Could Instability Trigger Radical Change in Your Life?

I propose that the world is upside down, that the way we live is the opposite of what we’re told it is: we don’t experience Progress, we experience Anti-Progress.

My five most recent essays (listed below) lay out an account of the present era that is radically different from the conventional narrative.

It’s worth noting that my writing is not “validated by credentials so you should listen to this person” or by data-based claims that “he called the exact top and bottom of the market and has beaten the market indices for 27 years.” The foundation of my work is the text either validates or invalidates itself by its sources and reasoning and is best read as “written by anonymous.” Lessons for the Young ... Robert P. Murphy Best Price: $4.84 Buy New $19.75 (as of 09:55 UTC - Details)

If you decide on the validity of the text based on the author’s credentials and investment track record, there are hundreds of PhD economists to follow and thousands of accredited financial advisors to consult–or consult Warren Buffet’s annual reports, as his investment track record speaks for itself.

The trust we place in these validations based on credentials and past data rests on a continuation of the conventional status quo, i.e. recency bias, the belief that the recent past is a trustworthy guide to the future because everything is stable and predictable.

And since everyone making their livelihood off the status quo has a built-in incentive to assume it’s stable and predictable, there is no advantage to entertaining possibilities outside this context.

This is the basis of assessing texts and ideas on their own merits rather than trusting the author will be correct this time because they are certified experts and/or they were right about things in the past. Trusting recency bias and credentials works well if the system is indeed stable and predictable. If it’s not, then letting the ideas speak for themselves becomes the way to widen our survey of potential futures.

I propose that the world is upside down, that the way we live is the opposite of what we’re told it is: we don’t experience Progress, we experience Anti-Progress. We don’t live in an economy that optimizes value to compete for our dollars; we live in an economy that optimizes eliminating competition to maximize extraction. All the technologies of AI aren’t additive and liberating; they’re powerful tools that optimize centralized control and extraction. The claim is that AI will help us but the real goal is to use us. The system we inhabit isn’t transparently fair, it’s transparently corrupt, the perfection of self-service passing itself off as manifesting the noble ideals of “capitalism” and “democracy.”

Rather than being victims of powers beyond our control, we accepted the erosion of fairness–the foundation of all human societies–into a rigged casino that favors the few at the expense of the many because we accepted the promise that this unfair, corrupt economy, society and political system enabled us to get ahead: who needs fairness if we have a seat in the rigged casino?

In the conventional telling, ours is a system of innovation, growth and opportunity. The reality is the opposite: the “innovation, growth and opportunity” are all concentrated in a vast credit-asset bubble that has richly rewarded those who own the assets that have skyrocketed in value and left everyone who doesn’t own these assets behind. Betrayal At Bethesda: ... J. C. Hawkins Best Price: $7.84 Buy New $11.66 (as of 08:20 UTC - Details)

This structure–the real world is the opposite of what we’re told–is a civilizational psychosis that benefits those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid. We go along with this psychosis because denial is our defense against a reality too painful to bear: our progression from a society of systemic fairness to a society of systemic unfairness.

But denial, unfairness and credit-asset bubbles are all inherently unstable, and so once the bubble pops, denial will crack and be replaced by anger, an anger at ourselves and those we trusted that will seek expression by focusing on those who glorified the rigged casino the loudest because it enriched them so immensely.

The alternative accounts touted by many are simply different flavors of the conventional narrative.

One is that the Powers That Be are instituting a techno-financial web we cannot escape of tokens, blockchains and stable coins that will digitize every transaction and enable the Powers That Be to switch our financial lives on or off as the means of an ironclad control.

If we change our money, the narrative holds, then we can escape this perfection of Orwellian control.

The problem is that changing the money in a rigged casino doesn’t unrig the casino; all it means is those in the casino start using another form of money.

Another narrative holds that technology and system dynamics can be wielded to reverse the decay and fulfill the fantasies of super-abundance and technological Progress. Natureu2019s Bounty Zi... Check Amazon for Pricing.

Neither narrative acknowledges that humans are hard-wired to live in a moral universe, as our sensitivity to fairness–which includes transparency, integrity, truth, honesty, duty, obligation and reciprocity–is the foundation of our social skills, which are our core selective advantage as a species.

The moral universe isn’t some concept that isn’t “real”–we’re constantly told that what’s “real” is finance, money, the economy, technology, data and systems–the moral universe is the foundation of all civilization. In dismissing this innate sensitivity to fairness as inconsequential in the “real world” of systems and data, we dismiss an understanding of our civilizational psychosis and our own denial of this psychosis.

There is a place for technology, finance, systems and data, but by measuring “progress” solely by technological standards, measuring “value” solely by financial metrics and measuring “understanding” (i.e. what’s being “optimized”) by data and systems–all reductionist left-hemisphere functions– we cut ourselves off from the moral universe that enables our primary selective species advantage–our social experience.

We are not social creatures like ants that self-organize by instinct and pheromone trails: we self-organize in a moral universe in which our exquisite sensitivity to fairness and unfairness in all its intuitive, right-hemisphere width and breadth has been hard-wired as the essential foundation of our primary selective species advantage.

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