“Two-thirds of young people would like to live under an explicitly socialist economic system”

Even worse: They have no idea what socialism is.

Not long ago we looked at The Future Laboratory’s report on travel that predicted carbon passports and limits on personal CO2 emissions as a way to mitigate climate change.

The back of the napkin math from our look at that report, was that living standards in G-20 nations would have to drop by 75% in order  to bring personal carbon footprints in line with “expert” recommendations (the typical North American pleb emits somewhere between 12 and 13 tonnes of CO2 per year – to meet those netzero objectives, set by unelected, globalist technocrats, we need to ratchet that down to 2.3 tonnes per year).

In the course of breaking that down I came across another report,  also authored by Future Labs (whom I described then, as coming across as a WEF-wannabe). That was on the coming “macrotrend” of Neo-Collectivism. At the time I plunked down £265.00 to buy the report, promising to write it up in an upcoming piece.

Here it is:

There are five core themes running through 40-page, high-gloss PDF:

1. Climate disaster is imminent.
2. Democracy and capitalism in their current state aren’t working.
3. Individualism is on the way out.
4. “Web3” is a driving force of decentralization, (but it is being co-opted by capitalism).
5. Young people increasingly see collectivism, if not outright socialism as the solution.

Like everything The Future Laboratory emits, there’s a lot of word salad:

“a new model has the potential to reroute power from organisations: Web3. In this digital laboratory, decentralisation reigns: citizens become squads, profits are dispersed and community is king.

 

It represents a fresh start, an Alternet Economy that allows us to imagine how systems rooted in consensus, equity and care can be reproduced in offline societies too. How, for example, could cities, wealth and even entire organisations be shaped by solidarity?”

The report promises that, “These practical strategies will guide your brand through the shift from individualism to collectivism“

However, when you peel back the veneer of equity, social justice and “deeper meaning” that are supposed to supplant the crass, destructive impulses like capitalism and free exchange, the trends highlighted as “re-imaginings” of work, organization and ownership, turn out to be… somewhat capitalist and free enterprise-y.

And that’s a problem.

Any kind of co-operative enterprise that is entered into consensually and produces excess time, services or goods (profit) which is then divided among the participants is basically a free enterprise venture. It’s nothing new.

“This means that brands, which are nothing without their communities, will make the radical move from being sellers to coordinators. To genuinely place collectivism at the heart of their products, campaigns and workforces, brands should prepare for a future in which they invite customers to run their businesses, design infrastructure as a service, and blur the boundaries between a company, a community and a collective.”

One could argue that customers already run businesses. Or at least they would, if left to themselves: “The customer is always right” and “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” are what drive a pure market economy.

What customers value, what they need, is what gets produced. All other factors are distortions.

You can ruminate on how profits tend to coagulate toward the few, how monopolies emerge and hierarchies ossify into oligarchs and elites – but closer inspection on why – for anybody who cares to go down that rabbit hole, usually reveals a broken monetary system, Cantillon Effects and a political class hell bent on perpetuating the grift.

These realities tend to cast a pall over “collectivist opportunities”:

Decentralisation is one of the driving forces behind Web3.  This re-imagined internet is intended to be governed by its users, and its collectives are flourishing in gaming platforms like Roblox and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) like Friends with Benefits.

 

But this sense of ‘freedom’ that Web3 promises is already being disputed. Ed Zitron, CEO of media relations company EZPR, argues that Web3’s veneer of equity is being rubbed away to resemble the hierarchies of Silicon Valley – an idea exemplified by Facebook’s acceleration into the metaverse. ‘These systems are not ‘free’ or ‘owned by the people’, but owned by the people who created the systems,’ he writes.

You mean platforms and infrastructure are owned by the very people who risk their own capital and time in order to invent and build them? The horror!

Even Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) find it necessary to implement policy and consensus through the ownership of governance tokens, and those tokens are usually bought and sold like commodities. They have to be, or else nobody would ascribe value to a governance token – that may be what the project participants are initially paid in.

The sub-text of all collectivist or socialist aspirations, spoken or not, is “equality of outcome” – something which is categorically impossible so long as there are any vestiges of free will. 

The sub-text of all collectivist or socialist aspirations, spoken or not, is 'equality of outcome' - something which is categorically impossible so long as there are any vestiges of free will.
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No matter how much you try to democratize and make any given venture equitable – at some level people have to decide whether to allocate their time, energy, resources to it, or to something else – and the only way to do that is to make doing so involve an economic trade-off. It’s the same reason why Proof-of-Work (mining) is so integral to the success of Bitcoin.

