Stocks (The Tulip Lesson)

Lyrics

A lecture, then.
A lesson, rather.
Recorded in the winter of sixteen thirty-seven.
A lesson we have been failing to learn ever since.

It began with a flower.
With a bulb, really.
Dormant in the cold Dutch soil.
Semper Augustus. Red flames on a white field.
The Viceroy. One bulb, they say, for four fat oxen, eight swine, twelve sheep, a thousand pounds of cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes, and a silver beaker.
The objective value?
A handful of dirt. A promise of petals.
But the subjective... oh, the subjective value was a mansion on the canal.

And so we learn the tulip lesson.
Or we should.
Sixteen thirty-seven is every year.
The asset rotates, the human stays the same.
The promise inflates, the fire eats the flame.
From Haarlem taverns to a trading screen's glow.
We plant the same strange seeds and pray they grow.

They traded in wind.
Windhandel.
Promises on paper for bulbs they’d never seen.
In smoky inns, fortunes were made between beers.
A baker, Nicolas Pieterz, traded his home for a flower's ghost.
Johannes Gessen, a man of means, found only bankruptcy in the earth.
The beauty they chased was a sickness, you see.
A virus in the bulb, breaking the color, making it rare.
Making it weak.

And so we learn the tulip lesson.
Or we should.
Sixteen thirty-seven is every year.
The asset rotates, the human stays the same.
The promise inflates, the fire eats the flame.
From Haarlem taverns to a trading screen's glow.
We plant the same strange seeds and pray they grow.

Confirmation bias. You see the neighbor’s new carriage.
Social proof. Everyone is buying. You must buy.
The availability heuristic. The stories of fortunes made are loud, the stories of ruin are quiet whispers, until they are a roar.
It's always the same pathology.
The same fever.
The same belief that this time, this time, the petals will never fall.

February third. Sixteen thirty-seven.
The buyers simply... did not appear.
And the silence was worth more than all the bulbs in the Netherlands.
The asset rotates.
The human...
...remains.