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Why We Think It’s OK to Cheat and Steal (Sometimes)
Why We Think It’s OK to Cheat and Steal (Sometimes)
While there’s a general consensus among the Zero Hedge community that the big boys are manipulating the various markets to maintain and even accelerate the Ponzi, this still requires a great deal of conscious participation by those lower down the ladder. While many of us are calling for the hangman’s noose around Blankfein or Bernanke’s neck, shouldn’t we also being stringing up your next door neighbor or that self righteous prick of a brother-in-law or maybe even you?
One of the concepts I constantly highlight is that we’re all susceptible to this behavior. And while I probably wouldn’t get much argument on this point from the more self aware and honest readers, I’m absolutely certain they would argue with me as to degree. We’re all liars, cheats and thieves; of this I have no doubt. Once this is understood and as painful as this may be to internalize, the only questions remaining are to what degree and how do we rationalize and justify this degree? You would be surprised how much your surroundings and peer group have to do with this rather than just your personal moral code.
We’re chasing windmills if we think that by getting rid of certain people or regimes (once again) we will change the direction we’re headed. This is a multi headed Hydra and our heads are there as well. In order to understand the nature of the beast in government and on Wall Street, we must first come to know the beast within. I can’t tell you how many of my clients have no problem informing me that while they’re horrified by the corruption and theft in this country, they want their piece of the pie. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose as long as the goose can rationalize it away as just trying to maintain their life style and income.
I’m not judging my clients for I live in a glass house. But this will not change unless we begin to understand and accept that the beast is within and that we aren’t just fighting an external enemy but ultimately one that is internal. I’m absolutely certain that a major rationalization and justification used by the powers that be for pumping the Ponzi is that Mr. and Mrs. Jones are demanding it. And they would be correct. There is an interesting video on the web of Catherine Austin Fitts asking a group of people for a show of hands of those who would be willing to experience major losses to their 401(k) and pension accounts to stop the beast. Very few hands went up.
Dan Ariely, author of “Predictably Irrational” gave an enlightening and informative talk last March (2009) about “bugs in the moral code”, a talk which coincided with the depths of the stock market crash. This 16 minute video is well worth watching if for no other reason than the insight it will bring you regarding your own behavior. I won’t spoil the video by discussing the contents other than to ask you to pay particular attention near the end when he mentions that the further the psychological or physical distance between you and the actual money, the higher the propensity to steal. He then mentions this helps explain the wholesale theft using derivatives. I agree.
For thousands of years there has been cycle after cycle of people allowing themselves to be exploited and abused by the few. This will never end until we understand why we willingly slip on the chains that bind us to our masters. I submit that unless and until we’re willing to explore these extremely painful areas within our own dark abyss, we’re doomed to more of the same. I’m not trying to divert attention from the sociopaths; I’m saying the sociopaths are home grown. We can do all the weed pulling we feel is needed and more will grow unless we go after the roots. And the roots are within.
Dan Ariely followed this up with another talk in May of 2009 exploring the question “Are we in control of our decisions” which is also well worth watching. That link is below as well.
Our Buggy Moral Code
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUdsTizSxSI
Are We in Control of our Own Decisions
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X68dm92HVI
Dan Ariely at TED.com
http://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_ariely.html
Catherine Austin Fitts Web Site
http://solari.com/blog/
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"Assigning culpability onto everyone else is thin gruel for an intellectual exercise. But thanks anyway."
Well said
Nice try CD but this is much bigger than a socio/psycho assignment to mere Human Nature.
This is NOT about a "little bit" of cheating.
Greg
"A bit too mushy here CD."
You're being way too kind!
Dude, I'd slam you again, but I posted something to you above and I'd be a real asshole to do it to you after what I wrote. Your responses are so bitter. You can say you don't like something, explain why, without the venom. The venom is killing you. Guarantee it.