Choice ensues, as does subjective value, then ownership. And wherever you get ownership, you get concentration of ownership. It’s the Pareto Principle 101 (the 80/20 Rule, which we find everywhere, is like a naturally occurring constant of the universe, like the Golden Mean).

The only way to obviate concentration and “unfair” ownership distribution, isn’t through  halfway-communist euphemisms like “Neo-Collectivism”, communitarianism or “socialism” – you have to go full-throttle: 100% central planning and abolition of individual rights on everything.

No “skin in the game”, no subjective value, no individual choice – just the fulfillment of a collectively decided central plan, against which there are no alternative actions or considerations (sounds a lot like #netzero and #degrowth, tbh).

In case you think I’m exaggerating the end-point of socialism, the report points (rather blithely, I might add) toward a Brave New World of “Post-Family kinship”:

“something ME O’Brien, a trans communist writer, is calling for: ‘In place of the coercive system of atomised family units, the abolition of the family would generalise what we now call care.’”

Noting that the “generalization of care” would only accomplish commoditizing it –  we get a sense of where collectivism inexorably leads: abolition of basic human rights.

The primary mechanisms through which individual choice and action occur (along with the choice of vocation), include the selection of a spouse, the raising of one’s family and relations with kin.

Confusing “Decentralization” With “Collectivism” Considered Harmful

“Neo-collectivism is not only motivating consumers to create their own systems of commerce, care and community, but leading brands and organisations to reconfigure their own anatomies too.

New initiatives are applying this sense of localism to the retail market, using communal sharing models in order to decouple consumption from capitalism.

Where citizens once relied on Silicon Valley powerhouses to spearhead better technologies, they are now taking control, forming human networks that rely on groups of people working in tandem.”

These are all just rhetorical repackagings of free enterprise , entrepreneurship and dare I say it, competition.

You can call an employee owned co-operative with a relatively flat org chart neo-collectivist and socialist: but it isn’t. It’s a capitalist, free enterprise business and more power to those who can make it work, especially by giving everyone on the team skin in the game (ownership, “equity”, shares).

But the danger here is packaging all these ideas around decentralization and new ways to do business as some kind of vindication of collectivism, or socialism. The report introduction cites the Institute of Economic Affairs, that

“Two-thirds (67%) of young people in Britain would like to live under an explicitly socialist economic system”

Yet very little in this report, that purports to describe the coming “macrotrend” of neo-Collectivism, is actually socialist or even really collectivist (except maybe the idea of abolishing the family).

What the Future Labs report is really talking about is decentralization. It talks about localism – which is another megatrend, closely related, and coincidentally something I’ve been recently talking about with Charles Hugh Smith, regarding one his books, Self-Reliance in the 21st Century:

Here’s the Future Lab word salad version:

“The pandemic helped people recognise the personal limitations of aligning career with purpose, motivating people to find life satisfaction closer to home, and within more localised communities and collectivist opportunities.”

 

“New initiatives are applying this sense of localism to the retail market, using communal sharing models in order to decouple consumption from capitalism.”

And here’s what Charles wrote:

“the entire premise of self-reliance is to relocalize one’s own economy as much as possible by earning and spending money in one’s own community, outside the control of corporations / globalization.”

and how he describes his book:

“self-reliance in the 21st century means reducing our dependency on fragile supply chains and becoming producers as well as consumers.

 

“[it] is often confused with self-sufficiency–the equivalent of Thoreau s a cabin on Walden Pond. But self-reliance in the 21st century isn t about piling up money or a cabin in the woods; it s about humanity’s most successful innovation: cooperating with trustworthy others in productive networks.”

The Future Laboratory and Charles Hugh Smith are talking about the same thing. But when you filter out the “WEF-speak” and glorification of collectivism – what we’re really looking at is driven by self-reliance (individualism) – which occurs within a community or what Charles calls a “productive network” (a free market).

I’ve heard people whom I thought would know better, such as ‘Exponential Organizations’ author Salim Ismail, trying to make  the case (on Robert Breedlove’s ‘What Is Money’ show) that “privately run socialism” would work better than state run, because it’s the central planning of The State that is inefficient.

This is really just a variation of “True Communism has never been tried”, where techno-utopians like Ismail inadvertently drift toward the “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”  ideations of Aaron Bastani (publisher of Jacobin Magazine). We’ll have to to break that out into another post. The short version is that all versions of “FALC” assume a near-zero marginal cost of energy – which, at least for now, is not the case. 

Ismail cited  Uber as an example of  a socialist app, proving that even brainy people are prone to conflating  sharing (or even cooperation) with socialism.

When you think about it, sharing is impossible without ownership and without capitalism, specifically. Private property is what makes sharing even possible. Without it, in a truly socialist system (no private property), there is no sharing – there is only taking turns using things – and who’s turn it is gets decided by somebody else.

