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The Crises and Sacrifices Yet to Come
The Crises and Sacrifices Yet to Come
The timing of finally embracing risk and sacrifice as the only option left is exquisitely sensitive: finally caving in a moment too late leads to the system collapsing beyond recovery.
The sense that we’re approaching a tipping point into a crisis with no easy resolution is pervasive, a sense that beneath the veneer of normalcy (the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates and that will fix everything), we sense the precariousness of this brittle normalcy.
While many are uneasily scanning the horizon for geopolitical crises, others see the crisis emerging here at home, possibly a political crisis or a financial crisis that ensnares us all.
Few look at the decay of our social order as the source of crisis. Few seem to notice that corruption has become so normalized that we don’t even recognize the ubiquity and depth of our corruption; we tell ourselves that this isn’t corruption, it’s just healthy self-interest, the “invisible hand” of the market magically organizing our economy to optimize efficiency and productivity. This provides cover for our worship of self-interest, a polite phrase for limitless greed.
While the media glorifies illusions of salvation and grandeur (AI!), few look at what’s been lost in the decay of our social order, a list that starts with sacrifice for the common good and civic virtue.
The American Dream has a peculiarly truncated vision of sacrifice: we make individual sacrifices to advance our personal goals, but sacrifices for the common good are not part of the Dream: sacrifices for the sake of our fellow citizens are at best unnecessary and at worst a waste of money, something only chumps fall for.
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Julian Assange Is Today’s Martin Luther King
Julian Assange Is Today’s Martin Luther King
“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop… And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
– Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, one day before he was murdered
What Martin Luther King King won through many hard-fought battles, and in the end through sacrificing his own life, has to be won all over again: freedom, truth, justice. And this time it’s Julian Assange who stands in the frontline. With Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden by his side. But I know you’re not very likely to agree with that assessment.
For one thing, I picked the kind of headline that will probably make many people not read an essay. But I’m not kidding, and I’m not saying this for effect. Julian Assange is like Martin Luther King in many ways, and he deserves for people to recognize that.
Assange and Dr. King were born in different times, the former 3 years after the latter was murdered. But when anyone wants to talk King’s legacy, then Assange very much IS that legacy. It would be nice if people like Dr. King’s youngest daughter Bernice, who is very vocal on her father’s legacy, would acknowledge this. Her father certainly would have.
What Julian Assange and Martin Luther King have in common is a superior intelligence, combined with unwavering courage and an unrelenting drive for justice and truth. Both men were born so brave they realized that they might have to give their lives for their causes. And then brought that realization into practice. Both in their own way gave their lives for our sins.
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On Interventionistas and their Mental Defects
On Interventionistas and their Mental Defects
Excerpted from the preface of Skin in the Game
Skin in the Game is necessary to reduce the effects of the following divergences that arose mainly as a side effect of civilization: action and cheap talk (tawk), consequence and intention, practice and theory, honor and reputation, expertise and pseudoexpertise, concrete and abstract, ethical and legal, genuine and cosmetic, entrepreneur and bureaucrat, entrepreneur and chief executive, strength and display, love and gold-digging, Coventry and Brussels, Omaha and Washington, D.C., economists and human beings, authors and editors, scholarship and academia, democracy and governance, science and scientism, politics and politicians, love and money, the spirit and the letter, Cato the Elder and Barack Obama, quality and advertising, commitment and signaling, and, centrally, collective and individual.
But, to this author, is mostly about justice, honor, and sacrifice as something existential for humans.
Let us first connect a few dots of items the list above.
Antaeus Whacked
Antaeus was a giant, rather semi-giant of sorts, the literal son of Mother Earth, Gaea, and Poseidon the god of the sea. He had a strange occupation, which consisted of forcing passersby in his country, (Greek) Libya, to wrestle; his trick was to pin his victims to the ground and crush them. This macabre hobby was apparently the expression of filial devotion; Antaeus aimed at building a temple for his father Poseidon, using for material the skulls of his victims.
Antaeus was deemed to be invincible; but there was a trick. He derived his strength from contact with his mother, earth. Physically separated from contact with earth, he lost all his powers. Hercules, as part of his twelve labors (actually in one, not all variations), had for homework to whack Antaeus. He managed to lift him off the ground and terminated him by crushing him as his feet remained out of contact with his mamma.
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