During the go-go years it was fashionable to say Greed Is Good. Now the term "greed" is less socially acceptible and the label tends to be slapped on any wealthy person or organization we blame for our problems. But both concepts are too simplistic.
If I want to gather as much material wealth as I can for the happiness and security of my family, is that greed? Of course not, just enlightened self-interest. If I am driven by a need to have more than anyone else I know, is that greed? Maybe so, but maybe I have merely forgotten what I was working so hard for; still if I am doing something that needs to be done better than my competitors, I am still a constructive force in our society.
But if, having achieved all this, I am willing to sabotage that society in order to gather more to myself, if I am driven not because I don't have enough but because I can't stand seeing anyone else have anything at all, I will have become a destructive force that should be reigned in.
How society makes that decision is difficult. We veer back and forth between stiflingly enforced fairness, and a system so hungry that it devours its own flesh. Purists claim that unrestrained greed will maximize productivity and benefit everyone. In a perfect world that might be true, but no system we devise can be less corruptable than we ourselves are. There must be freedom to succeed and there must be limits to what behavior is tolerable. There are no easy answers but we will have to find a balance somehow. Communism has failed; there is no doubt of that. It remains to be seen whether capitalism will succeed. Our world is teetering on the brink. History has not rendered a verdict yet.
"If I want to gather as much material wealth as I can for the happiness and security of my family, is that greed? Of course not, just enlightened self-interest."
You are making good points.
"If I am driven by a need to have more than anyone else I know, is that greed?"
When you abandon ethical and moral standards to amass your wealth... then we have a problem. When you use your wealth to corrupt societal institutions and tilt the game in your favor... then society has a problem.
It is an excellent topic to investigate CD
Your choice as a US citizen is to act in as ethical a way as you can and still survive the corruption.
This is a nation of overfed used car salesmen (J. Kunstler likes to say "Clowns") all trying to scam each other for a zero sum gain... or used electronic, or used real estate, or used mortgage, or used insurance, or used securities salesmen... many with no other job skills than bullshitting.
I saw this in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. When the VP's of Marketing started becoming the CEOs instead of the VP's of Manufacturing or Finance... every sale possible was made to every customer, credit worthy or not until many of the companies imploded... A dickweed salesmen will never turn down a sale... Fraud Street is full of dickweed salesmen ... so is Amerika.
There Is A Problem With Systemically Corrupt Societies
Your honesty and truthfulness can and will be used against you at all times by the corrupt, the scammers and those in power...
An honest person must not divulge information by both refusing to answer and at times using deception to keep the scammers at bay. An honest person is forced to lie to defend themselves. If you don't... you shall be sodomized in US society to no end.
US Society is Like Boxing
It is like boxing... defend your self in the ring at all times... in US Boxing... wear a second cup on backwards to prevent unwanted insertions...
Until this society stops worshiping wealth and believing a human being's self worth is their house and income bracket... then the celebration of unethical and immoral behavior by the corporate profit class will pervade and perverse this society.
We did not create this structure and these sets of rules...
Any one who thinks 95% of us have a say in anything should just look at the US permanent warfare machine, the lack of any criminal investigations on Fraud Street and the last decade of elections...
We did not create a corrupt oligarchy and a failure of a political class... We are just trying to survive in it.
Pretty much sums it all up.
bravo
Ya ya. The leaders and imposers of law and order are corrupt. You can't get clean bathing in their sewage and nobody cleaner will be allowed to advance.
Until you completely close the loop of punisher/punished, enforcer/enforced there will never be anything but continual corruption. As long as you believe that cops are your protectors, military is your protectors and you should call the authorities when you see something bad happen it will never work.
I'm seeing police in my town paid to direct traffic for a church every sunday while wearing thier official police uniform and drivng their police cars. I'm seeing cops star in TV commercials for cash for gold places. Lines are being drawn like a bad cartoon satire.