So too, is cooperation decidedly individualistic – one must decide to enter into a mutual agreement with another – and at least two individuals have to decide it to have any cooperation at all. Socialism, or collectivism is not cooperative – it is conformity and compliance – enforced by other people.

What Future Labs is articulating in this report, and techno-utopians like Ismail are hinting at, are really the myriad permutations that can and will arise on the crest of the decentralization revolution. Some may be hyper-individualistic, other decidedly communal, let a thousand flowers bloom.

But let’s not fool ourselves – or worse – mistakenly vote ourselves into socialism or embracing collectivism because we think they’re the same thing as decentralization.

The late great Ross Elver (my long-time lawyer and mentor) was fond of saying “You can’t suck and blow at the same time”.  The coming megatrend is decentralization, and you can’t have decentralization and collectivism at the same time.

Who gets to decide what you do? You or somebody else?

Decentralization is about the core, fundamental human right: choice – and choice is all about individualism.

Collectivism, under whatever name you want to call it abolishes choice.

The easiest way to tell the difference is to ask yourself “Who gets to decide what you do (or don’t do)? You? Or somebody else?”

Decide what? Your travel allowance, your meat consumption, your energy usage… everything.

If it’s somebody else, then it’s socialism / collectivism. 

I won’t post the Future Labs report here because it’s their paid content and, I assume, their copyright. Perhaps someday, after the abolition of private property, they won’t mind.

My next e-book The CBDC Survival Guide: Navigating Monetary Apartheid will be out soon (honest), sign up for The Bombthrower mailing list and I’ll let you know when it drops – and get a copy of the The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto in the meantime. 

Follow me on Twitter or Nostr. npub1elwpzsul8d9k4tgxqdjuzxp0wa94ysr4zu9xeudrcxe2h3sazqkq5mehan

Also See:

• Coming Soon: Your Travel Will Be Restricted By Personal Carbon Allowances
• Life in 2033: Monetary Apartheid
• Carbon Rationing, CBDCs and Sound Money

If Bitcoin didn’t exist,
we’d have to invent it right now.

The conventional take on Bitcoin and crypto-currencies in general from the mainstream skeptics is that it’s some sort of speculative bubble. The recent mania in NFTs seemingly adds credence to this argument. However, the NFT craze, as unfathomable as it is, even to somebody like myself, has precedents that show it doesn’t invalidate the crypto thesis.

Coming up in the domain and DNS business, I’ve seen this movie before. I’ve also made the point back in the 2017 crypto cycle that the Tulipmania analogy for Bitcoin was a bad one for many reasons, and that it was a more accurate comparison to the domain name aftermarket of the 2000’s era. When companies and speculators were paying millions of dollars for strings of words from the dictionary with “.com” appended to them, that was a speculative mania and it was akin to Tulipmania. And from our vantage point in the present we can draw the comparison to NFTs.

But when the .com aftermarket fizzled, the entire internet kept right on plugging along using DNS as the carrier tone, and domain names for endpoints. That didn’t change and to this day, without DNS you’ve basically  got nothing.  It’s part of the internet plumbing (yes, there are multiple projects seeking to supplant DNS via blockchain, separate convo for another day).

The overall point is, a seemingly speculative mania can erupt out of a relatively new protocol, be it the long defunct hedge fund that rang the bell at the top by purchasing “fund.com” for $10M USD, or an NFT selling today for $69M USD, and that doesn’t make the underlying protocol from which it sprang forth a speculative bubble (we discussed this along with attention markets and BAT on the latest AxisOfEasy Salon #40).

But if everything from NFTs to stonks to real estate and gold and cryptos are all hitting fresh all-time-highs, it seems to be that the obvious pattern here isn’t necessarily that “Everything is in a Bubble” as much as that the numéraire is collapsing.

Most people reading these kinds of articles know that bonds are a dead man walking and M2 money supply is going up everywhere. I was going to pull in charts from multiple places (my home country of Canada’s is below). Japan, Eurozone, China, there’s no point, they all look the same, everything looks like this:

And if you zoom in on the last year, the Pandemic Year that will bisect modern history into The Beforetimes and The New Normal, they all look like this:

The Pandemic panic and the monetary response to it pulled forward what I’ve been calling The Great Bifurcation by decades.

That acceleration and its intensity is a big reason why everything that can be construed as an asset in the world is going like this:

We aren’t in a hyperinflation yet. Policy makers are still trying to pretend inflation is undershooting and they’re still trying like hell to ignite it. As Charles Hugh Smith noted recently, money velocity is plummeting, even as M2 is blasting off (hold that thought).

