|
|
Musings Report 2024-14 4-6-24 The Long Game
You are receiving this email/post because you are a subscriber/patron of Of Two Minds / Charles Hugh Smith.
The Long Game
The Long Game describes the primacy of comprehensive long-term goals over short-term gains, pleasures and profits. It is shorthand for placing strategy above tactics, for building a championship team rather than focusing on winning the next game, for foregoing quick profits for future gains, for sacrificing mouthfeel indulgences in favor of a nutritional / fitness regime that delivers long-term health--in every case, devoting time every day to reaching goals that cannot be reached any other way.
A recent essay proposed that making progress on our long-term goals is the source of fulfillment and happiness, not actually reaching our goals: The Unintuitive Secret to Happiness: "Always Play the Long Game."
Playing The Long Game has a positive glow, for it carries the promise that the attention paid today to goals that can only come to fruition via daily effort and discipline will be rewarded. But these future rewards are not guaranteed. We can make the daily effort to reach long-term goals and come up empty.
The goals themselves may be revealed as more problematic than anticipated. The Green Revolution produced higher yields over shorter time spans as the solution to global hunger, a laudable goal, but the unintended consequences of this success are only now becoming apparent. By deploying hydrocarbon-based fertilizers and selecting seeds that grow and mature quickly producing abundant yields, we created a form of agriculture that sucks nutrients from the soil at a rate far higher than can be replaced.
The net result is the nutritive value of our food has been in steep decline since the Green Revolution replaced less efficient, lower-yields methods: Vegetables are losing their nutrients. Can the decline be reversed? This article mentions vegetables, but the same decline has been found in grains, dairy and meat.
This decline in nutritive density may be fueling the global obesity problem, as humans (like other animals) respond to nutrient deficiencies by eating more in an attempt to fill the deficiencies. This is explained in the book Eat Like The Animals: What Nature Teaches Us About the Science of Healthy Eating.
The conventional either-or in The Long Game is between the indulgences and pleasures to be had in the moment and the gains that can only be earned with sacrifices and a goal-driven vision of the future. There is truth in this either-or, but there's a far more illusive either-or that's invisible but consequential: choosing the wrong goal for The Long Game, as a result of being blind to the tradeoffs required to reach the goal and the unforeseen consequences of reaching that goal.
In the context of the Green Revolution, the goal was to increase the quantity of food to stave off hunger. Had the goal been to increase the yield of highly nutritive-dense foods, the choices and results would have been different.
There is also an implicit sense that the longer the perspective of the Game, the more virtuous and successful the player will be. This is illustrated by Zhou Enlai's famous response to Henry Kissinger's question about the impact of the French Revolution: "Too early to say." This is popularly--but incorrectly--taken as a masterly Long Game reference to the French Revolution of 1789, while the interpreter who was present reported that Zhou was referring to the May 1968 general strike that paralyzed France a mere four years before the 1972 meeting with Kissinger.
Focusing on the Very Long Game can actually distract us from the Game we should be playing now.
Much of my recent writing has implicitly addressed the difficulties and tradeoffs imposed by time and uncertainty on the Long Game. In the simplified understanding of The Long Game, the team leadership develops a long-term strategy of acquiring key players and crafting a winning approach which eventually results in a championship season: the success is unadulterated by tradeoffs. Yes, sacrifices were made but the rewards far exceeded the sacrifices.
In the real world, the sacrifices can far exceed the rewards, and the tradeoffs--generally unanticipated or downplayed--can exact a far higher cost than the rewards. Success is not quite as clean and unencumbered as the mythology of The Long Game suggests.
Society and Nature may be playing their own Long Games that can mute or dissolve our private Long Games.
This is an extension of my previous Musings on Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns. In deciding to play The Long Game, we presume we know enough to play ably enough to reach our goals, i.e. win the game. But in eras of disorder, decay, decoherence and dissolution, many of the certainties we counted on remaining unchanged melt beneath out feet, mooting our Long Game.
