This is part of the ongoing Jackpot Chronicles, looking at four possible Coronavirus scenarios or lenses.

The last instalment was “Force Majeure”, which posited a complete breakdown in seemingly permanent institutions. As it may turn out, these outwardly immovable edifices may not survive this economic collapse and be left out of “the new normal” that emerges out the other end.

Given that the idea of Coronavirus being concocted in a Wuhan Lab has gone from being a conspiracy theory that could get you deplatformed, to being seriously looked into by Western intelligence agencies, now may be a good time to look at the “Tin Foil Hat” scenario, and try to discern where viewing this pandemic through the proverbial conspiracy theory lens actually gets us.

Conspiracy theories make for tricky subject matter for anybody who tries to look deeper than the veneer of conventional narratives. What we are expected to accept unquestioningly out of mainstream circles is sometimes less plausible than what we are expected to dismiss as conspiracy theories.

It get’s even more distorted when inversions or backwardations occur between what is fringe and what is, ostensibly, “fact”.

Russiagate was a conspiracy theory, one that was platformed as common knowledge by multiple mainstream media outlets for over two years before finally being conceded as a nothingburger by the Mueller Report. There are still people walking around believing that the current US president was installed as a Manchurian candidate by the Kremlin, and you’re the one in the tin-foil hat for pointing out how disconnected from reality that actually is.

I’ve been very clear about this all along. Russia hacked 2016 in advance, and changed vote totals by deleting registrations. But it was NOT enough to put Trump over the top. Without Comey’s last minute letter, Trump would have lost. This is very, very simple.

— Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) May 15, 2019

(somwhere along the line, legendary usenet kook alt.genius.bill-palmer got himself a blue check)

This is typical of the hall of mirrors you enter when trying to understand the dynamics of conspiracy theories. Even the term “Conspiracy Theory” is itself the subject of conspiracy theories. The legend goes that the term was invented by the CIA to marginalize pesky truthers (another loaded word) that were finding all kinds of holes in the official explanation of the JFK assassination.

Whether it’s the implausibility of a “magic bullet” in Dealey Plaza or what many building engineers and pilots have to say about 9/11, the official explanatory cover for such world-changing events are so riddled with inconsistencies and flaws that they can only be believed by those who do not examine them.

The danger in admitting to oneself that at least some aspects of the most pivotal events of our era are not what they seem, is that it can pull you into a downward spiral where everything becomes a conspiracy and nothing is as it seems.

We all know somebody who thinks every news story, every event that occurs is a direct outcome of some shadowy cabal that controlled the event, manipulated the circumstances that precipitated it, and selected the outcome to serve their own agenda.

This is not to say that people and groups don’t conspire, that societal elites don’t have a self-serving agenda and that moral hazard and pathological opportunism do not play a significant role in outcomes. In essence, that’s politics. But here’s the crucial duality of conspiracy theory:

To the degree that all major events being manipulated behind the scenes by hidden conspirators is actually impossible, so to is the degree to which  the mainstream media explanations of events are mostly inaccurate and at times infantile.

Into this milieu, enter the tin-foil-hats, and things become inordinately more precarious. What we get is a type of three-body-problem writ large where the three independent narrative forces can be described by three age-old adages, ( all of which are possibly apocryphal quotes):

1. “Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity” (a.k.a Hanlon’s Razor, often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte)
2. “Never let a good crisis go to waste” (Winston Churchill)
3. “Never believe anything until it is officially denied” (Bismarck)

The outcomes we as citizens experience, subject to our leaders following varying degrees of these three impulses can be rendered in a Venn diagram with three drivers: Stupidity, self-dealing and duplicity.

As I’ve been exploring a lot lately, we live in something that  increasingly resembles a cyberpunk bizarroverse. One where the explanatory powers of mainstream media are in secular decline and in which our institutions have largely discredited themselves. Two powerful coping mechanisms are:

1) to pretend nothing is wrong and that business as usual can continue even though the underlying scaffolding of the system is imploding (hypernormalisation)

2) subscribe to some non-sanctioned narrative that purports to reconcile the discrepancy between what we believe should be happening with what we are actually experiencing.

