US Election Day And The Day After In A Time Of Decay And Memetic Mental Domination

We got the Presidential election this week and it could bring some volatility in the markets. A few months ago I wrote something about the election and preparing for it and got several people that went into a fury of outrage over it, even though I was not supporting any candidate, simply talking about who was ahead in the polls at the time, so I have not written anything about it since then.

For what it is worth here are the election odds as of this morning.

I have no comment to make on this and would not bet on it.

Discourse on the internet has gotten worse and worse over the years and so have the lies and disinformation. You can just look at the financial space and see how it has degraded over the past six years, as it has become dominated by Bitcoin gurus, memes, and pure hype with real analysis fading away, becoming unwanted. The masses, especially people who got into trading in 2020, or afterwards, have come to believe that this is normal and the way to make money and click away from anything of substance. Social media has become a cesspool where none of the real problems are revealed, and frankly those owning the platforms that push the memes, and those that create them, are not seeking to inform people, but to merely influence them, and the masses of people who use the internet the most want to hear about what the memes tell them is important.

There is purpose to creating a flood of confusion.

Adam Curtis explained how this method took hold in Russia in a video he made in 2014.

Nonlinear warfare - A new system of political control 2014 Adam Curtis

Since the video, the concept of “memetic engineering” has taken hold in intelligence agencies around the world, and among those seeking to manipulate the masses. Memes weren’t a thing in 2014, now they are.

I personally am trying to spend less time on the internet.

I have no doubt many people are dropping out of paying attention to the “news” too, because it all seems so confusing.

When it comes to the politics, what is clear is that political instability in the United States has been increasing for the past few years. The economic malaise that began to set in after 2000, thanks to the busting internet bubble and loss of manufacturing jobs, the housing crash of 2008, and the inflation of the past few years has driven the internal instability. Grant Williams did a good discussion of this, and how it applies to the financial markets, in a recent interview he did worth watching.

Confusion, Division, Loss of Trust: How The Investment World Has Changed | Grant Williams

The only thing I disagree with Williams about in this interview is his citation of the Neill Howell “Fourth Turning” generation theory as the cause of this. There are better historical theorists than him, and I do not believe his theory really is valid to explain the evolution of human history, even if it seems to be a good description of the past fifty years for people over 40.

It’s more a problem of the cycle of empires. I’d suggest reading Carroll Quigley’s book The Evolution of Civilizations for a better understanding of this, what really causes it, and what is happening today. We have passed the stage of what he calls “universal empire” in a civilization and are now in a “stage of decay,” one of the characteristics of which is many people losing belief in anything and society splintering into all sorts of sub groups. Civil society weakens and illiteracy grows. This “stage of decay” can last a long time, but everyone knows that things have gotten worse in the past few years.

This doesn’t mean the end of Western Civilization. There have been past period of crisis and renewal, and none of them had anything to do with generational age groups. Before World War II it was Great Britain that was the world’s superpower. It’s empire ended with that war and the United States got on top.

Socially we are now, you could say, in an era of “memetic” control, which makes it close to pointless now to try to talk about these things, as there is almost zero interest. People online love their memes. That memetic control will end (it’s only been around for less than ten years) after the current “stage of decay” completes and brings a new mode of thinking for people or a better media medium replaces it, which probably means online social media would have to be displaced by something better for people.

To be more specific, at the same time the US internal instability is growing, the US debt is growing, on track to reach over 130% of debt to GDP in a few years, the amount of trade in US dollars around the world is slowly falling, and the world is headed in a multipolar power block system, in which the United States is not going to be the only world super power like it was after the Berlin wall fell.

I am not likely to talk about any of these topics again, because very few want to hear it, and people just get angry, so I plan to sharply curtailing doing podcast or talking about this stuff at all on the internet.