Independence Requires Skepticism
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
Happy Fourth of July to all of my kind readers.
Today, when thinking independence, most Americans celebrate by farting hot dogs, guzzling Busch Light on speedboats while blasting “Free Bird”, pointing fireworks at one another and lighting them and, occasionally, thinking about our Founding Fathers telling the most powerful government on Earth to politely go fuck themselves.
Lately, as I’ve written, I’ve been thinking about a different kind of independence: the independence to think for yourself.
It’s the reason I write this blog and am confident I’ll always have something different than the next guy to say…because I am not afraid to think for myself and stand by my opinions, or lack thereof if I just don’t know how I feel about a topic. I’m also not afraid of being wrong.
The reason I write isn’t because I enjoy being a contrarian. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t wake up every morning wondering how I can disagree with CNBC. Being outside the consensus is uncomfortable because you’re wrong in public when you’re wrong, and when you’re right, people usually pretend they believed it all along. I’ve learned that the hard way.
This blog exists because I’ve spent years watching narratives get manufactured, repeated, recycled, and eventually accepted as fact. I’ve been fascinated (read: disgusted and ashamed) by the gap between what we’re told to believe and what’s actually happening. For me, the learning about how the mainstream media worked in the U.S. over the last decade was equally as horrifying as learning how monetary policy and our economy really works. There’s nothing intellectually honest about either.
So I spend my time trying to poke holes through everything.
Sometimes that has meant questioning trillion dollar valuations while everyone else is buying because “stocks only go up.” Sometimes it’s meant asking uncomfortable questions about monetary policy while central bankers assure us they have everything under control. Sometimes it’s meant wandering into political or cultural territory simply because everybody seemed strangely afraid to ask obvious questions.
I’m not interested in being anti establishment for the sake of it. That’s just another tribe. And frankly, I see these people online too. If you don’t look closely you could mistake me for one of them just because a number of my views happen to wind up being anti-establishment after examining the evidence. But that’s not me and I don’t have a schtick.
More and more, I’ve been interested in incentives. Follow the incentives and an awful lot of the world suddenly starts making sense. I’ve been wrong plenty of times. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either lying or deleting old tweets. But I’ve also learned that consensus deserves scrutiny, especially when everybody suddenly seems to agree a little too enthusiastically.
History isn’t exactly overflowing with examples of institutions admitting they got it wrong in real time. The point has never been to live on the fringe for the sake of it. The point is to visit it often enough to make sure reality hasn’t quietly packed its bags and moved there while everyone else was busy applauding the latest narrative.
After all, America itself was born from what many people at the time considered a fringe idea. In 1776, declaring independence from the most powerful empire on Earth wasn’t viewed as prudent. It was viewed as reckless. Dangerous. Even treasonous. Every generation since has had its own version of that story. The abolitionists. The suffragists. The civil rights movement. History has a habit of reminding us that today’s heresy can become tomorrow’s common sense.
That doesn’t mean every unpopular idea is right. But it does mean that consensus, by itself, has never been evidence of truth.
That philosophy applies just as much to...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE 100% FREE HERE).