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Musings Report 2019-42 10-19-19 What Worries Me
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What Worries Me
It's practically un-American to confess you're worried. Can-do self-help and cheerfulness are expected, promoted and rewarded. So to say I'm profoundly worried about the state of the nation is to swim against the acceptable current.
Nonetheless, I'm worried, because I sense the long-wave/cycle disintegrative phase is gathering momentum. Though the timing and outcome are unknown, these phases end badly.
As I noted in this week's blog, economic decay manifests as social and political decay. People are angry, easily inflamed, seeking scapegoats, hardening their own views, all of which manifest economic decline and insecurity.
People are increasingly demanding that everyone agree with them, rather than seek solutions and common ground. People aren't really seeking solutions or common ground, they seek confirmation that you concur 100% with their views, and if you don't, they are stridently indignant: how dare you disagree with me!
This is not a healthy development. People are increasingly prone to repeat their positions dogmatically, and your refusal to agree 100% increases their dogmatism and their agitation.
After three or four such outbursts--we cannot call them exchanges, because nothing is being exchanged--there's nothing to say.
It's extremely dangerous when people stop being interested in solutions and finding common ground, and are only interested in confirming that everyone agrees with them.
What exactly are we fighting over? The answer appears to be Trump. He's front and center in every narrative. This is striking: there's no real discussion of the nation's fundamental economic, social and political issues, or even a fig-leaf attempt to address them; instead, we've projected all our national angst and anger onto Trump.
Psychologically, this is a well-known human strategy to avoid a complete meltdown of the social structure. In families that are coming apart, family members will subconsciously project all the family's ills on one child. Groups will do the same, bullying a few members at the bottom of the pecking order.
When everything is unraveling, our herd instinct kicks in, and we become increasingly skittish and uneasy. One manifestation of this group anxiety is huge conflicts suddenly break out over nothing: riots at ball games, demonstrations that become free-for-alls, family gatherings that suddenly dissolve in extreme acrimony over some trivial event.
I'm witnessing these behaviors in comments and correspondence. The Oftwominds audience has always been genteel. People disagree or correct me with civility, and I respond in kind. One of the motives behind the title "of two minds" is that there are often several perspectives and I can change my mind as new information or experiences are presented.
But this is not what I'm seeing: I'm seeing once reasonable people harden their views into a seething dogmatism, and expressing indignation or anger if I don't agree with them 100%.
I don't think these readers bothered to understand my work, which is admittedly outside the mainstream; they found something they didn't like and keyed off of that.
The turmoil over "facts" and "fake news" is another manifestation. As financial commentator Ben Hunt recently put it, the "tells" are all being manipulated to support a dominant narrative. So the unemployment rate, consumer inflation and the stock market are all manipulated to support the illusion that all is going swimmingly.
As the distance between these fantasy "facts" and experiential reality widen, trust in these "tells" (i.e. trustworthy indicators) declines.
As trust in these "facts" and the "experts" who gin them up declines, the corporate media and authorities double-down in support of their fictitious "facts": any doubters are "conspiracy theorists," purveyors of "fake news," or dastardly Russian stooges repeating "Kremlin talking points."
There is no middle ground left in such a state, and indeed, no desire for middle ground, as the mere existence of middle ground would mean whomever demands 100% compliance and agreement with their position is not going to get it.
What worries me is the implicit belief that everything will be restored and our problems will more or less all go away once Trump is gone. This is a convenient but dangerous fantasy. All the truly serious problems will still be awaiting solution once he exits the public stage.
In this disintegrative phase, people are increasingly indignant if their simplistic, magical-thinking "solution" is challenged. Technology, to take a common example, will magically solve all our problems. Challenging this as unrealistic or impossible triggers a great indignation in the true believer: again, how dare you doubt tech innovation will save us!
As a small-time trader in financial markets, I'm accustomed to contemplating several conflicting points of view: some are bullish, some are bearish, some are neutral. Everyone makes their case, and if you decide to make a trade, you're going to be right or wrong. Once you realize you're wrong about the direction of the market, you can either change your mind and exit the trade, or you can double-down and absorb losses in the belief/hope that the market will eventually do what you're betting it will do.
This doubling-down is a dangerous strategy, because we tend to harden our convictions as the market turns against our bet. This leads us to suffer catastrophic losses, when we could have exited the trade with modest losses early on.
In other words, to reduce our anxiety and uncertainty, we harden our views and become dogmatic, blocking out all evidence that our position is untenable / not a solution.
This is what I fear is taking hold in the U.S. Rather than reinforce the traits of successful adaptation and problem-solving--flexibility, experimentation, developing an appetite for constant small failures as the necessary foundation of advancement, keeping an open mind--we're embracing the Dark Side of the herd instinct, doubling down on rigid, dogmatic, inflexible, untenable positions, a strategy that leads to catastrophic losses and collapse.
This is why I wrote Pathfinding our Destiny, to explain why the traits of successful adaptation are essential to surviving disintegrative phases. Once we lose interest in actual solutions, with all the sacrifices, experimentation, uncertainties and failures that real solutions require, solutions become impossible.
Highlights of the Blog
Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression 10/18/19
Economic Decay Leads to Social and Political Decay 10/17/19
Let Me Know When It's Over 10/16/19
The Ultimate Heresy: Technology Can't Fix What's Broken 10/14/19
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Counted up all the edible plants/trees in our yard. We started with two and now have sixteen.
From Left Field
We're in a permanent coup (via Cheryl A.)
Renewable electricity overtakes fossil fuels in UK for first time--no mention of how all this energy is stored for times the wind dies and the sun goes down...
America’s Great Shale Oil Boom Is Nearly Over
Elite Failure Has Brought Americans to the Edge of an Existential Crisis: The nuclear family, God, and national pride are a holy trinity of the American identity. What would happen if a generation gave up on all three?
The Original Evil Corporation: The East India Company, a trading firm with its own army, was masterful at manipulating governments for its own profit. It’s the prototype for today’s multinationals.
Estimating the economic impact of a wealth tax
This economist has a plan to fix capitalism. It's time we all listened. Mariana Mazzucato has demonstrated that the real driver of innovation isn't lone geniuses but state investment. Now she's working with the UK government, EU and UN to apply her moonshot approach to the world's biggest challenges
Billions face food, water shortages over next 30 years as nature fails-- nature hasn't failed, we've failed--big difference...
California wildfires, electricity shutoffs and our troubled energy future
Why We Need a Working-Class Media: What could the political effects be of a media that actually served working-class Americans? In No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, Christopher R. Martin shows how, since the late 1960s, journalism has practiced a “class-based redlining of the news audience” that effectively disappears working-class people and our communities. One result is that most readers today “would not learn much about the working class from the news media.”
Ancient Maya Farms Revealed by Laser Scanning--much more extensive cultivation than previously expected....
How to solve San Francisco's housing shortage: Make more land (via GFB) -- bold idea, this is what people thought of as a solution in the early 20th century... but filled land liquifies in earthquakes, so not a good idea when the Big One hits...
"When will you begin that long journey into yourself?" Rumi
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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