When you read about historical hyperinflationary episodes, you will find that what invariably happens is that capital flight occurs in all directions and people end up using some sort of “notgelt”. From Jens O. Parsson’s “Dying of Money”

The recent institutional move into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is a reaction against systemic, global financial repression. What the naysayers like Peter Schiff and Nouriel Roubani don’t get about where we are in history is this:

If Bitcoin didn’t exist, we would have to invent it, right now.

Fortunately Bitcoin and the other crypto-currencies do exist, and they’ve enjoyed a spectacular debut onto the world stage and into monetary history.

Fortunately proof-of-concept has already occurred and countless FUD cycles surmounted.

Fortunately the decentralized crypto ecosystems are ready for prime time, exactly when humanity needs it the most. Necessity really was the mother of invention.

In my Crypto Capitalist Manifesto (30 pages), which is one of the documents subscribers receive after they sign up to my new Crypto Capitalist Letter, I lay out some scenarios which show the theoretical effect of an exodus from bonds and cash on the price of bitcoin, I’ll extract a couple below:

This one estimates the lift to the Bitcoin price in nominal terms based on capturing a fraction of a fraction of a secular exodus from the nearly $20 Trillion USD in negative yield bonds. If half of the capital fled negative yielding debt and of that, 10% moved into Bitcoin, it would push it up over $100K (extrapolating in linear terms of the price is where it is today when this happens).

There’s at least another $100 Trillion USD in nominally positive yield bonds, but mostly negative real returns that would also be good candidates for re-allocation. The second table tries to model Bitcoin capturing a fraction of a fraction of that as well. If there was a 25% exodus out of bonds and Bitcoin caught 10% of that, that alone would put Bitcoin up over $6 Trillion. Other alternative assets like other cryptos, and gold and silver and real estate would all experience similar lifts.

Of course those are all linear extrapolations based on the current price. In the manifesto I model out a bit more, such as Bitcoin capturing more of the exodus out of bonds as it accelerates. There would also be a generalized acceleration of the Bitcoin price once the market participants became increasingly aware of this dynamic.

In other words, this is what I think is happening, metaphorically….

The Crypto Capitalist Letter will (hopefully) be in the tradition of The Privateer, but with a tactical focus on investing in crypto stocks.

Given what has happened to asset prices and crypto in response to just an inkling of inflation, imagine if Charles Hugh Smith is right, looking at the collapse in money velocity occurring now, that this is one final deflationary “tide receding” before the inflationary tsunami hits. Then what happens to the price of Bitcoin, cryptos and gold?

To receive future posts in your mailbox join the Bombthrower mailing list or follow me on Twitter. We had to push the launch of The Crypto Capitalist Letter into the week of March 22nd, get on the invite list here for when that goes live.

It means they set the rules, and you get to follow them any way you want.

#Davos2021 starts today.

We’ve all been hearing a lot The Great Reset lately, new slogans abound such as Build Back Better, the New Normal, and what seems to be a “new” model called “Stakeholder Capitalism” is being espoused (although it is not new, I wrote about the pendulum swinging from stakeholder supremacy to shareholder supremacy back in the days of Milton Friedman in the inaugural post for this site).

Recently I decided it would be helpful challenge my own reflexive inclination to suspect that we were all being collectively screwed by our institutions, yet again.  I wondered if these momentous shifts were simply one of those tectonic phase shifts that occur throughout history and that I shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that it’s some disingenuous and ultimately malevolent  pseudo-reality being imposed from above.

It is fitting that on this  first day of #Davos2021 I outline my arc in which I tried to suspend disbelief around The Great Reset narrative, forcing myself to pose the question:

What if The Great Reset was getting a bad rap?

Maybe it’s true that the world has changed irrevocably, and that change hasn’t been driven or captured by a razor thin scab of elites at the top of the socio-economic pyramid who are setting the agenda. The idea of a reset may be well founded, after all when I first started writing about wealth inequality and crony capitalism over a decade ago, I called it “Rebooting Capitalism”.

So I started going through Klaus Schwab’s books: The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016), COVID-19: The Great Reset (2020) and most recently, Stakeholder Capitalism. (2021).  It started out as s a curious blend of nodding one’s head in agreement, underlining numerous passages, musing that maybe this is just descriptive, not prescriptive. By that I mean, maybe Schwab is simply trying to make sense of the shifts occurring, and not really offering frameworks around what should happen next, but just trying to parse what is happening and possible trajectories of the future.

This former case is similar to Warren Mosler’s description of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). It describes how Mosler and other MMT-ers think the system actually works and why the outcomes will not be as conventional economics generally fears. In Stephenie Kelton’s more recent book The Deficit Myth, she builds on this theme that MMT is more descriptive with some prescriptive policy recommendations. But my overall sense of it is that these books about MMT were more about trying to articulate a new way of looking at the existing system and not trying to drive a completely overriding agenda (even if that’s what would happen if policy makers seize on MMT as a rationalization for destroying their currencies).

