Sunday, April 21, 2013

Fake It, 'Til You Break It

The most realistic part of the movie, "The Matrix", is when the guy who has been living outside of the Matrix, cuts a deal with the computers to plug him back in. He would rather live as a mindless human battery in a phony, denatured fantasy than to face a gritty reality. Unbeknownst to the overwhelming majority of today, we too live in a computer generated fantasy of our own - one sponsored by Central Banks and managed by HFT bots. Like the guy in the Matrix, today's average yuppy has no ability to face life in reality.  Keeping up with the (Dow) Jones' has exacted a heavy toll on the Prozac set...


On the other side of anarchy, the developed nations will be forced to "reset" to a sustainable way of life based on reality; below is a glimpse of what we can expect. Suffice to say, the days of "fake it until you make it", will be over, and yuppies will have to settle for being real people in the here and now rather than over-paid posers pretending to be something they are not. There won't be enough Prozac in the world to bridge the gap between the entitled phony life they are accustomed to, and the one based on reality:

> A balanced economy where the inputs equal the outputs. Sourcing cheap junk made in the Third World and dumping it on an ever-more leveraged consumer will be over.

> An economy that is not a zero sum game between wages and profits

> An economy where everyone works hard, not just the people at the bottom. Gone will be the over-paid management country club that delegates all of the work to everyone below them, while taking all of the bonus and all of the credit. Once the industrial arbitrage goes away, so will the country club membership

> A government that is held accountable for its promises. There will be no more four years of interchangeable lies by interchangeable buffoons from interchangeable political parties. The media buffoons will have to find something else to pass gas about, rather than which party most deserves to be raiding the cookie jar next. 

> Gone will be the Wall Street securitization business model of packaging everything up and selling it to the highest bidder. The asset sale will be over and the focus will be on sustainable income, not ponzi-style growth. A generation of MBAs will see their careers flash before their eyes.

Of course, there will be wide ranging "collateral damage" resulting from the reset phase. The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) will not be the same, ever again. Like NASA, it will be systematically dismantled and fed into the Food Stamp and Social Security hopper to prevent further rioting. Those people residing in the 144+ countries where the U.S. has troops - i.e. the frontier of the U.S. empire, will be left to fend for themselves.

The bottom line is that a lot of dumb ideas, greed, bad assumptions and delusion went into creating the globalized fiasco - and we are all somewhere along that continuum. However, the worst assumption anyone can have right now, is believing that any of this is the least bit sustainable. Not only because it's inherently unstable, but more importantly because a majority of people on this planet have to suffer continuously to keep this latent catastrophe operating. Belief in the status quo requires stunted judgement and morality, both of which are in terminally short supply in the Idiocracy.

Feel free to disagree with all of the above, but reality is coming like a brick wall and won't be stopping at Starbucks to debate over a four dollar cappuccino.