Of Two Minds

Initial victories do not guarantee the war will be won. Rather, they arouse the most dangerous enemy: the fatal hubris of over-confidence. War tops the long list of human folly for a basic reason: it rarely achieves the initial goals of launching the war.

When the crash can no longer be denied, the drop is widely recognized as having been obvious and inevitable…The last chance to exit is well-known in stock trading circles, but the concept can be applied much more broadly. The basic dynamic at work is a mismatch between the fundamentals (i.e. the real world) which are deteriorating due to structural changes and the psychology of participants which continues to be confident and upbeat.

The Geopolitics of Degrowth holds that real power flows not from waste, centralization and coercion but from decentralization, relocalization and the free flow of value. Conventional geopolitics is all about: more military power, more sanctions, more coercion, more influence.

Let’s call this financial system what it really is: the MetaPerverse, a conjured world of self-serving cons. We live in a peculiar juncture of history in which truth has been banished as a threat to the maximization of private gain, i.e. the hyper-pursuit of self-interest. Evidence that supports a causal chain has been replaced by cherry-picked data that supports a self-serving narrative: both the evidence and narrative are manufactured to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

The unprecedented credit-fueled bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate are popping, and America’s corrupt leaders can only stammer and spew excuses and empty promises. Unbeknownst to most people, America’s leadership made a pact with the Devil: rather than face the constraints and injustices of our economic-financial system directly, a reckoning that would require difficult choices and some sacrifice by the ruling financial-political elites, our leaders chose the Devil’s Pact: substitute the creation of asset-bubble “wealth” in the hands of the few for widespread prosperity.

Meanwhile, back in the wintry real world, everyone facing a dime in higher costs is jacking up their price by a dollar. We’re constantly assured everything’s on the mend but this trying-too-hard marketing has the opposite effect: it confirms everything’s unraveling.