Like you, John, I believe that TIME is the key to understanding the paradigm shift waiting in store for us.
We have a geometry problem. Our brains perceive three physical dimensions at 90° angles to each other. But that leaves nowhere to cram in any more dimensions at orthogonal angles. So instead, we animate our mental models to achieve that extra dimension of perception.
Consider that "before & after" are perfectly analogous to "in front & behind." It's the same with "above & below" and "left & right."
To realize this to realize that the universe is some kind of a elaborate illusion. The observable universe is contained WITHIN our minds, even though it seems to us that our minds are moving around inside of it.
The main thesis behind "System Failure" is that the economic authorities are constantly endorsing an illusion. The one where we ride around inside tiny bodies within a vast universe.
They always want their subjects dutifully reporting to work, not realizing that their jobs are illusory. So they conceal the fact the universe is contained within all of our minds. But every so often, the economic authorities loose control of the narrative. Usually every millennia or so, when broad systems of economics fail.
That's when discredited authorities find themselves opposed by spiritual figures who have glimpsed the marvelous truth underlying the human condition.
I believe we're living through just such an inflection point right now.
Nathan, the object oriented paradigm runs pretty deep, from atoms to individuals. "Entangled particles" are a mystery.
It's not so much that it is illusion, as energy is primary and information, pattern is effect. It's just that our digestive system processes the energy, while our nervous system sorts the patterns, so there is that cognitive bias towards form and when it insists on dynamically changing, we call it illusion.
Yes, our minds organize time as that linear flow, but that is because our sentient interface functions as a sequence of perceptions, so comprehending activity and the resulting change turning future to past, would be like trying to explain to the average person of 500 years ago, that the cosmos isn't swirling east to west, we are just on a little orb that is spinning west to east. They simply do not have the mental tools to process it, as most of their thinking goes to basic dealing with their situation. Time is rate and frequency, as temperature is amplitude and degree.
That the powers that be are doing their best to tear this world down, will force that change, whether people go along, or not.
The big issue is that structure is recursive, while energy is expansive. So when we make it all about form, we get sucked down those rabbit holes, trying to find that final state. Losing contact with context.
Wealth and power leveraging ever more wealth and power is a feedback loop that has learned to override any circuit breakers.
Yet greed as the primary motivating factor has the strategic aptitude of bacteria racing across a petri dish. Infinite growth economics. When we get done here, we’ll go to the moon and then Mars… To infinity and beyond!
That’s the advantage of multicellular organisms, being able to sense and navigate their surroundings.
Though it is government that functions as the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
We’ve come to accept government works best as a public utility, but haven’t yet come to see the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers.
In a market economy, money is the medium. In a capitalist economy, money is the message.
As linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 refers to money as both medium of exchange and store of value.
In your body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. Mix them up and you are dead.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would still be fighting over who has the biggest lots.
As a medium, you own money like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body.
While we might think of it as a commodity to mine from the economy, like we mine gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, it functions as a contract, between the holder and the rest of society.
As a contract, storing the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side, so much economic, social and political activity is designed to generate debt, to store the illusion of wealth.
That the flunkies allowed in DC are best at running up debt and the financial sector needs this debt to grow metastatically is not coincidence. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
“The real money is in bonds.”
The financial tail is wagging the economic dog.
Though when they do blow it all up, it won’t be the bankers in charge, but the cartels and warlords. Then, after awhile, the warlords declare themselves kings and we start over again.
John, your comments about money as a medium of exchange vs a store of value reminded of something I read in David Graeber's book "Debt: the First 10,000 Years." I went back and found the quote:
We are used to thinking of such bureaucratic interventions—particularly the monopolies and regulations—as state restriction on “the market”—owing to the prevailing prejudice that sees markets as quasi-natural phenomena that emerge by themselves, and governments as having no role other than to squelch or siphon from them. I have repeatedly pointed out how mistaken this is, but China provides a particularly striking example. The Confucian state may have been the world’s greatest and most enduring bureaucracy, but it actively promoted markets, and as a result, commercial life in China soon became far more sophisticated, and markets more developed, than anywhere else in the world.
This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.
Again, this seems bizarre, since we’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but, as the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, in many ways they could equally well be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money—historically, ways for those with a surplus of grain to acquire candles and vice versa (in economic shorthand, C-M-C, for commodity-money-other commodity)—capitalism for Braudel is first and foremost the art of using money to get more money (M-C-M). Normally, the easiest way to do this is by establishing some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so. From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites—though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamentally selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world—even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.
What will arise from our current stumble into the abyss?
Like you, John, I believe that TIME is the key to understanding the paradigm shift waiting in store for us.
