The Anglo Saxon societies have a sociopathic bias towards optimism aka. "reality skepticism". It's steeped in the culture. This is a culture built originally upon Germanic roots, comingled with French and subsequently melded with untold numbers of other cultural influences. It's a hybrid culture purpose built for business. The language itself is a bastardized conglomeration of invented words and ebonics augmented daily by the Idiocracy. It's the lingua franca of global business. And always will be, despite how many Chinese immersion classes are offered.
Of the top 10 Happiest countries in the world, 9 out of 10 are in Latin America. These are countries with strong families, strong communities and strong faith. We by contrast have suburbs, McMansions, 2.2 kids, houses full of junk, corporate relocations every five years, rampant depression, massive doses of Prozac and transactional relationships along the way. We don't have friends, we have contemporaries.
We are a corporate society. We don't have the same deep roots Latinos have, so we just monetized them instead. That will teach them. Like the Grinch that Stole Christmas, ironically they are still happier than we are, despite having been strip-mined of their local economies, now replaced with Walmart.
Part and parcel of the corporate culture, Economists fabricated the concept of the "consumer". A consumer is an entity who consumes things. His source of income is unknown. His job is permanently protected via the Latin edict "Ceteris paribus" - All else being equal, which is embedded in every single Econ-dunce theory ever created. Meaning in order to create the fantasy consumer, Econo-Dunces had to create a false dichotomy between people who have jobs and people who consume. Because, for example, in order to endorse trade agreements that kill millions of jobs, they had to assume that "someone" was going to benefit. Even looking past the atomic level of insanity inherent to this oversight i.e. the obvious fact that those who lose their jobs are no longer "consumers". The macro level assumptions to this fiasco are equally unsound...
These same Econo-dunces who tell us that trade agreements "work", will tell us moments later that of course trade deficits axiomatically require debt accumulation. We have to borrow money in order to buy more than we can afford. It's not just an accounting caveat, it's fucking commonsense. So unless we assume that we will be Ponzi borrowers into eternity, at some point the "Ceteris Paribus" circle jerk of assumptions comes home to roost.
The balance of trade (red). The Federal debt (blue):
The balance of trade (red). The Federal debt (blue):
It gets worse. If the entire reason for these trade agreements was to lower costs, boost profits, and benefit "consumers", then the admitted side effect of mass unemployment has to be lower wages. Again commonsense and reality, conveniently ignored by Ceteris Paribus. Econo-dunces will tell us that everyone who loses their job is quickly retrained and re-inserted into the workforce without incurring the massive social and economic costs of long-term layoff, foreclosure, bankruptcy, divorce, alcoholism, destroyed families, school shootings et al.
Sure.
It gets worse... now knowing that we are importing poverty to benefit these jobless consumers and knowing that this will in turn depress our own wages on the way to wage convergence, the "theory" of Pareto Efficiency would argue, as would commonsense, that it would be preferable to lower the wages and keep the jobs, than to send the jobs away leading to collapsed wages and no jobs. Again, just fucking commonsense.
How could wages be lowered across the board? Print money and give the money to Main Street instead of Wall Street. Tank the currency, lower purchasing power. Keep the jobs. By no means optimal, but certainly preferable to the very latest stage massive jobless Greatest depression track we are on now.
I want to tie this up with two overriding takeaways: One is that we live in the dumbest fucking society in human history without any comparison. I can't stop saying it.
Secondly, we live in a dehumanized, transactional, dopamine-seeking, disposable society that is borderline psychotic on the way to becoming full fledged psycho. It's baked into a corporatized culture that has to get back to its human roots.
Corporations are not human beings. And they are not extended families.