The first thing you have to do is make the money under the control of an elected body without any way to counterfiet it and buy up that body. The second thing you have to do is put police and military under the peoples authority with no war being fought without long arduous efforts of building the political support for it including the voluntary contribution of the expenses by those people. Because if it's not worth a fight before you fight then it's not worth fighting at all.
As I said it works very clearly and easily. All you have to do is make constant and never ending appeals to the higher self of the people beneath you while not doing that yourself. The way to fix it is to reverse the process. Appeal to their higher self while not being such a perfectionist yourself. That way instead of a guy doing 200 bucks worth of damage or causing a slight bit of harm to a person or a couple people doing 15 years in jail while bush kills millions and has no punishment. People should be shot for treason for breaking any law in government no matter how slight while small transgressions of the people should be slaps on the wrist until the abuse is patterned and repeated so often that it's apparent that stricter punishment is in order. If you do this it sets up a truly governing body of perfectionists who really are careful about things and order and maintain things much better than this slack jawed constantly lying, bullying, punishing for nothing trash we have.
To corrupt is to become morally or physically degraded. It also means to change something from its original form. I think you are correct in both senses of the word.
CD - I always enjoy your posts, and this was no exception. Regarding the section I've quoted above, IMHO, the answer is quite simple - ignorance. Throughout history the educated and enlightened minority have always had power over the uneducated masses, and you need go no farther than some of today's third world societies to see evidence of the same. I do not say this in a condescending manner, merely an observation of what I find to be fact.
In the case of our current market manipulation ponzi, I would say the same thing is transpiring, and if you want evidence of that, merely read and try to digest everything that Tyler and Co. have posted this evening regarding GS being short the mortgage market as far back as 2006/2007. I'm an educated guy, and while I certainly understand the broad strokes, much of the jargon in this article leaves me scratching my head a bit....even after spending the better part of last year as a ZH follower, an act that has significantly increased my "finance" accumen, but clearly not enough for me to get through this type of material without the benefit of Tyler's "translations" and cliff notes. In fact, as I was reading this, I was also asking myself, "how many people in the world today really understand this stuff, and how difficult will it be as a result, to bring down a company like GS for the fraud that they have perpetrated?"
So back to my point - it is quite easy for .05% of the population to control the rest, as long as they create the game and the rules, and either keep everyone else in the dark, or make the game/rules so complicated that almost no one outside the inner-circle can or wants to understand it.
And why do most people allow this to happen over and over again? Because the elites have become masters at pacifying the masses. Centuries ago, it was as simple as keeping people fed - today it's keeping people in Kindles, iPads, McMansions and SUV's. So long as the illusion of prosperity is present, the masses typically don't care what the elites are up to until it all comes crashing down and impacts the illusion, and unfortunately, I don't think that will ever change.
And a big byproduct of ignorance is complacency. So terribly many people are not willing to learn. They would much rather stick to the beliefs that have been foisted upon them, and those people are easily controlled by fear.
They are fearful, ignorant people.
I wonder where you did go to see that. Or what you actually saw.
I wonder how leaders in the third world could free their dominated the same way the western world have freed its own population.
What the US did was not different from what the medieval lords did. You know, no hour to get a noble or else it was to late. Being annoblished was a process during all the medieval time.
The big difference was that players in the game were of equivalent level, with a consequence that one day, one wins, the other day, one loses. Back and fro, therefore back and fro in terms of possibility of social promotion.
The US benefited from an environment where they would be unvariantly winners. Then steady social promotion.
The same scheme can be found in the roman empire. At start, it was a story of steady expansion (with the social promotion going with) Later, the expansion scheme halted and even went reversed. With a direct consequence on social promotion.
Freedom through expansion can only work as long as the possibility to expand exists.
Given the current situation, third world leaders are left with the task of finding a way to free their population without an expansion scheme. Good luck to them.
