“Reality is that which when we
stop believing in it doesn’t go away.”
— Philip K. Dick
In March of 2003, we broke
ground on the first real thing I ever built, the house I currently live in.
Then I understood that there was only one way this economic and political
system ended, badly.
And I knew then that I was woefully unprepared for the
challenge. When I started building my house I could barely drive a nail
straight. By the time the first part of it was finished I could lay a square of
asphalt shingles with the best of them…. if only until about 10 am or so.
I could now solve logistical problems of much larger scale. I
learned that building a house wasn’t one big task but a million little ones,
some good and some, well, not so good.
My wife and I had a lot of help, to be sure. We leveraged the
skills, labor and knowledge of family and friends.
My house became a kind of community project with some weekends
having as many as eight or ten people milling about like semi-competent Amish
men setting trusses, digging trenches and installing windows.
And I’m forever in the debt of those who gave up their Saturday
to work in the singularly horrific heat of a north central Florida summer, a
place I’m sure Dante had in mind when he wrote about the eighth circle of Hell.
I figured then we had about five to eight years before the
system would break. During the
2008 crisis I was convinced that, ‘This was it.” It turned out to be bad but
the world wasn’t quite ready to give up on the system it had built.
And we allowed the central
banks to coordinate a global bailout. But that was granted with
the explicit understanding that there would be no next time or there would be
hell to pay on both sides of the traditional political aisles.
Welcome to the Coronapocalypse.
Regardless of what you
may think about the origins of COVID-19, bio-weapon or not, ‘just the flu’ or
the new plague, the reality is that it is here. The response to it is real and
the damage it has had on the global economy is real.
It doesn’t matter at this point in time whether the response is the
right one or the wrong one. Because in an age where perception is more
important than reality and has been that way for so long, we have no real frame
of reference to guide our conclusions.
Prices and costs have been distorted beyond all recognition to the
saved capital they represent. The epic meltdown of markets speaks to just how
insanely overvalued the world was once the layers of credit contracted.
In the end, all we have are our observations. And those observations
are intensely personal. And most of the time the conclusions we draw from them
are wrong no matter how tightly we believe in them.
Be that as it may, we still have to make choices. We still have
to act.
And, if this is truly now a survival-like situation, one that I
personally tried to prepare for nearly a generation ago, that means we have to
deal with reality.
We have to put away the childish things we’ve been fighting over
for the past five years politically.
How ridiculous and insipid do the identitarian fights over
gender, race, sex and color look now? How dangerous and stupid does all that
capital, that time spent, look now in hindsight when today people with skills,
humility and high executive function are needed?
Do you really care today if the guy behind the meat counter at
your local supermarket is a MAGApede or a Bernie Bro, hates gay people or is a
closet tranny?
If you do then I suggest you stay home and reassess your
priorities and your choices.
The reality is that now that
the damage to the economy has been done we will need each other more than ever,
regardless of what we thought about each other yesterday.
The reality is governments
are grabbing for insane levels of power. Martial Law is here in Europe. The
U.S. isn’t far behind if we look at how some governors and mayors have acted.
The reality is that the more
power governments grab the less capable of protecting you, your family and your
community it was before that. It will view you as a threat. It will treat you
as less than human because your disobedience threatens their control.
If the Trump administration is smart it won’t go there. If Trump
wants to ensure the U.S. is the
destination for global capital in the near term, he won’t
go to where Europe goes.
Because the way to restore confidence in a currency, a people
and a government is to not panic. Lead and show competence and trust.
Those that over-react, enforce one-size-fits-all mandates become
incapable of solving problems, only maintaining the current misery.
So we have to be strong enough and brave enough for commerce to
flow. If you aren’t then stay out of the way of healthy, low-risk people taking
real risks necessary to keep the lights on, the sewers functioning and the food
supply from collapsing.
Celebrate that guy behind the meat counter or restocking the
shelves. Because the life he saves may be yours and vice versa.
Yes, some people will make the wrong choice, but most won’t.
Stop using them as straw men to grind your political axe. Old habits die hard
but guess what? You’re not an old dog.
We’re moving into that dangerous area of zero tolerance which
implies maximum costs for marginal net benefits.
Striking the necessary balance to keep our communities alive is
how we best fight back against these threats — the government overreach or the
virus itself.
It means realizing that bad people will do good things and good
people will do bad things. It means decisions made today may need to be
reversed tomorrow.
Top down order separates us from our greatest strength, our
ability to try new things, solve new problems and turn what is into what will
be.
It means keeping your opinions tempered, your humility high and
finding ways to solve real problems that alleviate current and potential
suffering.
It means realizing you don’t have all the answers, and
pretending like you do is literally a matter of life and death.
The
economy isn’t some big aggregate thing. That’s the fundamental flaw of all
dominant economic thinking, these concepts of aggregate
demand and aggregate supply. They
don’t exist. They aren’t real.
We talk about them like they are but they aren’t. They are pale
and unfocused reflection of trillions of small decisions taken by billions of
people everyday.
And no matter how much
you try to model reality by looking at the big numbers, the reality is that you
only see things through the densest of fog, near blind and full of hubris.
This is the central flaw
in all forms of central planning, the lack of specific knowledge to come up
with the right policy decisions.
That’s not ideology. That
is fact.
Any guess at my behavior, no matter how educated, carries with it a
measurable error which when multiplied by the number of decisions I make per
day and the number of people whose actions you are trying to aggregate makes
the entire exercise a futile and dangerous attempt to play god.
Even God doesn’t play dice with the Universe.
And
the sooner we give up our grand ideas of top down control through the decisions
of wise and insouciant verified smart people the
sooner we can deal with the reality of the life in front of us.
Today the world is contracting, not ending. It’s a smaller, tighter
world than it was yesterday. That means the closer your relationship to
someone, the more valuable they are.
The people in charge now
if they are competent, if they have a shred of decency and humility, will
realize by getting out of our way we can thrive. And if they won’t, then we
have to do the other thing humans are really good at, subverting crude attempts
at control.
That’s not ideology
folks, that’s who we are. And I love people for it.
It’s simply giving up
control over what you cannot and staying focused on what you can. It’s the
humility to know that I don’t have the answers to the problems of the world but
maybe the problems don’t exist as I think I see them.
We’ve been given a huge
wake up call that what we’ve built is a house of cards. You’ll hear a lot of
cries for people to ‘get local.’ Use the time you have in front of you to build
skills you didn’t have yesterday. Find ways to be more valuable to those
nearest you that may need you tomorrow.
Forge real relationships
with people you never thought you could.
But most importantly,
it’s time to stop denying that which is in front of us.
Because, try as we might,
it isn’t going away.