A feature of this age that has slowly evolved to be the centerpiece of our society is the fact that nothing is on the level. The central issue with the last election, for example, is the degree of shenanigans. Few people care about the platforms or people, outside of a few absurd examples. What matters to everyone are the many questions about the integrity of the process. Ours is an age where nothing is on the level and everyone is assumed to be up to something underhanded.
America is a marketplace society and the marketplace has always been the natural hunting ground for people who like to take advantage of their fellow man. This was something the ancient Persians observed about the Athenians. The agora, as far as the Persians could tell, was where Greeks tried to take advantage of their fellow Greeks through deception. Greek democracy was the marketplace applied to the arena of politics, which meant politics was based on deception.
The thing is, America has always been a marketplace society, but everyone assumed that we enjoyed a minimum amount of corruption. Businesses would cheat, but the marketplace would eventually expose them and they would suffer. It has always been assumed that the power of the marketplace, the invisible hand, eventually rewards the good and punishes the bad. The same has been assumed about politics. The best rise to the top while the fakers are eventually exposed.
Present day people would probably be embarrassed to hear themselves thirty years ago talking about politics or the economy. Regardless of your road to wherever you are now, the old you was a naïve and silly version of the present you, because present you is wise to the shenanigans. Ours is a world where no one is an idealist who trusts the system or imagines a better world. Everyone is a cynic now. The reason is the world is now run by hustlers always looking for a sucker.
Take pets as an example. Put the phrase “pet scam” into a search engine and you will find pages of various hustles in the pet business. This page offers a searchable database of pet scams. There is a whole industry around robbing people who simply want to bring a little joy into their home. Think about the sort of person who comes up with a way to rob people looking for a puppy for their kid. More important, think about the society that tolerates this.
Of course, puppy scams are just a version of the much larger scams that dominate the modern American economy. The news brings word that another cryptocurrency exchange is collapsing. Like all the others, this one was not a genuine business, but an elaborate way to rob investors. No one thinks much about these things because they have become so common. Finance is just a lightly regulated casino where insiders find new ways to take advantage of the marks.
It is tempting say that the stock market has always been a casino, but keep in mind that everyone’s retirement and lifestyle now depends on equities. The con men and hustlers who define the global economy are now relied upon to keep the system running so you can live a decent life. We have literally based the welfare of our societies on the good decisions of people who are incapable of telling the truth. The heart of our system is an economy based on deception.
There was a time when the government made some effort to tamp down the shenanigans, but that no longer happens. Everyone now accepts that their mobile device will be hit with scam phone calls and scam texts every day. The carriers should be able to block this stuff, but they have no reason to. It is not as if the government that supposedly regulates them is going to hassle them for it. The government is too busy producing disinformation to go after scammers.
That is the thing about this age that is different from the past. Scammers have always been with us, but these days we just accept it. Within living memory, we expected the government to make their best efforts to go after fraudsters. We used to have higher expectations of our politicians than we now have for our doctor. Like everything else, the people providing the most intimate services are assumed to be part of some hustle to separate us from our hard earned money.
The question that naturally arises is can a society exist where no one trusts anything or anyone in the society? Can you have a purely transactional society where everyone is trying to get over on everyone else? Right now, things are relatively calm, but that is mostly because most people have not embraced the new normal. There are still plenty of trusting souls to keep the old hardware of society running, despite the proliferation of people looking for ways to rob these people.
Western societies have always been moral societies. Your status is determined by your perceived morality. It is why we have always assumed that rich people must be smart and contribute something valuable to society. The proof of this is that they have been rewarded with wealth and power. What happens when the number of trusting souls declines below some level where trust and honesty are seen as vices? Can we have a society where deception is the coin of the realm?
In his book, The Jewish Century, Yuri Slezkine divided the world into two types of people, Mercurians and Apollonians. The former provides services to lubricate commerce, finance and politics. The latter are tied to their native lands, producing the goods required of society. America in the 20th century, according to Slezkine, was transformed by the Mercurians to reflect their interests. America had become a middleman society.
If the sum of your intercourse with other people is bounded by the momentary transaction, there is no profit in consideration. Why would parties to the transaction care about the interests of the other parties, when they will no longer have a reason to interact with them once the transaction is completed? Altruism and empathy quickly become liabilities to be exploited by the clever. All the rewards point toward profiting in the moment and moving on to the next deal.
What we are experiencing is the inversion of individualism. In a moral society, judging the individual on their actions results in a competition among members to uphold the shared morality of society. In a middleman society, where no one cares to judge anyone, the result is a Hobbesian competition of all against all. Ripping off moms with fraudulent puppy ads on Facebook comes with no reputational penalty. Worst case, you pay a fine and start the scam all over again.