I mention MMT here specifically because we touch on it again when I contrast it to Charles Hugh Smith’s concept of Community Labour Integrated Money Economy (CLIME), a little later.

With Schwab, he spends a lot of time in a descriptive mode, talking about the what is happening in the world, although we do see some of his assumptions creeping in and for awhile, I am cautiously optimistic that if everything Schwab outlines as a policy response to global issues like global poverty, and of course now, the pandemic, maybe it’s just the way of the world and this is the direction things are going without there necessarily being a SPECTRE-like entity in the WEF driving a self-serving agenda.

When Schwab talks about how a grand ideal of a standard issue One World Government model, what he calls the Neoliberal Utopia simply will not work, I breathe a sigh of relief,

“Consider  a global government [that] regulates multinational companies in global markets, and people gather in a global democracy and global unions. It is an unrealistic an undesirable goal, as it increases the distance between individuals and the immediate social ecosystems they are a part of. It also decreases their feeling of commitment to the people and the environment closest to them…Though the 20th century neoliberalists once may have seen such a global model as a Utopian ideal, it would inevitably end in the political disenfranchisement of local communities. When the center of power is too far removed  from people’s everyday realities, neither political governance nor economic decision-making would have popular support.”
— Stakeholder Capitalism p.181

But then, the more I read, the more I couldn’t shake the sense that when a guy like Schwab uses the word “commitment, what he really means is “obedience”. Schwab understands that people aren’t really going to accept decisions from on high, especially if on high is a centralized world government.

What we really need is “Subsidiarity”

Schwab goes on to introduce with a flourish one of the core pillars of Stakeholder Capitalism: Subsidiarity (the other is “Value creation and sharing”):

A primary principle for the implementation of Stakeholder Capitalism is therefore that of subsidiarity. It is not an untested or purely theoretical principal. Applied most famously in the governance of the European Union..it asserts that decisions should be taken at the most granular level possible, closest to where they will have the most noticeable effects. It determines, in other words, that local stakeholders should be able to decide for themselves, except when it is not feasible or effective for them to do so.

Subsidiarity is supposed to mean “whatever can be done at lower levels of government should not be done at higher levels”, but my guess is the devil would be in the details. Like in that last sentence of the quote, when it is not feasible or effective for the “stakeholders” in Stakeholder Capitalism to decide certain matters for themselves, those will have to be decided for them.

What would those sorts of issues be?

Well for starters, there’s climate change. That’s one of the things that’s already been decided…

“It makes sense to coordinate this challenge first at the global level.” but then the second level is at the national level, where countries can take different approaches, a limit on auto travel would have significant effect in the United States, where cars are the primary mode of transportation. Taking a different approach, such as limiting air travel, would affect certain groups of people more than others. Subsidiarity supports a national or local level of decision making for countries to determine which path will work best for them to effectively address the global goal”.

As Schwab blithely bandies about various limitations and curtailments on everybody else’s range of motion and economic choices, there is never any treatment of climate change as anything but a global crisis that justifies the complete re-ordering of everybody else’s lives.

And yet, the same level of drastic reimagining  of your life is proffered in Schwab’s other book, COVID-19: The Great Reset, even though by his own admission in that same book, COVID-19 is a not civilization ending plague:

“Even in the worst-case horrendous scenario, COVID-19 will kill far fewer people than the Great Plagues, including the Black Deaths, or World War II did”
— COVID-19: The Great Reset p. 17

Albeit one that provides an excellent opportunity to reorder everybody else’s lives,

changes that would have seemed inconceivable before the pandemic struck, such as new forms of monetary policy like helicopter money (already a given), the reconsideration/recalibration of some of our social priorities and augmented search for the common good as a policy objective, the notion of fairness acquiring political potency, radical welfare and taxation measures, and drastic geopolitical realignments.

The broader point is this: the possibilities for change and the resulting new order are now unlimited and only bound by our imagination, for better or for worse. Societies could be poised to become either more egalitarian or more authoritarian, or geared towards more solidarity or more individualism, favouring the interests of the few or the many…

You get the point: we (as in the WEF) should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine your world.

If COVID-19 is a comparatively lightweight pandemic to be opportunistically seized upon to drastically reorder everybody’s lives, one cant help but wonder if the climate “crisis” isn’t yet another global softball. Perhaps in the cold light of day, it could turn out that climate change is either out of our hands (if it is driven largely or even partially by solar cycles) or that climate alarmism is in itself more toxic and destructive than the direct effects of climate change itself, as Michael Shellenberger asserts in “Apocalypse Never”,

Apocalypse Never explores how and why so many of us came to see important but manageable environmental problems as the end of the world, and why the people who are the most apocalyptic about environmental problems tend to oppose the best and most obvious solutions to solving them.

