economics then, the way we measure and allocate value, is the very definition of bringing a knife to a gunfight. It is simply not up to the challenges or opportunities the twenty-first century presents. You alone have to meet those challenges and opportunities.
All these changes are going to elevate many people and are going to leave even more behind. And if you are expecting some form of policy change to save you, then you will be waiting a long time. According to a Princeton study published in early 2014, the wishes of the average American have precisely zero impact on government policy.26 And each day you wait for a politician to save you brings you one day closer to an unfunded retirement.
There is no avoiding the fact that we are now solely responsible for our own economic destiny. Taking the long view of history, we always were, but this has been obscured by the fact that for a brief thirty-year period after the war, our economic best interest was aligned with that of the state. Now it isn’t. Now we have to educate ourselves and become whole.
The first step in educating ourselves is to see through what the late, lamented, rogue political theorist Joe Bageant called “the American hologram.”
All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions … A simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram.27
The good thing about holograms, of course, is that they are by definition illusory. You do not need to choose them for your maps. You can find a better map. And if you can map the world, you can probably run it.
[contents]
1 “The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian.” Accessed April 12, 2015.
archive.org/details/marcopolo00polouoft.
2 James Turk and John A. Rubino. The Money Bubble. Wavecloud Corporation, 2014.
3 Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames. Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy—And What We Can Do About It. McGraw-Hill Education, 2014.
4 Ibid.
5 Forbes, ibid.
6 Alan Berube, Elizabeth Kneebone, and Jane Williams. “Suburban Poverty Traverses Red/Blue Divide.”
Brookings Research. Accessed April 12, 2015.
www.brookings.edu//media/research/files/reports/2013/08/06-suburban-poverty/suburban-poverty-by- congressional-district.pdf.
7 Jennifer Medina. “Hardship Makes a New Home in the Suburbs,” New York Times. May 8, 2014.
8 Hunter Stuart. “49 Million Americans Go Hungry, Despite So-Called Recovery.” Accessed April 12, 2015. www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/08/food-insecurity_n_5250592.html.
9 RealtyTrac Q1 2014 Foreclosure Market Report. Accessed April 12, 2015.
www.realtytrac.com/content/foreclosure-market-report/q1-2014-us-institutional-investor-and-cash-sales- report-8052.
10 Ibid.
11 Catherine Rampell. “Americans Think Owning a Home Is Better for Them Than It Is.” Washington Post.
April 21, 2014.
12 Deidre McClosky. “Measured, Unmeasured, Mismeasured and Unjustified Pessimism: A Review Essay of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century.” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and
Economics. Volume 7, Issue 2. Autumn 2014.
13 “The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt Us All.” Oxfam Report, January 18, 2013. www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/cost-of-inequality-oxfam-mb180113.pdf.
14 Andy Coghlan and Deborah MacKenzie. “Revealed—The Capitalist Network That Runs the World.”
New Scientist. October 22, 2011.
15 Ibid.
16 “Financial Repression: The Unintended Consequences.” Published March 28, 2015.
www.swissre.com/media/news_releases/nr_20150326_financial_repression.html.
17 Noel King. “About half of America has zero net wealth.” Accessed April 12, 2015.
www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/about-half-america-has-zero-net-wealth.
18 Kyle Smith. “Aging America heading for disaster.” New York Post. February 8, 2014.
19 Michael Snyder. “22 Facts About the Coming Demographic Tsunami That Could Destroy Our Economy All by Itself .” Accessed April 12, 2015. www.theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/22-facts-about- the-coming-demographic-tsunami-that-could-destroy-our-economyall-by-itself.
20 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
21 “Employment Characteristics of Families—2013.” Bureau of Labor Statistics. Accessed April 12, 2015.
www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf.
22 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne. “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” September 17, 2013.
www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/files/The_Future_of_Employment_OMS_Working_Paper_1.pdf.
23 Scott Timberg. “Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class.”
Accessed April 12, 2015.
www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_lanier_the_internet_destroyed_the_middle_class.
