End of Times?
Mar 22, 2020
Sounds so dramatic doesn't it? About as dramatic as all those Armageddon types that believe the financial system is going to collapse and we'll all be reset to zero.
THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN.
If there's one thing you learn from living through many supposedly doomsday recessions, it's that it's just a normal part of this bastard slavery machine we're all trapped in. The government will make examples of some bad companies, make new laws, print money to keep the system working, and
..we'll all go back to our jobs.
Pay attention to that last statement.
Let me start at the beginning.
A very long time ago, we lived in villages, hunted for meat, collected nuts and fruits, and sang merry songs by firelight at night while the boys chased the nubile girls. Simple.
Then one day someone invented the 'middleman'. This person was clever enough to define a 'role' for himself such that they did very little work, but their role became indispensable because they helped organize the rest of the village into higher productivity. This also inadvertently created the label 'worker' to apply to non-middlemen by virtue of distinction.
This wasn't entirely a bad thing, because everyone benefited from the greater efficiency, but it was quite obvious that workers were now working harder than the middlemen. What used to be everyone indulging in a couple hours of hunting and collecting nuts and berries every day, now was just the workers working twice as many hours of excessive hunting and collecting for trading with neighboring tribes, with the clever middlemen doing the negotiating, keeping a large chunk of the goods for themselves as 'commission', not having to lift a finger.
Fast forward to farming, and now you have a well-established hierarchy of Kings, Lords, tenants, farmhands, and slaves. Each higher ranking performing less work and yet having more wealth than the one below it.
This is often sold to us as beneficial because it organized humanity to become an efficient system, far more efficient than a single person trying to do all these things themselves, allowing for greater sophistication in civilization. While this may be true, the whole story is that those in higher ranks are also exploiting their roles to acquire much more than they're due for their contributions.
The inherent issue is that, frequently, the higher the rank, the more guarded it is. The extreme example, look at how guarded the monarchy role is; some kings even procreating with siblings just to keep the lineage of the crown to themselves. This guarding of roles allows them to exploit said roles for undue profits, leading to a natural pressure on the worker class to produce more, for the sole benefit of the middleman.
So, to recap, the problem of the 'middleman' is that they continue to define roles for themselves, exploiting the 'worker', and make it impossible to supplant them with fair competition. This singular aspect of human nature is the core of everything wrong in today's civilization.
So why do the workers agree to this? A couple reasons:
By design, workers don't and aren't allowed to understand or even question the big picture, so they buy into the hierarchy as being indisputable and legitimate, even 'natural'
The option to self-subsist has been entirely removed. No unlimited hunting or farming, all the land is owned by the middlemen. If you want a place to call home, you pay rent/mortgage. If you want to eat, you work to pay for food.
Doesn't sound like workers really have a choice, do they?
Take yet another leap forward, and today we have the most elaborate hierarchy system imaginable.
Some examples of modern day middlemen:
stock/crypto/FX/exotic traders that just wait for everyone else to make them money
your employer, CEOs
salespeople/politicians
Essentially anyone that produces nothing but found their way into influencing others to do real work for them; bridging labor to end-consumers. Employment is the vivid manifestation of such false hierarchy. How many times have you suffered because of some fucking asshole boss lambasting you to increase productivity to get your project over the finish line so they can collect a bonus? Spinning your lack of utter sacrifice as poor work ethics? It's disgusting.
Now again, hierarchy is a double-edged sword. It's a great thing because it optimizes the workers' efforts to be efficient and higher quality, but it's also a terrible thing because most of these benefits go to the fortified middleman role.
The increasing sophistication of humanity's hierarchy, along with the insurmountable greed of all the middlemen, and the fact that the workers would quite literally starve should they refuse to participate, leads to 'maximum productivity'. This is the theoretical maximum SUSTAINABLE output that the worker class is capable of without creating dissension. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 hours a day, 5 days a week, till they're 72 years old. This maximum effort is rationalized in the worker's minds because the minimum cost to survive is tightly correlated to how much workers make, by design. It's no coincidence that we work as hard as possible to just get by.
So what used to be a few hours of everyone enjoying hunting and foraging to survive back in the day, has evolved into a lot of rich lazy bastards, systematically dumping all this effort onto the backs of the workers that have to work as hard as possible as long as possible. Otherwise known as:
SLAVERY
I'm not using a euphemism here. Freedom is defined by choice, and if you're unable to choose not to participate in this corrupt system of worker exploitation, then by definition, you are a slave. There is absolutely ZERO that is natural about driving to work 5 days a week, spending 8 hours doing repetitive mindless work to make your boss rich, driving home, just to pay for food and a roof and so your children can get expensive slave-education, and repeat the whole cycle in their generation.
Humanity, we are lost.
