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Musings Report 2020-29 7-18-20 What Have I Learned that Will Help Me Navigate the Discord Ahead?
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What Have I Learned that Will Help Me Navigate the Discord Ahead?
Note of apology: as I approach the final laps in the marathon to finish a book, I run out of steam and it becomes impossible to keep up on email. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
What astonished Napoleon? "Do you know what amazes me more than anything else? The impotence of force to organize anything."
I suspect the impotence of force to organize anything may prove to be the dominant dynamic of the era we're entering.
What astonishes me is how little wisdom I've acquired in 50 years of adulthood that I feel confident can be applied to the Age of Discord ahead.
I honestly feel like I'm still learning the basics, i.e. I'm still a beginner in virtually everything. My grasp feels partial, my understanding tentative. There is literally nothing I know well enough to teach.
What have I learned, if anything, that will help me navigate the discord, uncertainty and risks ahead?
The well of wisdom may be dry as a bone, but there are a few practicalities that life has pounded into my recalcitrant brain which might prove useful to a learner/beginner such as me.
1. Maybe there's some sort of wisdom in realizing I don't have any wisdom, in the sense of any certainty that principles and insights that served me in the past will be of any value going forward.
I ran across a snippet that suggests this uncertainty by Joan Didion, author of the influential late-1960s collection of essays "The White Album," named after the 1968 Beatles LP. (Coincidentally, we share the same birthday, though she is 19 years older.)
"I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself... I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting room experience...
I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative's intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience was more electrical than ethical."
Didion was describing her nervous breakdown, but the description is equally apt of social, political and economic narratives being cut and spliced into a a series of disjointed images that sap our sense of continuity.
A beginner is alert, cautious, curious, wary of making mistakes. Lacking confidence and authority, the beginner is keenly aware that their grasp of things is contingent and likely to change, possibly radically. This mindset is one of low-level anxiety, but also of alertness and a willingness to absorb everything that's going on without an excess of editing or "I know better" hubris.
2. It's impossible to fix fundamental physical realities, and so we have to be very careful not to make decisions that trap us in unfavorable circumstances.
Here's an example: buying a house that's been "remuddled," meaning that the original coherent floor plan has been irrevocably altered into a mish-mash that simply doen't work, regardless of cosmetic attempts to make it work.
Locations are also difficult to fix; they require moving, an arduous and costly process with uncertain outcomes. Settling into an unfavorable locale cannot be made right, though it can be mitigated. But any disruption that arises tends to trip up mitigation and reveal the core inadequacies and risks.
Given the fragility of supply chains and financial arrangements, high fixed-cost lifestyles and high-energy consumption lifestyles seem especially vulnerable to supply-chain / financial disruptions. Dependence on long commutes and constant air travel, dependence on food shipped hundreds or thousands of miles/KM. dependence on sectors or companies exposed to potentially fatal disruptions--none of these inherent weaknesses can be fully overcome, and every mitigation is itself a point of further vulnerability.
Any security is contingent, but local sources for energy, food, clean water and civil unity, are inherently more secure than being far from all these essentials.
Exposure to civil disorder that gets out of hand is also a physical reality. Densely populated cities riven by extremes of wealth/power inequality and looming insolvency are the equivalent of powder kegs. The farther you are from the powder keg, the lower the likelihood of being injured.
The concept of initial conditions is helpful here: the decisions made early on establish the initial conditions of a system, which then dictate the possible outputs of the system. The greater the risks ahead, the greater the future importance of the initial conditions we choose.
3. If in doubt, do what the super-wealthy are doing because they can afford the best advice and have the most to lose, i.e. they are highly risk-averse.
Working for Stewart Pillette's quant shop (financial advice based on quantitative analysis of data) in the late 1990s taught me to put myself in the shoes of people managing millions of dollars, since these money managers were our clients. Their first priority was not to take risks that could destroy the fund's capital. Their second priority was to earn a yield above what an index fund earns. This is extremely difficult without taking on a lot of risk, which then puts the portfolio in danger of substantial losses.
This is why every manager seeks a risk-management edge of some sort.
