Strangely Imperceptible Destruction

2/10/2025

Are people truly aware of the vast and ever-widening chasm between the financial economy and the real economy?

On the one side, we have veritable tidal waves of “money” sloshing all about the world driving markets to or close to all-time highs and inflating asset bubbles of every flavor and variety.

On the other side, we have wage stagnation, loss of purchasing power, rising prices on the staples of life, and crushing household debt burdens, all of which are leading to perceptible declines in the overall standard of living for most “common” people.

Yet the same “common” people appear more optimistic about their current situations and prospects than they have in years.

I don't know about you, but I find that strange.

Perhaps it has something to do with the perceptibility of our current, ongoing crash. I came across a video the other day in which the presenter argued for the potential for what he described as a “reverse crash.” Instead of 1929 and its subsequent Great Depression, think more along the lines of everything continuing to appear rosy and functional, only you will not be able to participate in the bulk of it in the long run because you will no longer be able to afford to.

I don’t know how likely that scenario is, but we seem to be heading in that direction.

Either way, one thing is certain. A crash of sorts is happening now and has been happening for some time.

It's strange how so few seem to notice.

5 Comments

jerry tulio

2/11/2025 00:50:39

Immigrants take jobs and increase housing prices by banding together and luving 3 families in a house and buying up all the cheaper houses. So getting ris of immigranta does bring marginal financial improvement for the plebs. If only Trump can also boot all the Hindu-1Bs from the country as well, then we will have a tech boom and many Americans who have been out of jobs because of the Indian scum will be back to coding and making the web great again.

NLR

2/11/2025 22:34:44

"Are people truly aware of the vast and ever-widening chasm between the financial economy and the real economy?"

I agree. And not just the economy, but the gap between the rhetoric about what the 21st century is and what it actually is. There's a famous oligarch who says the world needs more births, but he also said he won't hire Americans and is avidly funding and overseeing the development of a technology whose only purpose is to replace people. How does that make sense?

At this point, one of the main criteria for whether something is good or bad should be, does it help ordinary people? Does it help regular people live decent human lives and does it preserve the things that people have valued for millennia or not? (Including a proper religious perspective on life, of course)

I don't know what the future will hold, but I do know that widespread and influential and good aren't the same thing.

bruce g charlton

2/12/2025 09:32:05

I think I know what you mean and agree. One reason is that our civilization utterly lacks any coherent notion of what it is trying to do, and therefore what counts as a good outcome, and what an evil one.

As NLR says, the idea that we ought to be thinking in terms of providing the basis of a decent life for ordinary people is just absent from all actual policies.

I don't see any evidence that anything substantive has changed in the USA with DT as President - the entire tenor is one of the leadership class doing things to each other and foreigners, according to their own covert agenda. The nations "masses" are looking on as if it was a sport or entertainment; and either cheerleading, sobbing or angry. It's just more of the old performer-spectator illusion - curated, as before, by the mass and social media, which are manipulated at every level.

The problem is not solvable at the level of materialist-hedonic values which are the Only values in the public arena. We know from decades of experience that people do Not act to preserve their own peace, comfort, prosperity and distraction - because they simply become more and more short-termist and easily manipulated.

This applies even to the small leadership class, who are (for perhaps the first time in history) systematically destroying their own long term prospects.

In sum, my interpretation is that the gap between reality and perception is a symptom of the deep causes for the gap.

Francis Berger

2/12/2025 19:26:33

@ Bruce, NLR - I hesitate to write simple posts like this because I don't want people to get the impression that I am focused upon/obsessed by this-worldly concerns like striving to make the common man happy, raise his standard of living, provide comfortable housing, etc. However, I find it worrisome, spiritually-speaking, that the common man goes along with his destruction and is optimistic about the very forces that are actively depriving him of his happiness, standard of living, comfortable housing, and all the rest of it.

At the very least, I would have hoped these obvious attacks against his material well-being would inspire the common man toward some pentrating discernment. I say discernment rather than awareness because contrary to what I say in the post, I think the common man is perfectly aware of what the powers-that-be are doing to him, at least at the material level -- yet for reasons I cannot explain, he simply cannot bring himself to face this honestly.

Despite obvious evidence to the contrary, people cannot bring themselves to believe that those in power yearn to systematically destroy them. It's a step too far, apparently.

2/15/2025 18:30:39

I think posts like this are worthwhile because the way things are organized have philosophies behind them and false philosophies are no basis for either the material or spiritual aspect of life. For example, the whole idea that technologically supported virtuality is better than concrete reality is simply not true.

Our modern financial system is more sophisticated than Job's and Abraham's measuring wealth in terms of livestock, in that it requires complex coordination of large numbers of workers and advanced technology. But it's not actually better. In many instances, it has become a bunch of abstractions divorced from real wealth and manipulated according to arbitrary rules.

Likewise, around the turn of the millennium, people were told that integrating digital technology with life was going to put us on the path to utopia. There's a lot that can be said about that, but in a nutshell, it just didn't happen. And it's natural to see why not. Even though the virtual world is made possible by sophisticated technology, it still can't replace the real world. And now we're supposed to believe that people using machines to write emails that their recipients use machines to summarize is somehow more advanced and smarter than everything that came before?

Ultimately, if things get better either materially or spiritually (or both), it won't be from actions derived from false philosophies.

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.

Strangely Imperceptible Destruction

Leave a Reply.

Archives

​Strangely Imperceptible Destruction

Leave a Reply.

Archives

Strangely Imperceptible Destruction