Americas biggest problem is not our economy, it is our imperialist-fascist war machine. Get rid of our military-industrial complex first, and then we can begin to fix our economic problems. We have to begin at the root of our immorality: fix the root of our decay, before we can remedy what is wrong with us at home. We are in our neighbors business, and we need to get out of it and end its diversion to fix our domestic problems. We are in our neighbors house, murdering them, and their children. Our focus is not where it should be. We need to get out of our neighbors houses, in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea, Japan, Germany; get out of the world's business, Israel's too. And then we can begin to clean our own house, here in America.
And you have got to the bottom of the real problem, CG: our own black hearts in dire need of cleansing. I ask the question why are we so concentrated on money, when murder comes after honor thy father and mother, and before stealing and greed?
You are sadly off target in this comment thread. Extorting the weak, farming the poor is the best known path to get rich.
What part has the US army in the capability?
Your piece of advice is the road to destruction for the US. An extortioner cannot deprive himself of his tools of extortion.
Most of the US citizens are (hopefully for you) totally aware of this fact and will oppose this suggestion. Without a US army racketting all over the world, much less prosperity in the US. With much less prosperity in the US, domestic unrest will start to kick in.
There are a few words rarely seen in todays dialogues here on Zerohedge and elsewhere.
LOVE, HONOR, COMPASSION ,INTEGRETY
You are correct, we are all thieves, but why? The answer quite simply is God/nature made us this way. It's an evolutionary arms race. Simply those who are able to lie, cheat, and steal will do better in the struggle for survival. It's just the nature of the beast. We like all organisms are engineered to survive and replicate. I happen to think this is why our brains are so well developed, more than they needed to be for basic survival. The pressures of the arms race forced better brains, to better lie and detect lies in others.
This is further accentuated by the fact that the great mass of humanity cannot identify when they are being conned and robbed. Oh sure they might get the feeling "Is this right?" or "I think I might be getting ripped off..." but it rarely amounts to much so long as the person in question is not starving and meeting the bare minimum requirements of human survival. So not only does the robber gain materially from the robbing in many cases will gain socially. Either the masses will not know he is a robber and consider him a public servant, or philanthropist, or some will even identify that he is a robber and give him positive social status for his skill at robbing! I have commented before that all one needs to do is look at our culture and you will see that it glorifies the hustler.
Ultimately the easiest path lies through exploiting people, after all behind every fortune there is a great crime. However this leads to a problem. As the number of exploiters grows, and so to does their skill grows, there is less and less for them to take. This forces them to become even more ingenious and bold, which quickens the drain on the pool of resources. Some of the masses will take note and join in on the looting, seeing it as the only path to get ahead. Ultimately this leads to a crescendo where the underlying system cannot support the exploitation and it collapse under it's own weight. You cannot get blood from a stone.
This fits in well with empire collapse, and has been seen over and over again. It is impossible to stop exploitation and thievery the best that can be done is to mitigate the problem. To me the biggest problem is monopolies, because after a while they feel normal to the masses, primarily the monopoly of force by the state. When one looks objectively at taxation, it's theft at the point of a gun, but very few see it that way. The only real solution to the problem if for the masses to be hurt so bad, that they will awaken. But they also need to identify the system that is screwing them and institute a system where it will be far more difficult for that mass exploitation to happen. Ultimately I doubt this will happen. As a wise man once said "There's a sucker born every minute"
It was Carl Jung who expressed how unhappiness can be spawned by the imbalance of the instincts of self-preservation and the preservation of the species. Having read his work long ago about this has helped me to maintain some balance of what we commonly call "honesty". If I am out of balance I can usually find some flaw of reasoning or action that has caused the subsequent unease. Correcting or compensating for the so-called damage done will bring back some balance. It is the current lack of this Weltanschauung that causes our overt greed and indifference. Our country, our businesses, our government, and all too often, ourselves have become dysfunctional.
Everything you need to know is in my latest comment, When the Facts Change?
