Fraud as a way of life caters
an extravagant banquet of consequences.
This can't be said politely:
the entire status quo in America is a fraud.
The
financial system is a fraud.
The
political system is a fraud.
National
Defense is a fraud.
The
healthcare system is a fraud.
Higher
education is a fraud.
The
mainstream corporate media is a fraud.
Culture--from
high to pop--is a fraud.
Need I go on?
We have come to accept fraud as
standard operating practice in America, to the detriment of everything that was
once worthy. why is this so?
One reason, which I outline
in my book A Radically Beneficial World:
Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All, is that centralized
hierarchies select for fraud and incompetence. Now
that virtually every system in America is centralized or regulated by
centralized hierarchies, every system in America is fraudulent and incompetent.
Nassim Taleb explains this
further in his recent article How To Legally Own Another Person (via
Lew G.)
The three ingredients of fraud
are abundant: pressure (to get an A, to please your boss, to make your
sales numbers, etc.), rationalization (everybody's doing it) and opportunity.
Taleb explains why failure and
fraud become the status quo: admitting error and
changing course are risky, and everyone who accepts the servitude of working in
a centralized hierarchy--by definition, obedience to authority is the #1
requirement-- is averse to risk.
As as I explain in my
book, these systems select for risk aversion and the appearance
of obedience to rules and authority while maximizing personal gain: in
other words, fraud as a daily way of life.
Truth is a dangerous poison in
centralized hierarchies: anyone caught telling the truth
risks a tenner in bureaucratic Siberia. (In the Soviet Gulag ,a tenner meant
a ten-year sentence to a labor camp in Siberia.)
And so the truth is buried,
sent to a backwater for further study, obfuscated by jargon, imprisoned by a
Top Secret stamp, or simply taken out and executed.Everyone
in the system maximizes his/her personal gain by going along with the current
trajectory, even if that trajectory is taking the nation off the cliff.
Consider the F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter, a $1+ trillion failure. The aircraft is
underpowered, under-armed, insanely overpriced, insanely over-budget and still
riddled with bugs after seven years of fixes, making it an unaffordable
maintenance nightmare that puts our servicepeople and nation at risk.
But no one in a position of
power will speak the truth about the F-35, because it is no longer a weapons
system--it's a jobs program. Defense contractors are
careful to spread the work of assembling parts of the F-35 to 40+ states, so
80+ senators will support the program, no matter how much a failure it is as a
weapons system, or how costly the failure is becoming.
A rational person in charge
would immediately cancel it and start from scratch, with a program run outside
the Pentagon and outside congressional meddling.But
this is impossible in America: instead, we build failed, under-armored,
under-powered, under-armed and unreliable ships (LCS) and failed under-powered,
under-armed and unreliable fighters as the most expensive make-work programs in
history.
As for our failed healthcare
system, one anecdote will do. (You undoubtedly have
dozens from your own experience.) A friend from Uruguay with a high-tech job in
the U.S. recently flew home to Montevideo for a medical exam because 1) the
cost of the flight was cheaper than the cost of the care in the U.S. and 2) she
was seen the next day in Montevideo while it would have taken two months to get
the same care in the U.S.
I've listed dozens of
examples here over the years: $120,000 for a couple days in a hospital, no
procedures performed; $20,000+ for a single emergency room visit, no procedures
performed; several thousand dollars charged to Medicare for a few minutes in an
"observation room" that was occupied by patients, no staff
present--the list is endless.
We've habituated to fraud as a
way of life because every system is fraudulent.Consider
the costly scam known as higher education. The two essentials higher education
should teach are: 1) how to learn anything you need to learn or want to learn
on your own, and 2) how to think, behave, plan and function entrepreneurially
(i.e. as an autonomous problem-solver and lifelong learner who cooperates and
collaborates productively with others) as a way of life.
That higher education fails to
do so is self-evident. We could create a highly effective
system of higher education that costs 10% of the current corrupt system. I've
described such a system (in essence, a directed apprenticeship as opposed to
sitting in a chair for four years) in The Nearly Free University and
the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.
As for what passes as culture
in the U.S.: the majority of what's being sold as culture, both high
and low, is derivative and forgettable. We suffer the dual frauds of absurd
refinement (so only the elites can "appreciate" the art, music, food,
wine, etc.) and base coarsening: instead of Tender (romantic love and sex) we
have Tinder (flammable trash).
Fraud as a way of life caters
an extravagant banquet of consequences. While everyone
maximizes their personal gain in whatever system of skim, scam and fraud they
inhabit, the nation rots from within. We've lost our way, and lost the ability
to tell the truth, face problems directly, abandon what has failed and what is
unaffordable, and accept personal risk as the essential element of successful
adaptation.
Here's a
good place to start: require every politician to wear the logos of their top 10
contributors--just like NASCAR drivers and vehicles display the logos of their
sponsors. The California Initiative to make this a reality is
seeking signatures of registered California voters. Since politicians are
owned, let's make the ownership transparent.