For my part, I find the most useful components of both conspiracies and consensus is that they are both known to provide an explanation of events that I can reliably assume as having near zero accuracy. A useful concept for this came out of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In it his concept of the recipriversexcluson describes a number whose value can be only be defined as anything but itself. Whatever the expert consensus is saying is happening or will happen, that’s the one outcome you do not need to plan for. Same goes for most conspiracies.

Introducing the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect

The last idea I’ll introduce is that mainstream media has itself, become a type of conspiracy theory. There is less reporting, less actual journalism and mostly punditry and editorializing. Ben Hunt gives us the concept he calls The Gell Mann Amnesia Effect (the phenomenon was originally described by Michael Crichton):

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

I noticed this phenomenon years ago, but didn’t have a name for it. In my case, most articles I read in the mainstream press about the domain name system, DNS, and naming in general are so bad as to be cringeworthy. This is one of my faves:

Applying all this to Coronavirus narratives, we can look at what a specific narrative says is or will happen, what it probably preludes from happening.

So when experts say we may have to be on lockdown for 2 years, I assume it’ll come in lower.

When some authority says we we will never shake hands again, I don’t bank on it.

When people on Youtube say 5G causes Coronavirus, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.

When they say the virus was engineered and released deliberately to bring about a totalitarian police state, I think that gives too much credit to the people who run governments (see Venn diagram).

So where does all this get us?

Enter  Radical Uncertainty.

This is the title of Mervyn King and John Kay’s latest book. King was the Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013 and presided over the Global Financial Crisis, writing about his experience in his previous book The End of Alchemy.  Kay is an economist who held various positions in academia (former Dean, Oxford Business School, also London School of Economics) and author of Other People’s Money.

Their central theme is that many problems we face are inherently unknowable and that no amount of data or sophisticated modelling is going to get us anywhere near a reliable probability of what any of it means, or what will happen.

Radical uncertainty cannot be described in the probabilistic terms applicable to a game of chance. It is not just that we do not know what will happen. We often do not even know the kinds of things that might happen. When we describe radical uncertainty we are not talking about ‘long tails’ — imaginable and well-defined events whose low probability can be estimated, such as a long losing streak at roulette. And we are not only talking about the ‘black swans’ identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — surprising events which no one could have anticipated until they happen, although these ‘black swans’ are examples of radical uncertainty.‘?

We are emphasizing the vast range of possibilities that lie in between the world of unlikely events which can nevertheless be described with the aid of probability distributions, and the world of the unimaginable. This is a world of uncertain futures and unpredictable consequences, about which there is necessary speculation and inevitable disagreement — disagreement which often will never be resolved. And it is that world which we mostly encounter.

So the ramifications of radical uncertainty go well beyond financial markets; they extend to individual and collective decisions, as well as economic and political ones; and from decisions of global significance taken by statesmen to everyday decisions taken by the readers of this book.

Radical Uncertainty means gearing our efforts toward coherently responding to events as opposed to insisting on modelling them with an eye toward achieving optimal outcomes, be that “full employment”, a targeted inflation rate or the elimination of the business cycle.

“Governments choose policies to maximise social welfare. A moment’s introspection is enough to tell us that they don’t. They could not conceivably have the information required to do so. They do not know all the available options, and they are uncertain what the consequences of them will be. They do not even know whether what they wish for today will be what they still want if they achieve it tomorrow….the notion that a government could calculate what maximises social welfare is simply ridiculous. The consequences of policies and actions are far too uncertain….”

It is arguable that many of the problems we experience today, such as debt bubbles and brittle supply-chains are the result of trying to prevent bad outcomes of the past instead of facing them head on and taking the requisite pain when they happened (no bailouts, allowing the over-leveraged to fail). But they didn’t and this is a major reason why the pandemic, when it finally hit, is having such a disastrous effect for something that all else considered, isn’t as deadly as pandemics of the past.