Ten thousand years of evolution are not overcome in a few generations, so this current crisis is most likely the conflict between the system and our nature. The reason half of our young people have mental health problems is that they have been born into unnatural societies. This is not normal. Women are taking antidepressants because they did not evolve to live in a no-trust society. Male suicide rates are at record highs for the same reason. Our society is hostile to our existence.
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It truly is a sad state of affairs in this day and age. I, for one, will never take anything a physician suggests or recommends at face value again. As for politicians and the like, they’re all absolute liars until proven otherwise.
6
This is something many of us came to realize on our own many decades ago, especially those of us who were raised on farms and then went on to college and professional careers in urban areas. The contrast in attitudes was jarring. In my old age, I have fled those urban sinkholes so that my interaction with those urban middlemen is minimized. I often think of the simplistic, patriotic attitudes of my father and his farmer friends…their plain honesty and high levels of trust in their society. All swept away by a disgusting culture of vulture capitalism. Free market my arse.
7
my experience exactly .
1
Can things still get done in a society where everyone is out to rip off everyone else? They can, but you must embrace the local autocrat who rules his fiefdom by violence, if you want working roads and peace. The Mafia supposedly got its name when an Italian mother saw her daughter killed by the highland Bandini and started crying for her dead child: “Mi Ophelia! Mi Ophelia!” which got contracted to “Mafia.” It started as a secret mutual aid society to protect the peasantry. It worked because it had strict rules that were enforced through secrecy and violence. They didn’t have social media or the internet to offer the constant temptation of “dry snitching” (snitching accidentally just by virtue of constant chattering) but such a society—while difficult to grow now—would not be impossible.
The deliquescing mound of Botox and jewelry that is Nancy Pelosi ordering her mentally retarded Negro sentry to murder Ashlee Babbitt should have been a “Mi Ophelia” kind of inflection point, but normie sat and took it. Times could change, and are changing, but you always have to be aware of the underground organization eventually growing into a counterproductive monster. The Mob stopped literally protecting the people who paid tribute and started offering “protection” to fruit vendors and brick layers. Blake Masters and J.D. Vance seem like serious men who are at least not our outright enemies, but both are also self-described “venture capitalists,” which doesn’t exactly bode well.
1
Perhaps the disconnect and amorality associated with the middleman methodology was a key tenet to Jefferson’s promotion of the yeoman farmer as the ideal for the Republic.
Alas, that horse left the barn long ago.
1
the Michigan election was a total fraud. grinchy witchmer and her mob now have the both houses of the legislature and every executive branch office. they legalized ballot harvesting with a proposal and repealed all parental rights pertaining to hormone blockers, trans stuff, and abortion. even the teachers I know were voting against Whitmer. none of them had ever voted GOP in their life . last election ion they reported antrim county went 72-28 for biden , after going 70-30 for trump in 2016 . after the count clerk started calling the media and demanding and explanation , the secretary of state said ” oops , we transposed the numbers when we were typing them into the system.” then they corrected the count for that county . So they can literally type in any totals they want and except in extreme cases nobody would know .
3
“Think about the sort of person who comes up with a way to rob people looking for a puppy for their kid.”
“More important, think about the society that tolerates this.”
^^ That’s the key phrase. The great moral principle of our betters is that the meanie is the guy who *enforces* the law.
3
The vast majority of scams calls and e-mails coming from India come from call centers in Mumbai. We know where they operate, and we know the major players and organizational charts in the market. When we whine loud enough, the Indian government will slap them on the wrist and force them to shut down an office, only to reopen somewhere else in the city. There are a few great YouTuber hackers that are fun watches that are able to hack into their systems while on the call with them, and it’s rather amusing.
I’ve said often, why doesn’t our government go after these people? These people prey upon our senior citizens, who we are supposed to respect and care for. Send an effing drone strike to a few of these buildings to really send a message. We’ve done it for far less. But they don’t care about us, they care about you using the correct pronouns and getting their Ukraine grift.
4
> Send an effing drone strike to a few of these buildings to really send a message.
Forcing India to close these things down would be a proper use of economic sanctions, but our government uses them to punish countries that are mean to gay people.
2
True. Your answer is certainly more politically viable and realistic. However, Ideally these “people” would face justice. Think of it this way: if we lived in a normal community and a group of bandits was going around and robbing the elderly in their homes, what would we do? The gallows would be the best response.
1
You bring up a point that I’ve wondered about for years. The retirement of the middle and upper-middle class is now reliant on the stock and bond markets. And not just the stock market as a whole, but the stocks and bonds in index funds, primarily the S&P and Barclays bond index. (Index funds dominate 401k choices and, increasingly, non-401k portfolios.)
The markets have gone from a mechanism to allocate capital to a retirement pension fund. Index funds don’t allocate money based on fundamentals but on capitalization. As the number of active managers shrinks, the allocation mechanism gets weaker and weaker. Money just flows to the biggest stocks.