We have a geometry problem. Our brains perceive three physical dimensions at 90° angles to each other. But that leaves nowhere to cram in any more dimensions at orthogonal angles. So instead, we animate our mental models to achieve that extra dimension of perception.
Consider that "before & after" are perfectly analogous to "in front & behind." It's the same with "above & below" and "left & right."
To realize this to realize that the universe is some kind of a elaborate illusion. The observable universe is contained WITHIN our minds, even though it seems to us that our minds are moving around inside of it.
The main thesis behind "System Failure" is that the economic authorities are constantly endorsing an illusion. The one where we ride around inside tiny bodies within a vast universe.
They always want their subjects dutifully reporting to work, not realizing that their jobs are illusory. So they conceal the fact the universe is contained within all of our minds. But every so often, the economic authorities loose control of the narrative. Usually every millennia or so, when broad systems of economics fail.
That's when discredited authorities find themselves opposed by spiritual figures who have glimpsed the marvelous truth underlying the human condition.
I believe we're living through just such an inflection point right now.
Nathan, the object oriented paradigm runs pretty deep, from atoms to individuals. "Entangled particles" are a mystery.
It's not so much that it is illusion, as energy is primary and information, pattern is effect. It's just that our digestive system processes the energy, while our nervous system sorts the patterns, so there is that cognitive bias towards form and when it insists on dynamically changing, we call it illusion.
Yes, our minds organize time as that linear flow, but that is because our sentient interface functions as a sequence of perceptions, so comprehending activity and the resulting change turning future to past, would be like trying to explain to the average person of 500 years ago, that the cosmos isn't swirling east to west, we are just on a little orb that is spinning west to east. They simply do not have the mental tools to process it, as most of their thinking goes to basic dealing with their situation. Time is rate and frequency, as temperature is amplitude and degree.
That the powers that be are doing their best to tear this world down, will force that change, whether people go along, or not.
Trial and error.
"Time is rate and frequency, as temperature is amplitude and degree."
Very interesting. Time as "rate and frequency" suggests that there's much more to finance (human value across time) than meets the eye.
The big issue is that structure is recursive, while energy is expansive. So when we make it all about form, we get sucked down those rabbit holes, trying to find that final state. Losing contact with context.
Wealth and power leveraging ever more wealth and power is a feedback loop that has learned to override any circuit breakers.
Yet greed as the primary motivating factor has the strategic aptitude of bacteria racing across a petri dish. Infinite growth economics. When we get done here, we’ll go to the moon and then Mars… To infinity and beyond!
That’s the advantage of multicellular organisms, being able to sense and navigate their surroundings.
Though it is government that functions as the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
We’ve come to accept government works best as a public utility, but haven’t yet come to see the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers.
In a market economy, money is the medium. In a capitalist economy, money is the message.
As linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 refers to money as both medium of exchange and store of value.
In your body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. Mix them up and you are dead.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would still be fighting over who has the biggest lots.
As a medium, you own money like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body.
While we might think of it as a commodity to mine from the economy, like we mine gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, it functions as a contract, between the holder and the rest of society.
As a contract, storing the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side, so much economic, social and political activity is designed to generate debt, to store the illusion of wealth.
That the flunkies allowed in DC are best at running up debt and the financial sector needs this debt to grow metastatically is not coincidence. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
“The real money is in bonds.”
The financial tail is wagging the economic dog.
Though when they do blow it all up, it won’t be the bankers in charge, but the cartels and warlords. Then, after awhile, the warlords declare themselves kings and we start over again.
John, your comments about money as a medium of exchange vs a store of value reminded of something I read in David Graeber's book "Debt: the First 10,000 Years." I went back and found the quote:
We are used to thinking of such bureaucratic interventions—particularly the monopolies and regulations—as state restriction on “the market”—owing to the prevailing prejudice that sees markets as quasi-natural phenomena that emerge by themselves, and governments as having no role other than to squelch or siphon from them. I have repeatedly pointed out how mistaken this is, but China provides a particularly striking example. The Confucian state may have been the world’s greatest and most enduring bureaucracy, but it actively promoted markets, and as a result, commercial life in China soon became far more sophisticated, and markets more developed, than anywhere else in the world.
This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.
Again, this seems bizarre, since we’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but, as the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, in many ways they could equally well be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money—historically, ways for those with a surplus of grain to acquire candles and vice versa (in economic shorthand, C-M-C, for commodity-money-other commodity)—capitalism for Braudel is first and foremost the art of using money to get more money (M-C-M). Normally, the easiest way to do this is by establishing some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so. From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites—though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamentally selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world—even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.