Let's Go Wild
#42: 3 March 2024 Sunk Costs
We usually fail miserably when we think about ‘sunk costs’. Most every aspect of life involves investment; from my spiritual life/beliefs, to the food I eat, to the energy that powers everything in my life, and so on. Oil companies will resist, with everything they have, the threat to their existence posed by climate activists and their demands to leave legacy fuels in the ground. They will continue to throw new resources at the threat, and new resources into research and development of the ‘old ways’, in order to protect the resources they have already invested.
Another version of sunk costs is on display today as we move into a world of forever vaccines. By that, I mean a world where vaccines fade quickly and need to be replenished or tweaked in a constant flow of body modification. We call one institution ‘health care’ when truly it is ‘sick care’. Why cure a disease quickly (limiting profit) when you can ameliorate symptoms (continuing profit) instead? Why solve for a price what you can maintain for a much larger price? The newly-minted billionaires at Moderna (a company that, after ten years of losing money, was about to fold) and Pfizer are doing their happy dance as they contemplate endless, quarterly doses to 8 billion people. Why would any sane person even think of manufacturing a treatment for Covid, when a so-called safe and effective preventative care product is such a bonanza? Now the sunk costs are in the history of the company, not in any particular product.
There are also sunk costs in our financial system. Chief among these is the ‘petrodollar’, an artifact of the post-WWII new world order that not only made the U.S. dollar the only currency that could be used to buy oil, but also ensured that those dollars would be invested (or laundered) through the U. S. financial system via the New York bank monopoly. The sunk costs here are hidden from common view: any country wishing to buy oil must acquire USD first. This either means selling products to America or buying dollars through a foreign currency exchange (which charges a commission and a skim). Decades later, a good-sized portion of all USD actually resides overseas and circulates as part of the energy trade (and let’s be honest, the illegal drug trade). This hides some, but not all, of the inflationary effects that follow unencumbered money printing, something that is happening (since the start of Covid) at mind-boggling rates in many countries, but especially in America. As I write this (March 2024) U. S. GDP is about $24 trillion, national debt is over $34 trillion. No currency in history has recovered from a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 100%; the burgeoning inflation might well be the beginning of the end of the dollar. One other factor: as America uses sanctions against countries ‘we don’t like’, those countries are crafting deals to use local currencies for energy trades, not USD. Thus they limit their exposure to sanctions; and those dollars that used to be used to purchase legacy fuels rushes back to source.
This provides us an opportunity to re-envision our relationship to trade and class; despite the difficulties of overcoming the sunk costs embedded in every aspect of modern life. I am not the only person to point out this opportunity; the Masters of the current financial structure are also thinking many steps ahead, and seek at least as much control over the end product of this overturning as they have now. Bear this in mind when you hear terms like ‘Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)’, ‘programmable money’, and ‘digital cash’. This is a topic that deserves more attention than we can pay it here; suffice it to say that we are well-advised to seek only replacements for coin and cash that allow anonymity and CBDC is not that. Nor are the ‘Internet of Things (IoT)’, vaccine passports, social credit scores, implantable ‘health trackers’, cameras on every house, or a cultivated artificial world where augmented- and virtual-reality replaces face-to-face meetings IRL. Paradigm shifts are unpredictable, and we can hope that this one is happening faster than the old system can address. Acting in haste, in catastrophe, is likely to fail because events move faster than remedies. If we want to maintain some semblance of freedom, we need to be toppling as many institutions as we can, as fast as we can.
The obedient won’t know what happened. Our resistance can step up, but needs to do so rapidly. This move to control, to exploit, won’t end with just our loss of employment or easy/cheap access to food and housing. By accepting incremental increases in pressure to give up autonomy over my body, and by so quickly forgetting what happened just last week, I am no different from the Germans that justified the need for concentration camps, or the American public that allows the decade-old drone assassination program to continue without transparency or accountability. Is it true-to-purpose to allow this ‘lesser evil’ of domination and exploitation based on a propaganda-generated fear of death? But of course, we excused the genocide on the North American continent, in the name of Manifest Destiny and ‘religious freedom’. This acceptance of death-dealing and our assumed need for our modern world to continue indefinitely are our own sunk costs into what is clearly a death machine and culture. Can we choose differently?
Errors compound, and people wake up. Illogic becomes visible: dying within months of Covid = Covid death; dying within hours of vaccination ≠ vaccine death.
Question everything, and:
Trust, but verify
Follow the money
Ask, who benefits from this program, process, product; and who decides?
Charles Eisenstein writes:
“I will draw from Stanislav Grof’s concept of perinatal matrices, a four-stage description of the psychodynamics of birth:
Stage 1 is Uterine Bliss
Stage 2 is when the baby grows up against the limits of the womb
Stage 3 begins when the cervix opens and the baby begins the journey through the birth canal
Stage 4 is the emergence into a new world. There is no going back
Applying this map to human civilization, Stage 1 was the long exponential growth curve of human society that consumed the vast bounty of Mother Nature without apparent limit. Even when resources were depleted in one place, there was always some virgin territory, minerals, forests, and cultures to exploit. The expansion consumed not only natural resources but also the wildness in our selves. It was the colonization of gift cultures by money and markets, of traditional patterns of social organization by law, police, and government, of vernacular architecture by building codes, of folk medicine by pharmaceuticals, of midwifery by obstetrics, of storied communities by generic housing developments, of the singing circle by the MP3 download, of folk tales at the fireside by videos on YouTube, of the kingdom of childhood by the mandated regime of schooling, of oral culture by written culture, of place-specific knowledge by universal formulas. None of these developments were an unqualified evil. Yet undeniably, a gnawing poverty torments even the wealthiest people today, and a corrosive sadness at the unacknowledged losses that no new distraction can assuage.