Since the stock and bond markets are so important to so many voters, the government can never let them function as they naturally should because the volatility (and potential declines) would be political suicide. The markets are becoming utilities in a sense. The markets are less a scam than another branch of the government.
But we capital markets. We money to flow to the best companies, not just the biggest.
4
A few years ago I did some work for a huge investment bank.
The head of fixed income rocked up and gave a speech on how they were changing focus as the pension funds and retail had finally managed to work out how to fairly value that particular type of fixed income instruments they had bought and that meant they just could not make the margins they had been for the last 10 years, as the prices were now transparent and that reduced the spreads.
Entire departments were set up to exploit the fact that the clients were unable to price the assets. Once they could, they just wind them down and moved onto the next opaque market.
The guy was not even bashful about it.
I wonder if Gen X will be the last generation to expect 401k returns. I don’t hear many people under 50…especially right-wingers…trusting the market. Most younger right-wingers are preoccupied with tangible stuff like ammo, nutrients, and metals. Younger left-wingers are just hoping they can live comfortably in old age, even in a pod.
The high trust still exists with the average joe. I’ve gone through a multitude of Craigslist transactions and have only once or twice come across a character who tried to deceive me. This has been pretty universal among rich and poor people I’ve made transactions with.
With the current climate, one would assume there would be near constant muggings, thievery, murder, etc. with such an unregulated space, but people more or less are friendly and just want to sell their old stuff.
Most of the robbers in our current society wear suits to the office and decide to shrink their product, manipulate valuations of companies they don’t like with ESG scores, and advertise one thing for a while then make a 180 and join the other crooks when they become successful (see DuckDuckGo).
The more low level robbers are outright crooks who hire out Indian firms to scam old people or good natured but naive people like the pet scams. It’s amazing we pay 40% in taxes and somehow these low-hanging fruit white collar crimes are not worth consideration. If they can’t be bothered to fix that, rest assured more complex and by the books organizations can get away with murder as long as they seem to be paying their taxes.
These things take time, and as times get tougher and people see cheats consistently getting ahead, the crookery will get more brazen. The days you can just make a quick Craigslist transaction might become more trouble and danger than it’s worth.
2
A while back I watched a video that was taken on a train in Japan. Some kid was eating pistachios and dropping the shells on the floor. An oldish man approached him and said something, and the kid responded in the negative. The old man then proceeded to whip the kid’s ass. High trust homogenous society vs low trust diverse society in one short video.
4
If anyone has lived abroad, particularly Asia (including Russia and the ex-Soviet states) they would recognize the low-trust scam-heavy society we are turning into.
When I was in China, hucksters wrote their mobile phone numbers on the pavement outside bus stops. They were peddling various services including organ sales. Not church organs mind you. And many other things. It was gross and clearly un-legal, but the working people just ignored it. Most Chinese accepted that anyone selling you anything was trying to cheat you. One of the first words I learned in Chinese was “cheat” or “rip off”.
In eastern Europe it was much of the same, though with petty crime thrown in, and ugly guys with mustaches. I have heard that the Middle East is also rife with shysters and liars.
At least, when I returned to the US, I could count on the siding guy or the A/C repairman or the barista was telling the truth pretty much. In fact I had a feeling that was why so many foreigners wanted to come here, because they could trust businesses.
3
All true, but what is the remedy? Can we now agree that voting harder is stupid on steroids? It’s just the lazy man’s pretense of “doing something” without having to get the fat ass up off the couch. And already, fanatics like Bongino are making excuses for 2022 and extending the carrot for 2024. How much longer can this insanity persist?
Until the collapse and a majority of the dirt people have gone 3 days without a meal. Only then can sanity return. Hardship makes hard men.
I just returned from a visit to the big city and was appalled at the number of tent encampments that have sprung up everywhere, including nearby to high end neighborhoods. They are uniformly filthy and the inhabitants act like they own the street. This has the makings of a permanent underclass. And they are the tinder that will ignite the cities when the collapse occurs.
So use this coming fog of chaos. Smarter, not harder. Think outside the box. The scammer on the receiving end of a bolt from the blue is the ultimate remedy. It sends a unique message that will initiate a stampede of real change, and it results in least harm for all. It has always been thus.
1
That reminds me I need to get a bigger tent
Thanks to mass immigration, the early settlers who came from west of the Hajnal Line, where high trust, high altruism, civic-mindedness and individualism dominate, are being swamped by east-of-the-Hajnal Line people, and everywhere around the world, where they’re clannish, collectivist and low trust and consider things like stealing elections normal.
For anyone not familiar with the Hajnal Line, hbd chick has written about it. https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/
So I gather the hunt for a new cat has hit a few snags! Might be a good time to look around for a friendly stray. But try not to steal someones indoor outdoor cat