"Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe." ~ Albert Einstein
The big news this week...at least before the premature exit of Anna Nicole Smith...was the new U.S. budget proposal. The Bush Administration revealed itself – once again – to be the most spend-thrift regime of all time. No publicly elected government has ever spent so much of its citizens’ money, or so much money that its citizens didn’t have. Nor did any government ever redistribute so much wealth – from the taxpayers to the defense contractors...from the middle classes to the financial classes...and (most importantly) from future generations to the folks living right here and right now.
The whole spectacle is breathtaking...and like all public spectacles...absurd.
Nearly half a trillion dollars in debt will be added over the next two years, according to the Bush plan. But then, in the year 2012, the feds promised to deliver a modest surplus – of just over $60 billion. Of course, that will only happen if nothing goes wrong in Iraq or Afghanistan (how could it?) and you are willing to employ accountants who are inveterate liars.
Even in the best case, there is no plausible way in which Americans can repay their debts – public or private. The public debt alone equals more than $100,000 for every family of four. The interest would be about $5,000. How many families could add that to their budgets? What sort of a politician would ask them to? Currently, the feds can’t even keep up with the interest payments. So, the debt feeds on itself...and the whole shebang just keeps getting bigger and bigger. More money. More credit. More debt.
Entire fortunes are put at risk. Billion-dollar bets are placed. Trillions of dollars float on a sea of liquidity. And nobody really knows what anything is worth...or when it might stop being worth anything at all.
How could this be?
Here, we turn to Darwin and the dinner table for a lift.
"It just makes sense that some groups of people would be smarter than others," our wife argued. "Different environments challenge people in different ways. Harsh environments may require greater intelligence to survive. Over time, the dumber members of the group are weeded out. The result should be a higher intelligence for the whole group."
Humans evolved in small groups, where they could know the particulars of things. They understood the threats they faced...and knew what was valuable. But when the scale and sophistication of human civilization increased, man found himself in a situation for which his brain was not prepared. He no longer had the precise, specific, direct information he needed. Instead, he needed to rely on a new kind of knowledge made up of abstractions, generalities and slogans. This new knowledge, which Nietzsche called "Wissen" to distinguish it from the more ancient form of experience-based knowledge called "Erfahrung," trips him up, because it is too far removed from the facts. The Inverse Square law and Darwin’s law both work against him.
Our hairy ancestors didn’t have to figure out the questions that bedevil us now: How much is a dollar worth? Or how much credit can the world stomach before it gets sick? Or will a troop "surge" in on the other side of the globe do any good? So, even today, our brains are just not suited to it. They’re not big enough.
Today, the average man can barely tell the difference between a fact and a campaign slogan. And so the new ersatz knowledge leads him into error. Modern politics turns the voter into an enabling dupe...makes the amateur investor a chump for Wall Street...and sends the poor, hapless foot-soldier off on a fool’s errand where he can only get himself killed.
Civilization, central banking and politics make monkeys of us all; we’re not equipped to deal with them. Like a hairdresser who shows up to work with a wrench in his hand and liquor on his breath, we are bound to make a mess of things.
This is especially applicable to our knuckle-dragging GOP Conservatives.
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