Shellenberger, Michael. Apocalypse Never (p. xi). Harper. Kindle Edition.

Shouldn’t there be some sort of process or governance structure in there to protect the world’s citizens from being overly regulated by somebody else’s idea of what is important? Should there be some counterbalance to these unilateral assessments of when drastic measures are required, especially when those measures would supersede our own agency in directing  our own lives?

But there isn’t, not in Schwab’s Stakeholder Capitalism after the The Great Reset.

What we get instead is “subsidiarity”:

Another example around climate change, conspicuous in its lack of coverage in Schwab’s books is the idea of nuclear energy.

If the entire world is headed toward an eventual transition off of fossil fuels (if for no other reason than Peak Oil) then shouldn’t the safest, cleanest, efficient energy source be featured prominently? The next generation pebble bed reactors and micro-reactors are safe to the point of being effectively riskless when compared to other forms of energy generation and the number fatalities those other forms cause when accidents do occur:

The worst energy accident of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam in China. It collapsed and killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people. It’s not that nuclear energy never kills. It’s that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million). By contrast, nuclear’s known total death toll is just over one hundred.

Leading Shellenberger, an environmental activist of 30 years to assert that,

Nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity. In fact, nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year….

Nuclear’s worst accidents show that the technology has always been safe for the same inherent reason that it has always had such a small environmental impact: the high energy density of its fuel.
–Shellenberger, Michael. Apocalypse Never (p. 151). Harper. Kindle Edition.

And then there’s also  Thorium, which can’t meltdown and the radiation half-life is measured in weeks, not years. There is no mention of any of this in any of Schwab’s books.

Under subsidiarity, local governments across the world will be tasked with addressing problems Kraus Schwab and the Davos crew (the wealthiest 0.01% of humanity that own somewhere north of $36 trillion of the global assets) deem to be problems, and reorder the world according to how the WEF thinks things should be prioritized.

What are the priorities?

We get some insight by looking at the list of “Deep Shifts” Schwab predicts in his earlier book: The Fourth Industrial Revolution, where he posits what the big changes are that are coming at us in terms of tipping points, positive outcomes, negative outcomes and “unknown / cuts both ways”.

Shift #1: Implantable Technologies (p. 121)

“Digital tatoos not only look cool but can perform useful tasks, like unlocking a car, entering mobile phone codes with a finger point or tracking body processes”

(or implementing immunity passports).

Shift #10: Smart Cities (p.144)

Shift #11: Big Data for Decisions (p. 145)

Shift #22: Designer Beings

Tipping point in for this one will be when “The first human whose genome was directly and deliberately edited is born” (which I will point out, has already happened with the CRISPR babies in China).

Shift #23: Neurotechnologies (p. 170)

Tipping point: “The first human with fully artificial memory implanted in the brain”.

Together, they coalesce to usher in an impetus toward transhumanism ordered by Big Data and AI that will probably, in lieu of any honest debate or public consultation around these shifts, result in a type of social credit system.

And that’s what is missing from Schwab’s books. There is nothing in the framework where local communities can identify and define what they see as problems for themselves and work toward solving them. There is no mechanism for asserting their own priorities of types of things the communities themselves may value above the WEF’s “Deep Shifts”, such as full or meaningful employment, privacy, or self-sovereign health care.

Directionality matters

In other words, what is missing from Stakeholder Capitalism is that, despite paying lip service to inclusion and community, there are no actual mechanisms for priorities coming from the bottom up.

What I’ve been realizing is that you can take two systems that have outwardly similar mechanics, like  MMT and Charles Hugh Smith’s CLIME. Both systems describe an economy from which money is created ex nihilo to fulfill or generate economic activity. But from those two frameworks one can envision two very different outcomes: hyper-inflation and a two-tier society on one, and a robust community of involved economic actual stakeholders getting stuff done in the other. Why?

Because one is a top-down framework where the incentives are set by policy makers removed from the economy they attempt to fine tune, while the other is a bottom-up ecosystem where actual economic activity is a direct result of market signalling and community needs.

Conclusion

After reading through the Schwab material having initially forced myself to suspend judgement,  I now am now firmer in my initial suspicions that The Great Reset, Stakeholder Capitalism and Build Back Better  slogans that come out of these annual Davos circle jerks are blissfully oblivious to what they themselves actually are.