Consider the consequences of what I view as two Long Games currently in play by forces far larger than individuals or markets: 1) rebalancing the destabilizing asymmetry of capital and labor, and 2) preserving the reserve status of the US dollar (USD). History is rather conclusive that extremes of wealth-power inequality hollow out and destabilize the political, social and economic orders.
To rebalance labor and capital, capital's share of power and value will have to be reduced, very possibly radically so. The current obsession with piling up assets and financial wealth as the essential foundation of security may be undermined by this Long Game rebalancing, regardless of which asset we pursue as the Ultimate For of Safety.
Every asset is prone to expropriation, punishment or dissolution: everything solid melts into air doesn't just apply to social structures, it also applies to assets, capital and financial structures.
Given the inherent temptations of fiat currencies--need to solve a problem? Just create more money--and the limitations imposed by currencies being the bedrock of national / imperial power, there is no easy formula to maintain the purchasing power of the currency while creating enough new money to satisfy every constituency.
The unstated tradeoff demanded by fiat currencies is that everything created by excessive debt / currency must be deflated to save the currency from the destabilizing predations of hyper-inflation. The only question is the distribution of the required sacrifices.
The elites who have benefited from the excesses of debt and currency naturally imagine themselves immune to sacrifice, for the sacrifices have been distributed to the bottom 90% for decades.
This asymmetry has destabilized the political, social and economic orders in ways that are not visible when viewed through the conventional lenses. The only way to rebalance labor and capital and preserve the reserve status of the USD is to shift the sacrifices to those who imagine themselves immune and to capital in all its manifestations.
The elites reckon themselves as indispensable and the bottom 90% as replaceable, but it's actually the other way round: elites can be replaced without destroying the structure, but decimating the bottom 90% brings down the entire system.
The same can be said of currency. One tradeoff that would be entirely logical in terms of The Long Game would be to reward owners of Treasuries and punish everyone else.
What's the optimum distance we should look ahead for The Long Game? Our belief in the permanence of our system gives us the confidence to plan out 20 years or even longer: how many assets do we need to pile up to retire comfortably, etc. Once this confidence is revealed as misplaced, then our understanding of time and the Long Game changes. We realize that perhaps The Long Game that actually matters is is now 7 or 8 years, and the goal is no longer winning, but limiting our losses.
Put another way: choosing the right Long Game may matter more than how you play The Long Game.
Highlights of the Blog
What Orwell and Huxley Got Wrong and Kafka Got Right 4/3/24
YOLO Spending, Inflation and the Wisdom/Madness of Crowds 4/2/24
Fed to Offer Every Household $1 Million from its New Discount Window 4/1/24 alas, an April Fools post....
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Received my $94 federal tax refund. This is worth celebrating on two counts: 1) it means I paid pretty close to the ideal amount of estimated taxes; 2) my tax return has been processed without generating any perturbations. For the self-employed with complicated returns, this is a welcome relief. Now on to paying this quarter's estimated federal, state and general-excise taxes....
A close second: our young mountain apple tree's first burst of blossoms.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
Political Instincts? (via Cheryl A,) -- recommended long read: "While the erosion of organized civic life proceeds apace, the Western public sphere is increasingly subject to spasmodic instances of agitation and controversy."
‘There’s so much triumph’: how Anna May Wong broke new ground in Hollywood
Integrity Issues Rampant in Alzheimer's Research, Say Investigators
Telling the Truth About Our Future -- Art Berman on energy realities....
Is society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modeling societal demise and its reversal (via Ben S.)
Baby goats in Minnesota infected with bird flu, concerning officials
Higher temperatures mean higher food and other prices. A new study links climate shocks to inflation
We think loneliness is in our heads, but its source lies in the ruin of civil society-- rediscovering Christopher Lasch....
"Our Country Is Being Poisoned": 270,000 Overdose Deaths Catapult Fentanyl As Major Voter Topic In Presidential Race
OpenAI explains why GPT understands nothing: GPT goes wrong because it's guessing, not understanding
The 7 major ways China has changed between 2019 and 2024 (10 min)
What We Lose When the Rent Skyrockets
"I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time." Akira Kurosawa
Thanks for reading--
charles |
|
|
|
|
|