(Too bad Tyler yanked it off the front page of ZH prematurely)
leo, god knows i have known a lot of men in my life. your the only one that has the balls to put his real name on his work and doing†
listen up ZHer's, this track function on this website, in my opinion, is one of the most invasive and dangerous tools you can let into your life. beware! TD and group own you, i don't think copyrights apply. the archiving this site has compiled is very impressive. it is cutting edge sophisticated. egos are involved, big time, and they are in control. don't get sucked in. don't trust anybody that can't author work with real identities, take it for what it is worth, probably not that much.
Leo,
That was petty.
I spent over two hours this morning on my post, highlighting important topics and the comments were interesting. Yeah, it's petty, but so is yanking it off the front page of ZH because one of the many TDs wants to be a total dick with me. I am still waiting for that new ZH format where we can see more contributors' posts on the front page.
And concerning this post, the Big Boys got you all by the balls and many of you still don't see it. Greed and fear is all you need to know about the psychology of markets.
There is never ANY deflationary threat. It only lasts for seconds in time before it gets inflated all to hell. In 1984 we had a tiny bit of bullshit in the form of S&L scandal. This time we got fraud EVERYWHERE. It's in every orfice. This thing is going to explode.
so that thing in my butt is not real?
And most especially for the market makers. Keep at it Leo, your time was well spent.
Thanks Miles, I appreciate it.
peace pal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nas-DYEywX4
Leo , I too got my ego hurt recently. Thats fine, when we see our weaknesses thats helpful. You have obviously turned a corner in your view of the economy. Good to have you on our side at last. I was beginning to think you were a spin meister for the gov. then realized your sincerety.
Now we have less versions of master bates to contend with. Hurrah!!
Leo,
I sense a good guy on the other side of the screen and keyboard. That is why I call you on your shit. :-) Meanwhile, I don't know what you know, nor do I put in the work you do . I am a babe in the woods regarding finance. I'm glad Miles is around to remind us what it is all about. I think Miles knows some of your frustration and has a better sense of priorities than both of us. Time for all of us to evolve or die.
Peace.
Human nature is what drives markets, as it does everything else. We are not altruistic creatures - nor are we able to be, considering the world of scarcity in which we live. We are only a thin dime away fom a state of nature in which live would quickly revert to dog-eat-dog.
Capitalism, such as we have, works because it is driven by the collective forward motion of everyone chasing his or her self-interest. If I, in making a deal with you, were to think only of you the customer, there would be nothing left in the transaction for me. The transaction would not go ahead. There can be no reason for it and trade can only occur when both parties see some advantage in it. Exploitation, or attempted exploitation is absolutely necessary to the free market system because, as humans, we are motivated solely (at root) by self-preservation, self-interest.
Socialism cannot ever work, for that reason. It's utopian. It's simply not possible to get everyone behaving like saints and sacrificing themselves for others.
There is a fine line between fraud and mere salesmanship. Some of us lean toward the "Goldman had a responsibility to educate the buyers about EVERY aspect of the deal, warts and all" while others tend toward "caveat emptor", believing that the buyers of this stuff had the primary responsibility to do due diligence because they had the final word on the deal.
There is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about "They never told us about that!" from buyers of toxic trash as well as takers-out of ARMs. Everyone wants some kind of guarantee: that their investment will be a better deal for them than for the seller, that all investments are guaranteed to pay off, that someone is there vetting every offering to make sure it pays off for the buyer...that government has a greater responsibility to check these things out than does the buyer.
But it's all nonsense.
There can't ever be a guarantee that no one will make bad investment decisions. No guarantees that every investment will be "a good deal" for the customer. If government could actually do that, it would be called something else other than "investing"; perhaps "winning" or "earning" or some such term...
Would you even WANT government to do that?? Socialism? A society where no risks are taken, where none need to be taken yet somehow someone somewhere is willing to do the work to put bread on the middle-class tables?
