Duck and Cover
February 15, 2019·3 comments·Money
Everyone knows the president's health numbers are fabricated. Everyone knows airplane safety drills won't save you in a real crash. Everyone knows the official narratives are constructed to make you feel better, not to inform you. The real danger isn't that these fictions exist. It's being the only person in the room who doesn't realize they're fictions.
• Official narratives designed to comfort you are everywhere. Presidential health reports, airline safety demonstrations, economic data, fund manager holdings are all presented as factual information but actually constructed to shape how you feel.
• The people distributing this information know it's theater. The investors reading fund reports understand what they're looking at. The normalized game is that everyone plays while pretending not to.
• But information designed to reassure rather than inform becomes impossible to evaluate. Risk reports, diligence lists, economic forecasts. The tools meant to guide decisions become cartoons divorced from reality.
• The danger isn't being lied to. It's being the only one at the table who doesn't realize everyone else knows it's a lie and has already adjusted their decisions accordingly.
• If your investment strategy, risk management, or institutional decisions are built on treating theater as substance while everyone else treats it as theater, what happens when the gap between those two realities becomes impossible to ignore?
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Comments
Am not challenging your broader points about cartoons/theater designed to create a false sense of security and that the people in charge are dedicated to protecting your interest. But your inflight safety demo example is totally inappropriate. Have spent over 30 years in aviation, mostly planning and strategy but have done detailed work in areas like Flight Operations and Maintenance… The safety procedures and drills that have been developed over the decades are very well considered, have been scrutinized and fine-tuned by a wide range of professionals, and really have contributed to huge improvements in safety. You falsely assume that the binary options in an accident/incident are land safely, or crash into the ground at hunfreds of miles an hour. All those safety instructions are designed for the many, many survivable problems. Major inflight turbulence causes lots of serious injuries (keep your seat belt fastened while seated). If there’s an emergency landing because of an aircraft or engine fire, you need to be able to evacuate quickly (tray tables up, bags secure under seat in front, and window shades open so you can see where the problem is). A320s don’t land on the Hudson River frequently, but the successful evacuation was because all those frequent flyers had actually listened to all those safety announcements, and didn’t try to exit through the rear doors which were underwater. Those of us who have taken thousands of flights may tune the message out, but remember that 75% of the people on the plane fly once a year or less. No human system is perfect, but all those pilots, mechanics, cabin crew, manufacturers, and FAA regulators really are dedicated to protecting your interest, the the safety culture they’ve built (although it is being weakened) has really worked well.
Sometimes, though, you feel like you’re the only one at the table who do know it’s a game of pretend. Like the game called ‘we’re going into Venezuela to liberate the people from socialism. We did not cause their economic problems, socialism did.’ It’s especially hard because from a mixture of national pride and self-interest as Americans, you suspect many people don’t know, because they don’t want to know.
Hey Bobk…do u also write somewhere…?
I have read your comments and found your explanation of economic process intuitive…?
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