Of Two Minds

Our control is what’s irreplaceable. Wealth, status and the illusory security of dependency chains cannot replace control. What’s our personal strategy for navigating tumultuous times? I’ve long advocated controlling as much as you can. We don’t control the availability of fuel and food from far away, or the government’s policies.

This desire for compliance and consensus dooms the autocracy to failure and collapse because dissent is the essence of evolutionary churn and adaptation..The various flavors of autocracy (theocracy, kleptocracy, dictatorship, etc.) look remarkably successful at first blush but they all share a fatal flaw. To understand the flaw we must start with the dominant dynamic of all organisms, natural selection.

The financialization of healthcare started two generations ago and is now in a run-to-fail feedback loop of insolvency. Long-time readers know I have been critical of U.S. healthcare for over a decade.When I use the term sickcare this is not a reflection on the hard work of frontline caregivers–it is a reflection of the financialization incentives that have distorted the system’s priorities and put it on a path to insolvency.

All this decay is so incremental that nobody thinks it possible that it could ever accumulate into a risk that threatens the entire system.The funny thing about risk is the risk that everyone sees isn’t the risk that blows up the system.

Eventually the “flock of timid and industrious animals” changes their minds about how much exploitation by the few is acceptable. You may have noticed the news flow beyond the hot war in Ukraine is largely focused on capital financial capital (markets, liquidity, interest rates, commodities, central bank tightening, etc.) and political capital (geopolitical maneuvering, sanctions, revising energy and defense policies, etc.)

Totalitarian imposed inequality is the only possible path of centralized Degrowth: 10,000 for me, one for you, unless you disobey, and then you get zero. The fantasy is that everything will soon be super-abundant and cheap again because creating money out of thin air creates demand out of thin air and supply will always magically appear if there is demand.