This is the Great Ravine
Epsilon Theory
July 13, 2024·108 comments·Politics
Political violence and institutional failure aren't systemic accidents. They're the mathematically optimal outcome of institutions that have learned they profit more from anger at the Other Party than from actual competence. Once sadness gets rebranded as engagement, institutions are trapped in an escalation that has only one endpoint.
- Institutions are choosing anger over competence because it works better. A financial advisor loses clients when they underperform relative to peers, not when everyone underperforms together. In zero-sum games like politics and media, that logic creates incentives to blame the Other Party rather than improve performance.
- The transformation from sadness to anger is entirely intentional and algorithmic. Big Politics, Big Tech, and Big Media have engineered a mediated pipeline that takes shared grief over terrible events and redirects it into focused anger at specific political enemies. The goal isn't truth but engagement.
- Every major institution now operates on minimax regret strategy. Being incompetent while everyone else is incompetent generates only sadness. Being incompetent while competitors are blamed for incompetence generates loyalty. This is why institutions spend resources manufacturing anger rather than fixing problems.
- The escalation is mathematically inevitable and already underway. To maintain anger at the Other Party, claims must become bolder, rhetoric must intensify, and responses must match escalations. Like mustard gas in World War I, once one side escalates, the entire system is forced to follow until the game itself breaks.
- We are being consciously offered rage that is not our own, disguised as our own anger. The sadness we feel is real, but the anger that follows is manufactured and borrowed from the Beast. The question is whether we can own our sadness and refuse the prefabricated anger that promises to complete our understanding.
The Why of Epsilon Theory
- Direct access to leading narrative-tracking technology across global news.
- Deep analysis of how narratives shape markets, politics, and society.
- An active online community of independent voters, investors and thinkers.
Subscribe to Premium
Already a member? Log in
Looking for Deeper Insights?
Unlock exclusive market intelligence, trade ideas, and member-only events tailored for investment professionals and active investors with Perscient Pro.
VISIT PRO
Most Popular
Politics
Politics
Comments
Woke up too early, far too early as I am wont to do far too often these days.
Ben was going to write an article Monday, I had been looking for it, and found it here in the wee hours of the morning.
Thanks Ben for encapsulating what’s going on, and especially how to think and deal with it.
It’s not funny how often my first thought on a “news” event is the irrational, maybe even angry one.
It takes a second thought to recognize and recalibrate.
Epsilon Theory helps.
The Pack helps.
If this helps, one way I have found work for me to get to the calmer, rational being is when seeing an inflammatory comment that sort of makes sense, that ACCUSES the other side, is to think of a friend, a very good friend , who you know is part of “the other side”, and realize he ( or she) is certainly not that way so obviously I’m being taken and mark that writer as someone to avoid in the future.
Would love to see how other members of “The Pack” handle and avoid being pulled into the fray.
Perhaps we can all share, and Learn from each other.
Anyhoo, as always, thanks Ben and glad I found this place
I’ve discovered Mother Nature is actually cruel, not fair.
Just say’n.
Tom
No, I’m not asking you to fight the Beast.
I’m asking you to see the Beast.
I’m asking you to see how the Beast feeds on our anger, which it has renamed as ‘engagement’.
I’m asking you to see how the Beast transforms our sadness into anger with stories, which it has renamed as ‘news’.
I’m taking a pause in the epsilon between the map and reality or thinking and feeling to let my sadness go through the stages of anger and hopefully emerge with a plan. I’m presently focusing on The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
-Sun Tzu
And we do it in a way that they think they came up with the idea themselves.
-jimmy
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. --Sun Tzu
Thank you Tom. I corrected it.
Jim
When I was talking at the dinner table with my family about this event my main comment was, “The media are absolutely thrilled with this assassination attempt. It’s great for their business!” So sad to say.
I agree with so much of this, and I thank you for writing this, as it encapsulates so much of what I, and I’m sure others, have been thinking.
My one pushback/question is: are we giving too much credence to the notion that things will one day correct themselves? For all the warts on the left (and my god are there warts) the current incarnation of what used to the Republican party is as close to the line of “we’re gonna smash the place and we’re letting you know now” as you can get. And maybe it’s hyperbolic, but I think when we cross that Rubicon (we’re about to cross that Rubicon much farther than Jan 6) all bets are off. All of em. And this thing may never self correct. This thing was designed never to go into the black hole of fascism or dictatorship. Every system was put in place to stop that from happening. But, if they system breaks…I’m not sure anything local saves the day.
Will Durant, eloquently stated “When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.” We are well into chaos and they’re showing us the playbook for dictatorship. I come from an Eastern European background, so maybe I have some neurons firing a little too hard, but this ravine may very well be an ocean instead, with an unreachable other side.
I hope not. I pray not.
How do we get through the Great Ravine? This.
Epsilon Theory is not part of big politics, big tech or big media. It’s their antidote. We know real humans are writing these lines (and have even met them in the flesh!) Hopefully ET will be a refuge for a pack of clear eyed, full hearted core to grow slowly but surely into something significant at the end of the Ravine.
Ben has mused that he hopes his daughters get to see the other side. Great usually has positive connotations as an adjective. In this case, it is unlikely that the decades long set of pressures put in place can be broken and rebuilt without facism or authoritarianism being a likely feature. We have to expand our sense of history to centuries across various societies. The last 3-4 generations in the US for the top 10% is an anomaly of larger than Great proportions. Rather than the images our brains conjure like fantastic, amazing, and wonderful when we hear Great. This is more likely heinous, appalling, terrifying and cruel. Not a pleasant message, but clear eyes are a must.
To me, part of not getting angry but staying sad is understanding how modern human history is centered around cycles.
I’m still reading Ray Dalio’s 2021 Changing World Order which turns out to be another confirmation that the flow of military, political, social and economic events follow cycles big and small, with the most powerful cycle being the longest (roughly a hundred years end-to-end.)
Things look not just the worst, but inexorably so, when we’re on the bad side (or worse, near the extreme of that side) of this biggest of cycles.
However, personally, I’m pretty sure that tragedy is unavoidable in a cosmic sense. When both wealth and confidence (which is a big part of wealth itself, in the modern setup) go up, everyone is happy not just to enjoy them, but to rig things up in order to enjoy them just a bit longer. When the chickens come home to roost (and I wouldn’t want to live in a world where they don’t,) we have to lose wealth and power collectively, and the negotiation over distributing this loss can easily get nasty, as we’re all so used to the benefits of the good side.
It is just plain human nature. It’s not pretty, but it’s us. The ‘bad’ side of the cycle can also be thought of as a time to sober up and regroup, which we seem to be doing here at ET.
Continue the discussion at the Epsilon Theory Forum...