They believe that the role they are ostensibly to serve is as the “enlightened stewards” of society, taking the liberty of reimagining everybody else’s lives.

In reality, they are the living embodiment of uber-woke super wealthy elites , so tacitly sure that their belief systems are the product of their own personal enormous material success that they can’t really be beliefs but self-evident truths. After all, if they were wrong, they wouldn’t be super rich, right?

What is being proposed however, what The Great Reset and Stakeholder Capitalism is, isn’t just benignly wrong-headed or egregiously presumptive: it is chilling.

It doesn’t specifically call for social credit, or an AI-driven authoritarianism, yet that is what its tenets and incentives will produce. It aspires toward transhumanism, and so far all indications are that governments, and global elites seem to be buying into it and singing the “Build Back Better” mantra of Stakeholder Capitalism in concert.

If The Great Reset comes about, and I think it’s already here, it will lead to that two tier society where the world’s underclass are governed algorithmically via smartphones, digital, programmable scrip (UBI) and well ordered dopamine hits. Meanwhile the far smaller populace that actually owns all the assets globally live in a parallel universe where they retain agency, freedom of movement, diet, and thought.

On my mailing list I talk about what we can do as individuals to try and get clear of The Great Reset. Because even if we loathe this with every fibre of our being, find it oppressive and tyrannical, anti-human, anti-spirit and soulless, we won’t be able to do anything about it from the wrong side of the impermeable membrane that will very soon cordon off the haves from the haves-nots.

We have to defend our liberties, our civil rights and our assets in the New Normal. In a worst case scenario it’ll require forming an underground network a la Isaac Assimov’s Foundation. The Foundation’s stated purpose was to survive the onset of a Galactic Dark Age and preserve the accumulated culture and wisdom of a civilization that had irrevocably embarked on a path that would trigger its own demise.

Now more than ever it is important we all try to improve things from the grass roots level as the Stakeholder Capitalism rubric may be the last gasp of a system about the come off the rails completely or after a prolonged period of disruption and tyranny.

Charles Hugh Smith and I are working on a base framework for CLIME that will empower communities to create their own local exchange currency and take control over their own community economies.

• Join my mailing list to be notified about that and get other advice on surviving The Great Reset.
• Start setting up on alternative communications channels like Telegram, Signal and Keybase (we’re setting up a Bombthrower Telegram here)
• Support third-party political parties like the Greens if you’re left-of-center or the Libertarians or PPC if you’re on the right; withdraw your financial support and votes from incumbent political parties everywhere, at all levels (more on this in another post).

Hold your ground where possible, but prepare for a type of Samizdat communications culture for awhile. We may have to keep in touch with each other from the underground. The mainstream media will be no help and Big Tech is part of the problem.

This is the second instalment of The Jackpot Chronicles: Four Possible Post-Coronavirus Scenarios.

Force Majeure means:

a chance occurrence or superior force that renders a contract unenforceable and frees all parties from their obligations under it.

We are frequently told that there exists some manner of “Social Contract” to which we are implicitly bound by virtue of being alive. This implied Social Contract confers legitimacy upon the institutions that order our world, the national governments, the central banks, the miltary and police. And by extension certain communication outlets and media are endowed with a status of official curators over the narratives around institutional power.

Under the Force Majeure Scenario, the first of four possible Coronavirus aftermaths posited in “Welcome to the Jackpot”, the overwhelming or superior force is not the pandemic itself, but rather the collapse of the debt supercycle, the monetary system that derives from it, and the structure of nation states that are burgeoned by it.

The last time we were here, when a systemic crisis has shaken the foundation of the social order, the policy response was favourable to one party of the social contract at the expense of the others.

The GFC, which I now call GFC 1.0 or GFC ‘08, saw the financialized class, those closest to the monetary spigots of the Central Banks enjoy accelerating prosperity as their asset values rose, whilst the rest of the population endured stagnation and a steadily increasing cost-of-living (which mainstream commentators refused to acknowledge as inflation).

The policy response from the last crisis has led us directly, in a straight line to this one. The only surprise being the exact nature of the catalyst which would pop the Everything Bubble, and perhaps the ferocity with which the air began to let out once it did.

The signs were certainly there that we were nearing some kind of archetypical “shoeshine boy”moment or phenomenon. Complacency in passive investing, extreme overabundance in the unicorn population, the fact that there exists (existed) an entire industry around arbitraging long term leases with short term rentals via AirBnB, there was a sense of Roaring 20’s around it all and all those vile contrarians were wondering “just how long can this go on?”

Under Force Majeure the public begins to understand that the people who populate institutions are just that, people. Despite specialized training perhaps, they are not endowed with any superhuman intellect or wisdom. Success within the matrix of the institutional elite comes from proxemics and adroitly navigating the system itself, not much more.

