We Hanged Our Harps Upon the Willows
February 10, 2020·4 comments·Politics
We're told to choose between becoming cynical about every narrative we encounter or ignoring the real manipulation happening around us. But the actual danger is subtler and more binding. The most powerful narratives don't merely tell us what to think. They compel us to participate, transforming disagreement into moral failure.
• Every major institution has learned the same trick. When you resist their vision for Democracy or Military or Peace or Capitalism, you're not disagreeing with an idea. You're accused of hating the thing itself. Disagreement becomes impossible because opposition gets reframed as depravity.
• Participation is the real prison. A narrative about college education doesn't just inform your thinking about universities. It compels you to ignore their bloated costs and turn a blind eye to their growth. A narrative about capitalism doesn't just justify markets. It binds you to always being long, always buying, regardless of what valuations actually are.
• The mechanism works because it exploits something true. Democracy is good. Military service deserves respect. Education matters. Capitalism has built prosperity. The narratives don't lie. They just capture what's genuine and use it to demand your participation in things you might otherwise resist.
• This is why cynicism and apathy both lose. If you see manipulation in every symbol, you become paralyzed. If you ignore the manipulation, you're conscripted. Most people caught between these poles simply surrender without noticing, humming along to songs they didn't choose.
• The only escape requires creating something new instead. Not protesting the old narratives. Not fighting them head-on. But writing new stories and reviving symbols that actually reflect what you and your community believe, rather than what institutions want you to believe. The question becomes: will you sing their songs or remember your own tune?
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Comments
Rusty & Ben: How do you reconcile this and other recent ET notes with Edmund Burke’s “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing?” You hammer against participation and encourage us to see every public institution/narrative not only as corrupt but corrupting. Okay, but isn’t it also true that if we want to fight the rot we must do more than blog?
If I were an oligarch, I’d be promoting the hell out of every #BITFD meme and inveighing constantly against the legitimacy of everything but God and family, including (of course) all the fragile and imperfect accountability systems holding me in check. And each time a well-informed, leaderish person threw up their hands and retreated behind a do-nothing wordcloud of virtue signaling cynicism, I’d celebrate and send a thank you note.
So how about asking the Pack to do something practical, like scour more Form 4s, 990s and other filings to bolster the case that certain buyback/comp schemes and PACs are actively corrupt? If we bundle our efforts and ship all the evidence to the SEC, DOJ and a few large news organizations, mightn’t that be the next Panama Papers? Mightn’t that slow the gyre?
John, it’s pretty consistent with about seven years of writing! We’ve never wavered from advising that the answer to competition games is NOT to play (I’m looking at several notes from 2014 that are literally about backing away from the table/casino), but to instead replace them with our own cooperative games. Not playing someone else’s game isn’t doing nothing, it’s not doing THAT thing.
What we’ve also been consistent about is writing that we AREN’T here to tell you how to think or what to do. What you think needs to be done may be different from what WE think needs to be done. That’s why we’ve set up a system for creating events and gatherings to connect you with other ET packmembers (and will be expanding that soon to forum functionality), so that YOU can decide how best to participate. So that YOU can create cooperative games and a spirit of reciprocity in a full-hearted way in your community. It’s also why we’re spending our own money to travel to and support these events.
It’s also why we’ve started work with our ET Pro subscribers on charting out an Inflation preparation plan for asset owners together. It’s why our ET Forum later this year is focused on producing several multiple collaborative work products like the ones you describe.
But it sounds like you have a real vision for what you’d like to achieve with your community. Don’t wait for me and Ben to ask you to do something - tell us what we can do to help YOU.
Hi Rusty, Thank you for this elaboration/clarification. I was unaware of some of these points and I appreciate your efforts to enable/facilitate real-world activities and collaborations. Life is a team sport, after all. Bravo and thanks again.
This reminds me of a saying that “The level of importance rises to that which you pay attention to”. Therefore, even if your against something or protesting, your giving it more power every time you participate in it. I see it like a pond that expands as long as you participate in it in a pro/against fashion. Instead you go to a new pond where the sounds of memes are out of reach… what’s left is clarity and space to create.
Lemme know your thoughts, if I misunderstood this point.
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