I blame the middle classes for this mess more than I do GS or the ratings agencies or the governments or the Fed. They borrowed their silly heads off without doing their homework, their research, their due diligence. Forgot to consider rising interest rates, falling home values or job losses in future. They got greedy; they wanted to avoid responsibility and jump into some imagined social safety net that cannot ever really exist.
Indeed, this crisis is more about infantilism and responsibility avoidance, buck-passing and victim-role-playing than anything else...
nice comment K. but there is the question whether life is really only a zero sum game. take conception for example, the basic biological transaction which caused us all to be here right now shootin the breeze. both the sperm & the egg meet with the intention of self-preservation (of their genetic code). but who wins? who loses? isn't there value created where there wasn't before?
perhaps always thinking in terms of winners & losers is limiting the available possibilities.
another thought: "considering the world of scarcity in which we live"
yes, scarcity is what we've been taught to believe exists. but what if it was not necessarily so? what we lived in a world of abundance and were only being led to believe that the opposite was true?
Relative scarcity. That is the reason for any market.
In the most simplistic terms, the stuff you should own is the stuff that is hard to replace.
The most basic question I have yet to have answered is this.
If the only source of expansionary funds is the taxpayer, how can we grow?
"Relative scarcity."
That is what makes artists great. Think Beethoven, Mozart, Bach.
"If the only source of ... funds is the taxpayer, how can we grow?"
Man, Help Thyself! 'We' will be a cooperative community, much as our 1920-generation grandfathers learned. And quite a productive one at that.
But Art, ... True, absolute art...will be valuable as long as there is life.
Best,
Josh
K's (et al) thoughts make me think of politicians regurgitating "comprehensive regulation" when what we would benefit from more was enforcement. Preaching to the choir here, but obviously few would be working Monday morning if somebody (anybody?) started enforcing all current regulations. Morals are an afterthought that will do nothing but cost you your bonus. It's hard for me to identify an investment that is morally and ethically sound. What little I know about private equity makes me think this may be the least offensive, but even they at the very least perpetuate the sickness.
Months ago someone was ribbing a poster about their choice of investments, "How could you, how can you sleep at night participating in the melt up?" My response was essentially don't hate the playa. The games been in extra innings since before I got on the scene. At times my moral compass gets spinning as I consider plugging my nose and getting in on some of this casino action. Aspects seem really fun, but at what cost soul-wise?
Way to get back on that horse CD.
"I blame the middle classes for this mess more than I do GS or the ratings agencies or the governments or the Fed. They borrowed their silly heads off without doing their homework, their research, their due diligence. Forgot to consider rising interest rates, falling home values or job losses in future. They got greedy; they wanted to avoid responsibility and jump into some imagined social safety net that cannot ever really exist."
Somebody actually said it. That said, I blame them all equally. Defraud the bank? Go to jail. Trash the bank's property because you weren't allowed to keep your ill-gotten loot? Go to jail. Make predatory loans? Go to jail. Run the bank into the ground? Go to jail. Counterfeit money and distort the interest rate? Thomas Jefferson knew what to do with you.
Wow, someone I agree with on this narley complicated subject.
+1,000,000
It's OK to cheat on your spouse but not your GF or BF; otherwise, they will never learn to trust you.
This brings to mind a theme on which I have been commenting to friends for years. Part of the problem we have with these issues is thinking in moral terms (I too am guilty, but we need to be aware and to limit thinking along these lines). We use words like "sociopaths" and "psycopaths". These words suggest people who need to be exterminated and then the system will operate "morally". All this refocuses the debate in an unproductive direction. It is important to maintain a practical perspective on our problems. In the end, I could live with a corrupt system if it was the most successful for the largest number of people. One of the biggest problems with our current system isn't that it is immoral, but that it doesn't work. That is as true for the psychopaths at the top as it is for the innocent grandmother at the bottom. What makes me crazy about our current crop of leaders is that they are shooting themselves in the foot. They have been at the top of a very successful food chain for 60 years, and they are doing everything they can to destroy a system that was treating them very well indeed. The irrationality of their behavior, even when viewed from the "collective" perspective of just the privileged few, is mind-boggling.