Absent a reliable edge, the basic strategy to preserve wealth is to find low-risk assets that pay some sort of "rentier" dividend: bonds, timberland, energy, etc., and diversify into enough risk assets that there is a chance to scoop up some big gains while risking only a small portion of the total portfolio.
Being risk-averse may require bold moves. For example, Warren Buffet sold every share of his prodigious holdings of airlines. Maybe he had gains, maybe he took a loss. But it's clear he reckoned the risk of airline stocks going to near-zero was high enough to require bold action.
The same thinking is behind the rapid exodus out of city centers by the mobile wealthy. They recognize the risk of a meltdown of civil order is now a distinct possibility, and rather than wait around and risk getting trapped, they're leaving now.
As I often mention, the shift from linear change that appears slow / controllable to non-linear meltdown can be rapid. Why cut things too close if you can exit a risky set-up immediately?
Most successful entrepreneurial owners of wealth tend to look for solutions without getting bogged down in the emotional swamps of resentment, indignation or resignation.
Politicians may claim to want solutions, but this is generally PR; what they really want is obedience. Demanding obedience and only wanting opinions that support your own fixed view is a path to catastrophic failure.
We might not be able to afford private islands, etc., but observing what the wealthy are doing generally offers risk management food for thought, if nothing else.
4. Although I knew of the 19th century Danish philosopher Kierkegaard's work, I was never curious enough to study it until I read Thomas Merton's autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain.
Although it doesn't seem like a practicality, Kierkegaard's understanding of being authentic and true to oneself--a process translated as "acquiring oneself" in English--is the bedrock of every consequential decision, at least in my beginner's view.
Kierkegaard saw everyone who tries to please those around them and meet their expectations as wearing a series of masks. Relying on superficial, conventional masks is useful in navigating everyday life, but less so in making consequential "initial conditions" decisions that will effect everything that happens going forward.
The importance of acquiring ourselves is the one thing I'm confident about. If we don't have an inner compass we can count on, then a bunch of flimsy interchangeable masks won't help us make the big, critical decisions that may soon be forced on us, individually and collectively.
Highlights of the Blog
New Podcasts:
AxisOfEasy Salon #13: The "Phase Shift" everyone is worried about has already happened
Posts:
Welcome to the Crazed, Frantic Demise of Finance Capitalism 7/17/20
This Is a Financial Extinction Event 7/15/20
Could America Have a French-Style Revolution? 7/14/20
How Do We Change the Leadership of our Quasi-Sovereign Big Tech Neofeudal Nobility? 7/13/20
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
I know I often mention plants here, but the maturation of food and beauty-producing plants is a source of wonder to me: our breadfruit tree, a mere three years old and already 15 feet tall, has flowered for the first time, giving us the hope of mature breadfruit in a few months.
From Left Field
Obesity Is About So Much More Than Diet and Exercise: An obesity specialist reveals four overlooked contributors
The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America: In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry -- what I've been saying for years...
What Covid-19 Did to My Brain-- not pretty...
Remarks from the Systematic Crises Triggered the Current Pandemic teleconference (Michael Hudson) (via LaserLefty)
"The problem is these banks don’t lend money to build factories. Banks lend money against assets already in existence, mainly real estate, houses, buildings, and also companies – and to corporate raiders to buy other companies on credit. So, the effect of this bank lending has been to inflate the price of real estate, because a house or a building is worth whatever a bank will lend against it."
--in other words, the economy has been fully financialized....
People and Jobs? Or Wealth? The Government Has To Decide Which To Prioritise, and There Is Only One Right Answer
Beyond Resilience: Global Systemic Risk, Systemic Failure, & Societal Responsiveness (via Anne)
'Too big to fail': why even a historic ad boycott won't change Facebook
Will Republicans ditch Trump to save the Senate as support nosedives?
Official COVID-19 Statistics Are Missing Something Critical -- as I've been saying--what about the people who have long-term consequences? Why aren't we tracking them?
COVID-19 Can Last for Several Months: The disease's 'long-haulers' have endured months of debilitating symptoms -- and disbelief from doctors and friends
Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests-- vaccines may well be useless....
That Time Charlie Chaplin Almost Got Assassinated In Japan (via GFB)
"If you're afraid of losing, then you daren't win." Bjorn Borg
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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