Chapter Thirteen: The Man Himself

The novel needs to be careful here, because Henry Kaye is a real person who has denied a great deal, and because the easy thing is to write him as a Svengali.

He was not a Svengali. He was something much more useful to understand, which is that he was the most successful applied psychologist in Australia in the 1990s, working entirely outside the discipline.

Everything Kaye taught was true. That's the part people cannot hold in their heads.

It was true that the schools do not teach anybody how money works. It was true that most Australians in 1998 had no financial literacy whatsoever and were at the mercy of institutions that had no incentive to educate them. It was true that fear of debt keeps people poor and that the wealthy use leverage as a tool while everyone else treats it as a moral failing.

All of it true. Every word.

And the whole apparatus was built on that truth the way a hook is built into a piece of bait.

Because if you stand in front of a nurse from Frankston and say the system has never once explained this to you and that is not your fault, she will cry — actually cry, in row K, in a function room at three in the afternoon — because it is the first time anyone in her life has said it.

And in that moment you have not sold her anything. You have simply told her the truth.

The sale happens two hours later, and it happens because of what you did with the truth.

Jamie McIntyre watched that happen a hundred times before he was twenty-five, and what he took from it was not the psychology. He was never especially interested in the psychology and never read a book about it.

What he took from it was the arithmetic: that a true sentence, said to the right person at the right temperature in a taped-off room, is worth thirty thousand dollars.