Ironically, Radical Uncertainty was written just before the outbreak, it’s publication date was March 17, just as things were really coming unglued…

“The Black Death will not recur – plague is easily cured by antibiotics (although the effectiveness of antibiotics is under threat) – and a significant outbreak of cholera in a developed country is highly unlikely. But we must expect to be hit by an epidemic of an infectious disease resulting from a virus which does not yet exist. To describe catastrophic pandemics, or environmental disasters, or nuclear annihilation, or our subjection to robots, in terms of probabilities is to mislead ourselves and others. We can talk only in terms of stories. And when our world ends, it will likely be the result not of some ‘long tail’ event arising from a low-probability outcome from a known frequency distribution, nor even of one of the contingencies hypothesised by Martin Rees and colleagues, but as a result of some contingency we have failed even to imagine.”

So as I try to balance out these varying imperfect narratives from mainstream sources, official sources, and the tin foil hats, I try to use them more as filters to identify what to take out of the equation than as providing information and having explanatory power.

1. I eliminate what the prominent futurists and experts say will happen
2. I  eliminate the reason why conspiracists say something is happening
3. I severely discount what the MSM says is happening.

Then I  look at what’s left and try to make sense of it. To that end while I personally think that all most of the hysterical outcomes, in terms of millions of deaths, mandatory implants, FEMA camps,  are highly improbable, under the Jackpot’s Tin Foil Hat Scenario I’d be wrong (think China, everywhere).

What I am positioning for is a mother of all economic depressions, rampant inflation, joblessness, war on cash and basically everything described in the second part of Graham Summers’s The Everything Bubble (tl/dr Inflation, NIRP, War on Cash, Bail Ins and wealth taxes). When I run through all of this filtering and analysis this is what looks more imminently probable to me.

While I don’t think of these anticipated events in terms of a coordinated global conspiracy to screw all the plebes (again, consult the Venn diagram), I do expect that the rationalizations of these events along with the narratives justifying them will be rife with conspiracy-sounding elements. This brings us back to the hall-of-mirrors aspect of what is conspiracy versus what Jaques Ellul called “integrative  propaganda” in such times as these.

For the next edition of The Jackpot Chronicles I decided to rename the “Mandatory Pollyanna” scenario. That’s the one where central planners and bureaucrats manage to “save” the economy yet again. However the cost of that would be to undertake an LBO of the entire economy and running it as a centrally planned utility. I’ve decided to rename that one “The Great Bifurcation”, after the the inevitable result of that would be emergence of an even more pronounced and starkly divided Two Tier Society.

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William Gibson’s most recent novel Agency, describes a type of “many worlds” tapestry of a multiverse as it exists after a catastrophe called “The Jackpot”. The main character’s POV takes place from within one of these “stubs” as they are called, which for some reason forked off from the “real” Earth timeline sometime after the 2016 US election.

Although Gibson doesn’t exactly strike me as a MAGA guy in real life, it is interesting to note that in the story, the “real” Earth timeline is one in which it’s implied that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election (neither “Clinton” or “Trump” are mentioned by name anywhere in the book).  However, it’s also the timeline in which a global thermonuclear war erupted around the Syrian conflict.

It is this outcome which the protagonists, some of which are covert operatives from our future, are seeking to nudge the other stubs away from. In other words, it’s classic William Gibson, who’s enduring quip “The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed” has probably garnered even more relevance of late.

In one of the early stubs, it is Trump who won the 2016 election, and although no nuclear conflagration occurred then, a series of rolling catastrophes remembered by history as The Jackpot, ensued. The Jackpot resulted in massive depopulation, the destruction of democracy globally, and a system of interlocking fiefdoms run by a new governance structure openly acknowledged to be a kleptocracy.

This idea that we were living in somebody else’s parallel universe oddly reinforced an inexplicable subconscious urge that began expressing itself in my own thoughts around the end of 2019, the idea that we were the bizarroverse that people often refer to in half-joking terms.

