of Ray Dalio’s tome Principles. As most professional investors know, Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. The precepts that he espouses in this book underlie how he runs his firm and purportedly explain how he has been able to achieve nearly $50 billion of profits for his investors. At the outset, Dalio wanders into the realm of both metaphysics and psychoanalysis when he poses these two central questions: 1) what is true? and 2) what do you want? When the author asserts that “you can never be sure of anything,” he is merely echoing the sentiments of philosophers dating from Socrates to Bertrand Russell to the legendary investor George Soros. Soros was much more poetic when he confessed that he was “an insecurity analyst” because he was always cognizant that he might be wrong and therefore started from a position of insecurity. In comparison, Dalio does not seem to have suffered from any bouts of insecurity, much less humility. In Dalio’s second basic question “what do you want?”, he is really posing a psychoanalytic yearning. This is because the root of psychoanalysis is desire. By desire, I am referring to the distinctly human urge to seek meaning and satisfaction in our life. Essentially, desire is a human being’s unfulfilled need, be it physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual or financial. In desire, we are searching for both missing, disowned pieces of ourselves and for something beyond ourselves, outside the borders of self-recognition. As Lacan has articulated for us, in analysis is where the analysand discovers, in its most naked and austere form, the truth of his or her desire. This is a journey in which science, philosophy, religion and least of all, psychiatry have all shown themselves to be woefully insufficient. So how does Dalio connect his idiosyncratic precepts to the day-to-day realities of investing and managing a hedge fund? In essence, an “idea meritocracy” - wherein the best ideas win out and meaningful relationships are created - are facilitated by the promotion of radical truth and radical transparency. According to Dalio, we need radical truth because investors have chronic difficulty in comprehending reality, afflicted by the many blind spots that prevents us from seeing the truth. Therefore, the antidote is regular doses of humility and questioning that forces us to embrace change and to remain open-minded. In Dalio’s Orwellian world view, individuals are machines operating in a complex, interactive system, increasingly commoditized by the ongoing digital revolution. In practice, this means that Bridgewater employees are subject to continuous monitoring, intrusive scrutiny and often public criticism, akin to the self-criticism rituals of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Instead of facilitating harmony and open-mindedness, this management style is more likely to be experienced as dehumanizing and dangerously reductive. In fact, his lieutenants have told him in writing that his management style make his employees feel “incompetent, unnecessary, humiliated, overwhelmed, belittled, oppressed or otherwise bad.” Predictably, the employees that choose to work in this cult environment are seduced by the siren song of filthy lucre. Although one cannot argue with Bridgewater’s success, there is no evidence that its remarkable financial results are solely attributable to the authoritarian and megalomaniacal speculations of its founder. Although the author repeatedly extols the virtues of humility and simplicity, what Dalio actually offers in this ponderous, sizable 567-page book is - in the words of one critic - “a vast, clanking engine of tenets” - that is, in turn, inconsistent, pretentious and sometimes just plain bizarre. Would you want to be pigeonholed by the required application of the questionable Myers-Briggs personality test, publicly ranked in a firm-wide “believability” rating, or otherwise have your every move systematically recorded? Thanks but I will pass! If not for the simple fact that this work is a memoir and confessional of a prominent member of the investment world, one may be excused for avoiding this monumental claptrap to narcissistic self-indulgence.