“An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted”
— Arthur Miller

 

An era like this comes to an end when the public realizes that their betters aren’t intellectually superior but rather institutionally privileged. Now facing an existential crisis of their own making, they are completely out of touch with the public mind and out of their depth to deal with it.

Then The System Finally Comes Unglued. Now what?

The central banks and national governments have fired their bazookas in unison yet despite a typical relief rally in the form of a standard issue dead cat bounce, reality continues to insist on asserting itself. On a recent Jelly Donuts podcast, Grant Williams talks about forthcoming GDP numbers coming off 30% “truly apocalyptic”.

Yet, the incumbent institutional custodians will continue to deny reality and to discredit themselves, what will it look like then the populace comes to realize that the old social order, and the institutions that curate it are being deprecated?

Breaking: A new bull market has begun. The Dow has rallied more than 20% since hitting a low three days ago, ending the shortest bear market ever. https://t.co/06YS0XqWGP

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 26, 2020

Ontario Premier Doug Ford recently advised citizens who couldn’t pay their looming rent bills at the first of the month to simply “not pay”. He later tried walking that back, but when this sentiment gets writ large, with governments printing money and sending out cheques, what happens when people and businesses simply decide not to pay their taxes either?

Can political leaders say, with a straight face, that citizens should stiff their landlords or mortgage lenders but not the State?

And if the State can simply print up money and send out cheques, why do we need taxes anyway? Have we arrived at full MMT?

All of the central bank and fiscal stimulus portends a secular shift from deflation to inflation and I don’t think very many people understand what that means.

It means a whole lot of broken clocks are gonna be right for once, but at a time it counts the most.

Now, every company that levered up on debt to buy back their own shares over the last 10 years wants a bailout. Grant Williams points out in Things That Make You Go Hmmm that the airline industry spent 47B on buybacks since 2010, they want a 50B bailout.

What the chart, right, doesn’t show is the total dollar amount spent by the airlines on buying back their own shares between 2010 and 2019.

That number is $47.3 billion (of which American Airlines – whose negative cumulative free cash flow between those dates was $7.9 bln – contributed $13 bln).

Even the private jet industry wants a bailout.

And what will public citizens get? Those whose businesses have been ordered to close, whose jobs have already been lost? They’ll get a check for $1,200, or a tax deferral until August. Bfd.

Charles Hugh Smith’s books speak a lot about this type of secular wane in institutional relevancy, which we discussed on our podcast once and it bears repeating here:

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

Under Force Majeure as the institutions become understood to be out of touch with both the causes and remedies to the immediate crisis, they begin to signal their own hypocrisy and irrelevance more intensely.

It will not be long before citizens will face the dilemma of continuing to observe the edicts of their governments, whose policies inexorably stripped them of their ability to weather any kind of economic speed bump. They will come to realize that despite what the government decrees, especially if that means keeping their businesses closed or their jobs on hold for much longer, they may be better off working around that.

That’s when myriad alternative economies and ecosystems will explode, black markets, grey markets, Local Exchange Currencies, private blockchains, invisible agoras.

As governments at all levels teeter on insolvency and their inability to control their own populace everywhere or to be in a position to guarantee security and order, I could envision neighbourhood watch groups morphing into localized militias. I would anticipate an explosion in private security and ex-military contractors.

Don’t be surprised to see Facebook resurrect their Libra, either under that monicker or some rebranded version as the large corporations, the ones that have revenues larger than most national GDPs begin to reassert some of their plans which may have been impeded earlier.

However it plays out, the key points to bear in mind are that:

• It would be a mistake to think of the next 20 years as a linear, albeit accelerated version of the previous 20 years (a la Chris Martenson)
• We are about to undergo a change in secularity from deflation to inflation (a la Grant Williams, Peter Schiff and many others)
• The incumbent institutions of the fiat currency era are about to be swept away, akin to the way the royal houses of Europe were after World War 1 (the last major “Force Majeure” transition period that comes to mind for me).

It will all be very reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”

If you want to receive the rest of the Jackpot Chronicles series, or get on the list for my Business Survival Blueprint (available to subscribers only), sign up for my mailing list.

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

As some of you may know, I run a small boutique audiobook publisher called SpokenTome.media and the first few audiobooks we did were by socio-economic commentator Charles Hugh Smith.

We just finished three more of Charles’ books, so it was an opportune time to have him back on for another podcast.

From being branded a Russian disinfo agent by the Washington Post and New York Times to the fallacy of democratic socialism and MMT, we covered a lot of ground…

The three books we just finished, were:

1. Money and Work Unchained
2. Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege
3. Pathfinding Our Destiny (his latest)