A possibly overlooked detail in the latest installment to the sad saga of Michael Avenatti concerns the likelihood that his attempt to shake down Nike, for a payment to him of a sum north of $20 million, was based on his knowledge of genuine perfidy on the part of the company. For his criminal scheme was a suicide mission if Nike was pure. He had to calculate that the company, facing a choice between
(a) paying him more than $20 million and persisting with its profitable cheating; or
(b) inviting scrutiny of itself by calling the FBI
would choose (a). But it seems he miscalculated. Nike placed a call to Johnny Law, because possibly $20-some million was too much? The company employs squads of lawyers who, like Avenatti, graduated at the top of their class, and it plausibly can defend itself for less while at the same time closing a "business line" that was proving to be more trouble than it was worth. I feel more sure about how Avenatti calculated than how Nike calculated, but what I'm most sure about is that there is no one to cheer for.
Since, however, Avenatti is Avenatti, an individual who isn't hiding out within a corporation, he's a more inviting target for us moralists. Why'd he do it? To me, demanding more than $20 million seems, as a criminal strategy, excessive and rash--desperate, actually. For just a single million, Nike might well have knuckled under, and it still would have been a helluva payday. Suppose you earn $500,000 per year, on average, over a 40-year career. From here down below, that sounds like a pretty good living, but, over your whole working life, you still wouldn't make as much as Avenatti was telling Nike to transfer to him if it didn't want him talking about its business practices in press conferences.
I suppose Avenatti might have asked for the amount he needed, considering his habits and "lifestyle." In that case, however, the problem is still to account for excess. My question, I guess, is the one from Wall Street, "How much is enough?" What does Michael Avenatti need? What would make him happy? His chosen line of work is celebrity lawyer, a group that no doubt self-selects for being motivated by wealth and fame. But he had attained these things and was still shouting at Nike's top officers, f-you this, f-you that, pay me $22 million or else--something like that. One forms the idea that if they had paid he would have taken a day off to celebrate and then continued with the same desperate life until he either died or, as appears to have happened earlier this week, suffered a ruinous event.
Nothing would have satisfied Avenatti. He started out wanting to be rich and famous and, having attained it, discovered he wanted more. Psychologists have developed a vocabulary to account for this kind of behavior, the key concepts being what they call "hedonic adaptation" and "the hedonic treadmill": instead of enjoying the weather on the mountaintop, people become immediately acclimated, and adjust their expectations ever upward. The result is all this feverish activity, a desperate chase after contented bliss, which, notwithstanding many repeated successes, keeps retreating beyond their grasp. Though they lacked the lingo of modern psychology, the stoic philosophers, whom I described briefly here, had the same idea. They urged their auditors to withdraw from the mad chase. Happiness can be attained only by indirection. It might settle on you if you could only stop striving to attain it. One recognizes an affinity with much religious teaching, especially those of the East.
On the other hand, it's not as if Socrates or Jesus or Spinoza or Henry David Thoreau disagree with the Buddha about the undesirability of a life devoted to cupidity and the acquisition of fame. That their supposedly revered teachings are, as we say, "more honored in the breach" must be attributed to some fairly potent force, like maybe our biological selves: going back in time, discontent and unhappiness correlate with promiscuity, so those are the genes we're stuck with. Have to tamp them down with philosophy!
Comments