Somewhere, somehow, there is a much more rational reality, and we’re “The Bizarroverse” to that.

— https://bombthrower.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/shutterstock_1030471843-e1551983495127-1.jpg E. Jeftovic (@StuntPope) December 12, 2019

As these thoughts expressed themselves I had some sense of this oncoming year becoming an inflection point in history, one of those years against which all future events would be retroactively measured “Pre-2020” or “Post-2020”, and for sake of expediency I’ll appropriate Gibson’s literary term for that inflection point, The Jackpot.

The Jackpot is what Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart have been converging on for years, before anybody ever heard of COVID-19. They said that the current conventional assumption, that the next 20 years would be a somewhat straight-forward linear extrapolation of the previous 20, was wrong. They didn’t know what the catalyst would be, nor did any like-minded commentators such as Charles Hugh Smith,  James Kunstler, John Michael Greer,  or even myself, when I intuited in Unicorn Winter that “Ground Hog Day was coming”.

By now it seems quite likely that the inflection point is upon us and that the Coronavirus was the catalyst to bring it on. The Great Bull https://bombthrower.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/shutterstock_1030471843-e1551983495127-1.jpget of 2009-2020 or even 1982-2020, is over (each counter-cyclical bear crisis papered over by QE and ZIRP). This time, the Central Banks are out of ammo and none of the old moves are working.

The Jackpot is where we arrive when we run out of road to kick the can.

Over the next few posts I’m going to explore what various outcomes could look like after the Jackpot. These are not predictions. They are scenarios of what might unfold when certain key tenets, those articles of faith that have been taken for granted these last 20 years, break down and become irrelevant, or even toxic.

Scenario 1: Force Majeure:

In this scenario all predominant belief systems about governance and order such as liberalism, democracy, rule of law, free markets and capitalism break down. So do their accompanying institutions: political parties, nation states, currency regimes, even formal religious denominations.

This outcome witnesses the ascension and proliferation of the non-state actors. Imagine Facebook and Google having their own currencies – and paramilitary forces, while overleveraged, bankrupt nations rupture and crack up.

Countries become a balkanized hodgepodge of autonomous areas where control is contested between privately held warlords, clans or networks and remnants of regional authorities. If you want to get a feel for how the Force Majeure scenario plays out, get a copy of Neal Stephenson”s SnowCrash.

Scenario 2: Tin Foil Hats

This scenario is one where we posit (merely as a thought experiment) that the conspiracy theories around Coronavirus could be true. These range from it being a weaponized virus that either escaped, or was unleashed, to the assertion that the entire Coronavirus hysteria is a hoax, perpetrated by Global Elites (probably the Lizard People) in order to take down the economy and institute worldwide martial law.

In this scenario we might be in the early innings of World War Three, only the war isn’t being fought with bombs and bullets, it’s being fought with biological agents and weaponized financial derivatives.

Scenario 3: Mandatory Pollyana

This is where Central Bankers step in and once again save the day, injecting just the right amount of liquidity, pushing interest rates to the exactly correct level, possibly below zero. Policy makers unleash unbridled fiscal stimulus, tax incentives and deferrals, to be followed up with MMT and UBI.

In this version, global financial markets become, in the words of Ben Hunt “publicly owned utilities” – that are only permitted to go up. Short selling is banned. The world moves into a globally coordinated command economy.

Scenario 4: Good-bye Globalism

Is where multi-national corporations, so shaken from this Near Death Experience, realizing their error of betting the farm on just-in-time supply chains, labour cost arbitrage and having zero buffers, begin pulling manufacturing back home.

The smart ones start building cushions and shock absorbers into their business logic, and they begin to eschew leverage after being on the wrong side of a series of cascading liquidity implosions. In other words, businesses begin to transition themselves into what I called “Transition Companies” as posited in the inaugural posting for Out Of The Cave.

I consider this scenario to be the most desirable, but the least likely, especially if many of these corporations receive government bailouts.