Thanks CD!
I am thankful to have a contributor who focuses on the psychology of herds and criminals in the world of finance.
At 19 years old I walked into a world of men who had spent entire lives trying to "get theirs" by any means necessary. My only chance to make it was to learn how to identify and deal with criminals who were on their own turf and who would stop at nothing to rip wide open any weakness you presented (even your ass if you weren't careful).
Looking back, that was the best education you could ever have given me and it was free.
The world of finance is no different than a game of prison poker and I love it. The fact that the world is at stake sure beats the hell out of a pack of cigarettes or a ramen noodle.
To get to my point. people want to trust people and there is always a surplus of people in this world who are willing to take advantage of that. Some people are so sick in their minds that they will take advantage of small children of frail grandmothers. The titans of finance are a sicker breed than you will find in a prison. You couldn't find a sicker bunch of men if you went to a child molestors hospital of the criminally insane.
The men of high finance have a hole inside of them which can't be filled, sadly. The world wouldn't be enough. They are maniacs but they put on a hell of a show.
Thanks again CD.
But they do seem to be highly concentrated in a single nationality, with an occasional consiglieri of a different one:
geithner,orszag,bernanke,summers,paulson,greenspan,rubin,friedman,fuld,frank,thain,dodd,mozillo,o'neal,gensler, cassano, blankfein, shapiro,yellin, fink,kashkari,cohn,dudley,dugan, and now kagan, among others of similar birth. And not for the first time.
Very curious, don't you think?
i respectfully disagree. i am fully short this market and remain so. i am convinced that the social mood is angry and this anger will bring about a change to the current 'corrupt' status quo, thus a lower trending market. i want change to this corrupt system and refuse to play 'long' until there is change. if i lose all - then so be it.
i think when the social mood is joyful, there is tolerance. i think all great empires collapsed when the mood of the people changed to anger and it was this social mood which effectively smashed them apart.
Happily, i fill my shorts.
Philosophy of Judo...do not put up a resistance to force. Instead of resisting the force, you move with the force. In short, do not meet force with force as it will only cause friction. In a sense, you submit to the force of your attacker. Again, do not meet force head on or you are merely wasting your energy.
Philosophy of a Gorilla: Go ahead and meet force head on. If you're big enough and strong enough, your mass will overwhelm your opponent, as steamroller does to a bug.
I submit the FED is a Gorilla.
Obviously you are not a government employee, nor are you a recipient of food stamps, or part of GS bonus pool or GM's pension plan.
And the latter group, private individuals, are such a minority, we are targeted by these demanding welfare ghetto dwellers — we're their source of wealth and income and entitlements.
You can't have a burgeoning welfare state if you don't debase the currency of THE MIDDLE CLASS, thus taking from the 100,000,000 savers and conservators, most of whom don't have a whole lot of either.
The wealthy relative few can withstand a transfer of a fraction of their stored booty. 55% of 100,000 is whole not more of a burden than 55% of $100,000,000.
Yeah,Mr. and Mrs. Jone's are demanding it,but they are being programmed to "need" it,hence the demand's
Darwin may win the day here. Do we survive better as individuals, taking as much as we can stash, thus giving in to this tendency you describe (which I won't argue with) or as a cooperative collective, who do not screw each other, but basically have each other's backs?
In a trade, do I need a good deal and your good will? Or do I need a great deal and I have no care for the relationship?
Extend this idea out to our relationship with the planet. Do I need to get all I can get from her, possible, with no care for her ability to adapt, regenerate, and heal conditions towards homeostasis, or do I make sure I have "enough" to get me through hard times, and be a steward for the planet and future generations.
Just some quick thoughts regarding your post.