Some call economics the science of self interest. When he was six, my son Cillian wrote Valentine’s Day cards to the person he loved the most: himself. My wife Elke and I thought that perhaps he didn’t really understand the premise of the cards, and sat him down, using our best patient-parent voices to get the kid to see the truth of things.
But no, this child is sharp enough to carve the electrons off an atom, and not only did Cillian get the idea, his argument was flawless, and he took us to school. “I’m a person. You said to write it to the person we love the most. That’s me, so I did.”
And he did. Cillian’s an Auto-Valentine.
St Valentine was supposedly killed in the third century in Rome because he got caught marrying Roman soldiers in Christian ceremonies. When the emperor Claudius Gothicus tried to save his life by getting him to convert to paganism, Valentine – clearly a stubborn, rebellious sort of dude – doubled down and tried to convert the emperor to Christianity. The emperor kept his pagan head on his shoulders, and Valentine lost his – thus teaching us all that one should never negotiate hard from a weak hand (and that, perhaps, being a saint has a lot to do with having below-average levels of self interest).
One thousand seven hundreds years later, my son, the little bollox, has a bit too much economics in his heart, I suppose. Chaucer might have been right when he wrote “Amor Vincit Omnia”, but I’d say he wasn’t thinking about the six-year-old son of a psychologist and an economist. It’ll take quite a woman (or man) to get round Cillian.