24 Charles Hugh-Smith. Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. CreateSpace, 2014.
25 William H. Frey. “Millennial and Senior Migrants Follow Different Post-Recession Paths.” Brookings Research. Accessed April 12, 2015. www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/11/15-millennial-senior- post-recession-frey.
26 Martin Gilens, and Benjamin I. Page. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Accessed April 12, 2015. journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?
fromPage=online&aid=9354310.
27 Joe Bageant. “The Great American Media Mind Warp.” Accessed April 12, 2015.
www.joebageant.com/joe/2007/08/the-great-ameri.html.
A Probabilistic Universe
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will
have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
Success is a head game. More specifically, it is a head game of chance rather than one of skill or strength. If there is good news in the grim story of the previous chapter, it is that the entire system is a human construct, an overlay on a probabilistic universe. It is flimsy, a hologram inside another hologram. The most insidious way the holographic bars trap you is by convincing you of their eternal, physical reality.
One of the most practicable ways of breaking out of these bars is through a diligent exploration of consciousness and probability. Marching in lockstep with a centralised, extractive late capitalist economic system is the religious faith known as scientific materialism. If only the physical exists, then only the physical has importance. If you are just a bag of chemicals, if your brain is the same thing as your mind, if you are simply a meat robot, then despite the lived personal experience of every human who has ever existed indicating the complete contrary, the worth and value of your life can be precisely measured in physical terms based on the objects you manage to accrue around you.
The hypothesis of materialism is extremely weak. A single example of the nonphysical in action, be it telepathy or psi effects, a religious miracle of any flavour, a provable example of divination or precognition, and Richard Dawkins’s house of dreary cards comes crashing down. There are thousands and
thousands of examples to choose from and you are well-served collecting those that are most personally meaningful to you over the course of your lifetime. It could be the otherwise-impossible past life recollections of children, it could be the 120 years of university studies into telepathy and other psi results. Find something that simply cannot be but is and get really knowledgeable about it.
These data points become talismans to ward off the demon hosts of the materialist tyranny.
The inherent weakness of the materialist hypothesis neatly explains why the scientific establishment remains wilfully, deliberately ignorant of and vigorously opposed to fields such as parapsychology. Inviting it into the canon of approved knowledge, even just as the unloved ginger stepchild of psychology (which it isn’t), breaks the rest of the college. In the words of notorious British metaphysician David Icke “they defend the first domino.” The magician must flick and flick until it tumbles.
At times of economic transition, old maps no longer navigate through unfamiliar streets. Chaos magic helps here. If you believe, as I do, that it is more or less mandatory for magicians to have adventures, then we can extend the metaphor by suggesting that a well-prepared adventurer always travels with more than one map. There may indeed be a resting worldview you prefer for the quieter moments in life or their most important milestones such as births, romance, and the deaths of loved ones and enemies. These maps may not be best suited for navigating the corporate sphere, especially now that it appears to have gone completely feral. (Who is the Egyptian goddess of high frequency trading, for instance? Who is the saint of downsized workers? What is the herbal charm against having your job automated?)
In order to navigate a wealth creation system that is not built for our benefit, the most appropriate maps are offensive rather than defensive. Poking holes in the dominant narrative robs it of much of the unconscious power it holds over you. Visits with the bank manager suddenly generate significantly less anxiety when their absurdity is laid bare. They emerge as a meeting of holograms to discuss things that have no objective reality in a probabilistic universe filled with
chaotic high strangeness. Honestly, it’s like a surrealist theatre piece when you stop to think about it.
There is, however, a danger in building out an adventurer’s map that must chart the advantages and shortcomings of science. The magician may find him- or herself accidentally believing that the map is in some sense true. All too often people seek to “prove” this or that mystical worldview by recourse to scientific findings. This is a fool’s errand, as mysticism is fundamentally irrational and that is its great power and solace. “Proving” mysticism with science is like using a slide-rule to measure wind speed.
In either case, in all cases, the best we can ever say is that some maps overlap more than others, which may be useful in navigating a particular metaphoric mountain range or mangrove swamp. Neither map actually is the mountains or the swamp, and neither map is particularly useful on the open ocean. I am not selling and will never sell you a worldview. I merely want to help you find the spot marked X.