Not Lindy! Motherf*cker!
Experts, authority, risk management and courage.
Experts
Renato Moicano set finance twitter on fire when his UFC fight win speech turned out to have nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with the communist dystopia taking over his home country of Brazil and its contrasting principles of freedom - which propelled the modern West to what it is - or was, until recently.
My Brazilian friends contacted me the other day to tell me they are leaving. The situation is not pretty. Shellenberger is all over the case. Greenwald is on it too. And Musk is obviously trying his best to keep free speech alive there through his tribulations with X.
The particular bit that lit up every big name in finance was specifically the Mises reference and its implication that sound money (no printy-printy) is the most unappreciated and consequential of all the principles that tangentially undergirds all the other real rights as we relate to the free market and a Western world known for its history of innovation, freedom and quality of life - really, like no other.
In reality we have not experienced a life without money printing since essentially 1913, so literally nobody alive can tell us what it’s like to live life truly free from these “price and perception” distortions, and it’s a testament to The West that we have continued to do to great things since then in spite of eternally devaluing currencies, which now devalue at exponential rates given the pre-ordained nature of debt markets and math.
The sound money principle today is seemingly only loved by the right, Ron Paul gold bugs, the crypto world, specifically bitcoin (an encouragingly massive, global and high-IQ cohort) and anyone with an understanding of finance good enough to know that shutting down the world for two years as an excuse to kick end-times level money printing into gear, was the largest-scale sneakily criminal act in all of human history.
Of course the plandemic is over and the money printing continues, as was always the plan. Wars are next obviously.
To some this is surprising. To me it is not at all. With very few exceptions, fighters are generally based - as a result of facing pain and hardship, oftentimes poverty, and the fact that a capacity to defend oneself, or even the capacity to beat up ten guys and take their stuff but not actually do it, teaches one the basest layers of life’s truest dynamics. And they are generally the kinds of people who humbly consider themselves eternal beginners and eternal students of life. They are unleveraged archetypes.
Most people outsource their violence to third parties via some complexified iteration of a nanny-state, and I’d contend this explains a near majority of problems in our world, including mental health issues, and most often explains those aspects of life that contain components of passive-aggression or emotional manipulation. People tell men to “do what’s right”, people tell women to “do what’s right for you”. Well, that is a part of what we are talking about, and that is quite sad too.
I don’t make the rules, but being based necessarily means un-supporting any phenomena that is a known symptom of fiat financialization. Like paying the highest prices in history for university tuition while the quality of which is at an all-time low (the academy now often causing more direct harm than good in the external world), the transgender surgery boom (and associated mental health crisis), Net Zero & SDGs (high-beta NGO culture), think-tanks in general, social media influencers, the list goes on. Most people have no idea that none of these are real occupations, nor essential to life, and when the shit hits the fan they will wonder how they ever came to believe that they were. Unfortunately, only pain, and lots of it, can bring the vicissitudes of these outgrowths of modernity back into workable reality.
Authority
This week, Katherine Maher, the new CEO at NPR, gave us lots of controversy, and lots of entertainment.
Her aim in life, funnily enough, is to make the rules. Without getting too into the weeds, her time at Wikipedia was all about bending the truth to suit the regime narrative.
She, herself, is a symptom of a life lived entirely under the distortions of fiat financialization. We know this by looking at her resume - Yuri Bezmenov’s post was hilarious - and written before the below video started doing the rounds and causing a massive stir.
She was, in a way, the one caught holding the bag when the system finally said “no”.
Some of the choicest quote-tweets of the Ian Miles Cheong post (linked for kudos):
Feminized, infantilized and care-bear weaponized.
“Live your truth” and slay kween.
Ayn Rand’s heroes aren’t real but her villains are.
Behold the matriarchy. It's like the patriarchy, but without the dead weight of reason and logic.