Over the next days or weeks I’ll put try to find the time to flesh out each of these scenarios. It turns out that hunkering down can be a full time job unto itself, something I plan to write more about for the GC subscribers.  If you’re not already on the list and want to know about the rest of the Jackpot Chronicles and my thoughts around navigating your business through it, sign up for the list here.

My new book, Unassailable: Defend Your Content Against Deplatform Attacks, Cancel-Culture and Other Online Disasters is out now. Learn more about it here.

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Last night I made the mistake of putting Ben Hunt’s The Long Now Part 2 on a tablet and brought it to bed to read. My kid had an early morning soccer practice at school today and the plan was I’d read this before turning in early. By the end of it I couldn’t sleep.

It articulated something I’ve been grappling with for so long, so clearly and so lucidly that it got my mind racing. I’m sure you all know how it is when you’re galvanized by an idea at night. You lie there in bed with your brain completely overclocked, scribbling in a notebook beside the bed. I ended up padding over to my office and emailing Mr. Hunt around midnight and he gave me permission to attach a PDF of the The Long Now Part 2 with the email I’m sending my list. It’s also online at the EpsilonTheory website.

From the very opening line, I should have known I was in for a sleepless night….

Every three or four generations, humanity consumes itself with the fang and claw of fascism and collectivism. Every three or four generations, we eat our own.

This is that time. This is the Long Now.

As it so happens, I had just started listening to Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning this week, a book I’ve owned probably since the third turning but never got around to reading/listening to until now. I knew the overall concept of the Fourth Turning, and that by Howe’s reckoning we had entered the Fourth Turning with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09.

The Fourth Turning is a crisis period, what Hunt calls The Long Now…

In politics it takes the form of a widening gyre, where the center cannot hold against the onslaught of polarizing political entrepreneurs who eliminate the political promise of the future, replacing it with the Long Now of constant political fear. In economics it takes the form of a market utility, where those same illiberal political entrepreneurs eliminate the economic risk of the future, replacing it with the Long Now of constant economic stimulus.

Hunt calls forth the analogy of the Rhinoceros, after the 1959 novel by Eugene Ionesco. In the story the villagers in a central European town begin, one by each, turning into rhinos, and then running on destructive rampages through the town. It is a metaphor, Hunt tells us, that describes how fascism rises within an otherwise normal community….

People are a little puzzled at first, what with their fellow citizens just turning into rampaging rhinos out of the blue, but even that slight puzzlement fades quickly enough.

Soon it’s just the New Normal. Soon it’s just the way things are … a good thing, even.

The key point Hunt makes in his essay is this:

It’s not just bad people who turn into rhinos

Everybody is susceptible, and the penalty for buttressing oneself against the trend of “going Rhino” is utter and profound aloneness. It almost seems not worth it.

Your typical MAGA zealot is a rhino. So is everybody in Antifa. Both Paul Krugman and Sean Hannity are rhinos. People who mean well become rhinos because in the prospective Rhino’s mind

…the danger at hand is so great, so existential, that NOTHING MATTERS other than combating that danger, that you must sacrifice your most precious possession – your autonomy of mind – to believe in the necessity of these political actions. You must not only think that it is possible for 2 + 2 = 5 if the political exigency is urgent enough, you must believe that it is necessary for 2 + 2 = 5. Orwell called this “collective solipsism”. I call it political nihilism. Either way, THIS is the politics of the Long Now.

We are all in danger of  “going Rhino”: Yesterday, in fact, I had just set up a new Twitter account, a parody that was to push a new blog I was spinning up whose intent was to be like the “F**kedCompany” of this generations’ forthcoming tech bubble implosion. It was cynical. Jaded. Biting. After reading The Long Now, I felt slightly ashamed of myself.  It wasn’t helping. Even if I managed to get it off the ground it wasn’t going to be productive. It would be yet another source of acerbic angst in your social media feed. Who really needs that?