I am speaking here not so much of ecological limits to growth—as I argue in my Climate book, if we lose our remaining compunctions about destroying all that is beautiful and alive, earth can accommodate our expansion long into the future. Rather, I am speaking of that feeling of futility, senselessness, No Exit that germinated around that time in the Existentialist movement. We were still growing, but we weren’t getting anywhere… The result is a collapse of sense, meaning, and identity that escalates as our inherited means and methods repeatedly fail us.
But now I feel that the winds have changed. The ship continues forward under its old inertia, but a new breeze is stirring. As the cervix opens, the contractions do not subside; they intensify. We are on the brink of social convulsions beyond anything we have seen in America for 160 years and in Europe for 70.” [emphasis added]
The ‘new breeze’ stirring has blown in a storm. The clouds are no longer just on the horizon. We hear the rumble of thunder before the deluge: supply chain disruptions, forest fires, floods, and droughts, civil disturbances, transportation system breakdown, internet and power outages, political extremism, accelerating inflation, and so on. As the saying goes, this is when ‘the shit gets real.’ For many people it already has: the underclass, the sick, the persecuted, the hungry, and the unarmed innocents gunned down by authorities. They have been relatively invisible to the bulk of society, mesmerized as it has been by The Spectacle™.
The orthodoxy of vested interests stonewalls challenges to its anomalies and inconsistencies. It takes free thinkers to crack the wall and abet the ending of the incorrect dogma. No single tool makes the change; what changes is our reality construct. We once more understand that our health derives from natural, not manufactured, sources.
We tend to anthropomorphize a lot: we project that animals think like we do. We also tend to think that humans have always seen and thought about reality as we do today. How do we know what we know: myth, tradition, brute force, authority (real or imagined), scientific method, and/or investigation? The Renaissance changed our methods, in art by changing our perspective from 2D to 3D. This fostered a huge change in what we know by melding perspective and time. Pre-Renaissance was really Pre-Clock. Post-Clock allowed us to share a cultural experience of the passing of time, as well as ‘time management’. Try to picture a ‘modern’ world without a shared time construct. This current time model: is it true? Is it the only or the best model?
Our consensual, collective worldview, or how we describe and strategize our exploration of reality, is ever-changing. Current science describes the change in energy (at the atomic scale) from one ‘level’ to another as a ‘quantum jump’. Post-jump, the entity is radically different; note also, it’s a jump, not a slide. There is no intermediate state, there is no time span. A jump in culture-level abstraction occurs when a ‘small’ cohort of people grasp a new description of reality. New views mean new ways of relating to the energy of the world, other, and self. But how does the established order react? What sunk costs can, and must, be abandoned? Who decides, and how? This human tendency towards maintaining status quo means it is always the fringe that builds the new paradigm; the ‘uneducated’, the ‘unbelievers’, the heretics at worst; the ‘free thinkers’ at best.
I cannot live ‘separate’ from reality. My/our continued transformation relies on individuals adapting and soon thriving in the next, greater manifesting of any new reality. In 15th century Europe, finite land was under the control of a literate church that enslaved illiterate masses. The high cultures in America had independently developed intricate mathematics, but there too, the literate few controlled the illiterate masses. In both ‘worlds’ the accepted description of reality, being closely guarded, did not spin off advancement in support of any new understanding of how the world might/should work. But the status quo could not hold back change forever.
It should be clear from history that status quo is deeply linear, while change is massively fractal. It is increasingly chaotic, tangential thinking that erodes the linear status quo. Conventional, traditional relationships break up on the shoals of a new world, one that is rising up out of the waves. One thing is certain: the future will be different. Visionaries will aid us in finding our way as painlessly as possible. But breaking things hurts.
Put simply, the Renaissance moved both culture and science from 2D to 3D. Those who resisted did not survive intact; they collapsed and disappeared or were subsumed by those that grew alongside the new perspectives. Of course, new worldviews start off as risk-intense. Eventually though, as it is now with 3D, we lose our ability to identify or ameliorate the damages made clear by the erosion of the paradigm. Quantum Physics is the landscape of the coming 4D world; clearly it is risk-rich as we try to grasp its overwhelming implications, possibilities and hazards, even as 3D struggles to survive.
A new era, or worldview, is not to be judged by existing standards, a ‘Garden of Eden’, nor is it ignorable; a time for revenge, a time when the past predicts the future, a time to be part of the Establishment. A new era, or worldview, is an inevitable – necessary – change in priorities, a new ‘common sense’, a different type/level of complexity and perspective, a transformation of all major institutions (and creation of some new ones) and seats of power; impossible to predict.
Rachel Carson wrote:
“The right to make money at whatever cost to others is seldom challenged.” Time magazine accused her of ‘frightening and arousing’ her readers, as if that is not the job of a writer. She was even told, since she was a ‘spinster’, that she had no right to express concern for unborn generations. When will the right to make money at whatever cost become one’s shame instead? What might that world look like?
In times of great suffering, the veils grow thin. What was hidden becomes visible; what was easy becomes difficult, what was impossible becomes grace. Let us allow our ancestors to whisper in our ears, “Let’s Go Wild”. It’s the only sane solution.