We are so fucking far down this rabbit hole of indentured servitude, that we are not alive. We are cogs in a very elaborate machine designed and controlled by the small percentage of psychopaths that dominate this world. Billionaires, hedge funds, CEOs and despots; these are our slave masters, and virtually everything we do trickles up into their wallets, with a few crumbs left over to get us to the next paycheck.
Money
There is only one true currency in the world: human labor. Everything else we call money is just a coupon for human labor. Labor is what gives money value; the ability to turn a piece of paper into someone's time spent working. No matter what you buy, at some level, you are paying for someone's related efforts to manifest/deliver what you're purchasing.
Another important concept: there is no money tree. Every penny you own was taken from someone else. This means we are all connected, and moreover in 'competition' with, each other. The more money you make, the less someone else has. We are all also slave masters, putting pressure on those below us.
Try to imagine when you go buy your groceries, how you are connected to some remote rice-picker in China that's picking rice 12 hours straight for 50 cents a day, and how all the middlemen in between got their cut without lifting a finger.
And then there's those above us. I want to put forth the idea that no one human being can possibly be worth billions of dollars. There is nothing a single person can contribute to humanity that warrants having that much power to themselves. This, is quite simply a crime; humanity's clearest sign we have so much further to evolve.
Many psychopaths resort to the Darwinism argument of the 'strong shall survive' justification for today's slavery machine, but the invention of money has artificially created virtual labor, allowing for the accumulation of power far beyond nature. Would a Tyrannosaurus Rex eat an entire herd of animals at once? Slowly digesting it over 50 years? C'mon.. there's nothing Darwinian about money, it's all a big con, perpetuated and closely guarded by the rich.
The biggest con ever.
I know many of you want to go back to the gold standard for this reason, but the governments will never give up their money printing because it's the only tool they have against hoarding. It's the new norm, and that Pandora's box can't be closed. It wouldn't solve the problem of wealth imbalance anyways, the rich would still systematically get most of the gold, but there's no way to easily redistribute gold. Trust me when I say, when choosing between a gold standard (no reset) or fiat inflation (quasi-reset), we're much better off with fiat. You don't have to understand it for it to be true.
I see a lot of people upset that this financial crisis has spurred an absurd amount of fed money printing, without really understanding what that means. Printing money just means that existing money has been diluted in value, and re-appropriates this value into the government's hands for redistribution into the banks so the economy can keep running.
It's no different than any other financial crisis cycle:
Psychotics at the top of the hierarchy figure out some clever obscure complex way to milk the markets, creating a lot of virtual wealth through leverage
The musical chairs game stops and the little bit of actual money in the markets is taken by those accredited with the right set of trading options (that workers aren't allowed to exercise, for their protection of course)
All leverage collapses, exposing how much fluff the economy really was, many middlemen lose their shirts
Middlemen cut operating costs, firing workers, passing their market gambling losses down to them.
Government prints money, enticing middlemen to take advantage of cheap money, middlemen hire workers
Repeat
Every cycle of printing money makes money worth less, so every recession cycle seems much more dramatic because the values being presented are so much greater than the previous cycle. This gives the illusion that each cycle is worse than the previous, but in reality because the money is worth less, it's essentially the exact same problem with around the same degree of severity, and the exact same solution: plug the hole, dilute, redistribute.
We are all captives to the great middleman casino, where the fate of millions of lives are gambled with, daily, in markets that most don't even comprehend.
Who's to blame?
This isn't what division of labor was meant to be. Division of labor is supposed to make ALL our lives easier and more efficient. Instead, it's allowed the small psychotic fraction of our species to enslave and burden us with their whimsical desires. And it's your fault!!
Wait..whu..whut?
That's right, it's your fault!
If you want the system to fall apart, you have to stop holding it together. Your participation in doing your 'job' is the glue that perpetuates this endless fucking nightmare of hierarchy that bleeds the life out of the workers. Every single dollar those rich lazy bastards above us have, was given from you to them, willingly.
Their power is only what we give them. Remember that there is only one real currency in this world, human labor, and you currently OWN all your remaining human labor left in your lifetime. If you keep selling it for the pieces of paper money that they can print endless amounts of to keep you starving and working, then YOU are the one that keeps the system from falling apart.
Put another way, all the power in the world is actually owned by THE WORKERS! The rich just have a mountain of labor coupons that for some reason we're more than happy to honor in exchange for our efforts, instead of using that effort for our own benefit.
Let's hear that again:
"instead of using that effort for our own benefit"
After all, a billionaire is a poor man if nobody will accept their paper money, right? Now do you see the trick being played on us while we're too busy trying to survive?