So this morning I shut the entire thing down and started writing this instead. As Hunt tells us, we can’t do anything about the disruption that is baked-in to a Fourth Turning / Long Now style unraveling.  All we can do is to “refuse to become rhinoceros ourselves”, and in doing that, we take another tack:

Make, Protect, Teach

What resonated with me so much from reading this essay was because I’ve been trying to articulate something similar for a long time. It’s the basic premise behind “The Transition Overview: Building Companies That Matter” piece that kicked off Out Of The Cave back in 2017. In my last podcast with Charles Hugh Smith we talked about it (around the 38:19 mark):

MJ: when I look at  Pathfinding [Our Destiny] like part seven where where we’re talking about what the way forward looks like, that it’s outside of the control of the of the establishment, that it’s outside of the system I get this sense that for society to flourish and adapt around this and evolve. I guess that’s the key word, we’re going do this around the institutionalized hierarchies.

They’re not going to get religion one day, we’re not going to elect the right candidate, we’re not going to have the right party gain power that’s suddenly going to say “I read this great book by Charles Hugh Smith and this is how we’re going to do it”.

It’s going to be something like institutionalized hierarchies will just lose more and more relevance as these new social and business and financial configurations start gaining more and more relevance.

CHS: That’s an excellent point and I think if anything I didn’t emphasize that enough. That really what we’re talking about is kind of like hacking the system in in the old time sense that a hack was a workaround. It wasn’t like you were breaking into the system to steal something, you’d created a workaround for a kludgy system that just didn’t work anymore.

And so I think you’re absolutely right, it’s going to be working around us and and Bitcoin is one example of how workarounds are manifesting and of course the status quo is going try to suppress those and/or co-opt them but what we’re really talking about is when systems fail at a systemic level you can’t reform them. You’re not going to make a policy tweak that’s going to fix higher education or the health care system. It just isn’t going work.

People are going to start working around that and they’re going be starting to pay cash for for medical care from pop up providers or remote physicians. Or there’s lots of different solutions to that in education. What I see the model that’s going to emerge whether people like it or not and is that students are going to start taking control of their own education and they’re going start organizing their own education.

They don’t need this bloated structure that charges them $70,000 a year and so that’s where technology, the internet and networking has really enabled a whole suite of solutions that basically bypass all the institutions that now hold the wealth and power, that have all this as you say institutionalized lethargy as as their their model.

It’s actually quite an exciting time but for those who are dependent on the system within these institutions it’s a very disturbing time

The way through the Long Now is not to vote in the correct political party in or to cajole professional panderers into decreeing the correct policies. We’re beyond that now.

All of this to pave the way for the punch line in The Long Now, Part 2, which is that

“The way through the Long Now is a social movement, not a political party.”

That sentence was why I couldn’t sleep last night. That’s what people like Charles Hugh Smith and Chris Martenson and George Gilder and Tom Woods and numerous others have been converging on for the last decade or so. That’s the emerging theme and Ben Hunt, in this essay I think, finally nailed the three word ethos of what is emerging: Make Protect Teach.

I believe that a decentralized and service-oriented social movement at scale can thrive in the age of social media technology. I believe that a decentralized and service-oriented social movement can both inoculate our hearts from the top-down Nudges that push us into rhinocerosness, as well as fill us with a positive energy that reverses the pervasive alienation that creates the Neb Tnuhs of the world.

It’s a social movement for a revitalized foundation of citizenship. It’s Make – Protect – Teach.

There’s no primacy to these three rightful objects of political power and the citizenship which drives them. Put Teach at the top of the triangle. Spin everything 90 degrees. Marry two of them. Take them independently. Change the colors and the font size. I’m not trying to be symbolic here.

I’m trying to be Real.

I’m trying to provide an alternative to the abstracted world of narrative and cartoon that rules our mindfulness from the top down, in favor of a concreted world of actual human beings making things and protecting each other and teaching each other, where we act as Stewards of our children’s future rather than as Managers of our personal now.

If I’ve done Hunt’s essay any justice in this piece you’ll set aside 15 or 20 minutes and read it sometime in the next day or so. I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something if you did that.

The Long Now Part 2: Make Protect Teach