Solution
I believe I have one, but it's a multi-generational, technologically-dependent, radically ego-aggravating method that will never be tolerated by the masses. And that just highlights the fact that we are in this situation today for the very reason we can't get out of it: GREED. Yes, you. All your actions culminate into your current state of affairs. What would your life be like today if you didn't own that car? Or big house? Etc. Could you be free/retired right now if you had made less demanding choices?
Unpopular opinion: the seeds of our corrupt system is inherent to and manifested by all of us. Everybody operates on the same self-serving principles, and the system we have today accommodates this ego-fixation. E.g., we consider flat democracy to be logical, even though most people have no idea how to run a civilization. Like asking the children to elect their parent. Yet flat democracy persists because nobody wants to offend the troglodytes; it's fucking ridiculous. As long as the dumb vote outweighs the wise vote, we're stuck with this slavery machine.
The stark reality is, there is no quick or incremental/teardown solution. This is a perpetual war between classes, and the middlemen have all the weapons. There is no reset coming, the economic machine will go through yet another cycle, gobs of wealth will transfer to the already rich, and the rest of us will all keep working. The middlemen have long ago built into the system the necessary defenses against dissent, making it illegal to pursue your basic human rights to subsist off the land that for many ancient millennia was our feral right, yet over the last few centuries has eroded to no Earthly rights at all. No, you must participate in the slavery apparatus, or you're a criminal (trespasser, no hunting license, tax evasion, etc.).
Now there's going to be so many morons out there trying to label me as a communist, or meant to call me a communist but instead labeled me a socialist because you're an illiterate dumbfuck. I'm not any of those things. In the world I envision, everyone is born at zero, adequately rewarded for their efforts, passively punished for sloth, and never gives blind greed a foothold. The 'reset' everyone really wants, sustained in perpetuity. Call it what you will, but it's never existed before, so keep your labels to yourself.
That brings me to the results of this poll. I'll just say what won't happen and why. It's not the end of times. I know it feels like it, and every recession ALWAYS seems like it is, and all the high-profile Chicken Little's are crying the sky is falling (read about it in their new book..), but it's just more of the same old same old shit. When it's all over, nothing meaningful will have changed, and you'll still go back to work. Once you go through a few more recessions, you'll finally understand the cycle.
Downward Forces on the Economy
DELEVERAGING
All the fat whale bastards on the stock market like to gamble with lots of leverage, meaning that most of the stocks were way overpriced with artificial money. Well, that's the first to go, and it did. These bastards also had to cover lots of margin calls so they also cashed out their crypto to get USD to pay for their bad bets, which is why crypto appears correlated to the stock market; for now. This deleveraging usually happens pretty rapidly, as we're seeing, and hopefully a good chuck of deleveraging has already played out.
PANIC
The most unpredictable aspect of any crash. How long, how deep, how many waves? Nobody knows.
COVID-19
The straw that broke the camel's back, but the virus itself would've caused havoc in the best of times. This black swan event will be short-lived but longer than we'd like, and everyone in the world is going to feel major impact from this. If you think you're suffering because of losses, try to remember all those people out of work, out of supplies, old people suffering alone in terror.. The scale of this exceeds all human historical precedent by far, even greater than any other plagues, natural disasters, even world wars; and it's just getting started.
Upward Forces on the Economy
FREE MONEY
The feds are pumping more new money than God into the system to attempt to dilute the lopsided wealth accumulation by the middlemen. This new money should provide resistance to the decline in the markets, or more accurately, to mask it. Without this printing, we'd enter into deflation, which is a slow collapse; very bad. So the alternative is fighting deflation with inflation, robbing the value of our savings, sure, but also making money cheaper to borrow with attractive rates (at taxpayers' expense), which stimulates the economy. If it's not enough, they'll add more money.
What this suggests to me is that the govt is motivated to manufacture a V recovery. It won't be a true V because the value of the currency has been debased, but I think they want to keep deflation at bay. Whether they can accomplish this or not, or how deep the recession ends up being, is a much bigger pointless speculative debate that I really have no interest in. Just know that powerful forces are pulling in both directions so don't lose hope.
COVID-19 PASSING
The global reaction, while imperfect, will save lives, and sets the stage for quite possibly an equally impressive recovery upon resumption of normal services many months from now. Only question is, where is the bottom created by the virus?
Myself, I can't predict the future, I'm only pointing out the forces at play. I haven't seen more interest in crypto from those running from stocks, so the safe-haven narrative is horseshit, unless you take the passive latent effects of inflation into account, which is legitimate, but lackluster. There really needs to be utility backing crypto for it to have any appeal to traditional investors, and for that we need time to build that utility so it's visible to the world. Until then the greedy whales will continue their tyranny.
That said, millions of people going a bit batty sequestered in their homes, might have unintended consequences..
Movies, fridge full of food, toilet paper, THC-pen, Twitter, semi-automatic BB-pistol, and complete physical isolation from any human being.
Just another day in casa galgitron
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