The fact that this intellectually vacant and ideologically excited midwit was chosen to lead one of the few remaining viable news orgs is also an important marker for NGO teleology and where things are headed… The decision to elevate a veteran NGO midwit who loves therapy culture and memetic ideological nonsense as CEO signals that NPR has no interest in righting the ship and is leaning into the chaos.
“The best of what we can know right now” is some Kamala-level stuff.
That’s all a lot of heat.
Shoo-wee. I’m sure it’s tough.
From my perspective there is only one word to describe her situation: over-leveraged. Her life was a train ride to progressive Valhalla, until it very suddenly wasn’t. At every step of her striverdom she cranked up and honed her delusions, as she was elevated and vaunted by an extremely unhealthy mainstream culture based on the perpetually urgent need for Progress.
But it’s not just the wrongness itself that’s a problem - it’s the way she is able to so effortlessly elevate absolutely destructive nonsense to sound legitimate with her McKinseyfied, low-talking Authenticity(TM), Concern(TM), and Empathy(TM). The mechanism itself is what is dangerous.
The fact that these levers are so readily available to people like her is what terrifies me, because it works on normies all the fucking time.
The Longhouse has brought too many *risks upon us already.
This is strange enough in business but it leads to very peculiar outcomes in personal lives as well - the idea that “progress” necessarily means we're all living in an ever more perfect society where everybody's opinion is equal, but at the same time we must “trust the experts”. This makes no sense. This means only that the proles get to bicker amongst each other with “equal” hopelessness, while the Atlantic Council oligarchs tell everyone what to do - with final authority.
To coin a Tate-ism, this is a pathetic, slave-minded view.
It is a direct attack on the order that built most of modern society for hundreds if not thousands of years. Some opinions are of course worth more than others.
This is after all what we call expertise, or even just “focus”. And I found it funny how, even at the end of the pandemic, after learning the facts of the pandemic, I was shocked to realize a lot of normies still rallied around the idea that “we're all informed”.
Really? By whom? You downloaded your CNN update? You saw a News24 article on Facebook? Who is actually looking out for you? I am thinking someone between you and the digital god in the sky. I assure you it’s not the government, nor any entity remotely resembling it.
Atomized normies, who, experiencing no physical contact with localized authority from someone who actually cares, are still confident to look to the digital sky-god for answers. We have truly lost our way.
What society needs most right now is local authority - practical authority. The one that existed, for free, until not so long ago. What happened to real trust? Like they say in MMA, there are levels.
An overly progressified longhouse culture that imagines it’s in control all the time by feeling of “consensus” - where everyone explicitly tells each other stories about how in control they are, are not only the most exposed to risk personally, but exposed to new delusions that in turn create more risk - this is the leverage.
What some might label autistic behavior, one can also call alpha male responsibility - to notice literally everything and try to protect the group against the worst downside risks. Autists can’t help themselves, in a good way, while alpha males genuinely bear both the perception and management of all risk and danger, until the nth degree, and on behalf of the many others around them who are “busy” little bees. Their peak sense of duty means they understand that they are the final boss, whether they want to be or not: “If I can see they won’t manage their own risk, who else will watch out for them, but me?”
Ceding power to the nanny state has only ever ended in tears. This is the history of the world. And alpha males do not like to see tears.
Courage
I was taken with Santiago Pliego’s lovely article, Vibe Shift and his way of describing the unveiling of the antithesis of the longhouse, and a life of true vitalism.
I support a more positive vision of the future focused on building externally, not on obsessing over managing internal life or how to divvy up what few spoils of resources and power remains.
“Consensus” and “solidarity” are only required when nobody is managing risk at the individual level, and, likely as a result of this lack, when society begins to exhibit what Mattias Desmet calls excessive free-floating anxiety.
Courage naturally goes hand in hand with proper, local risk management. It just requires a shift in perspective - and probably also to just drop most of the progressive/Marxist garbage we have been taught in the last, say, 20 years.
Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.
…repudiation of homogenizing hyperglobalism and instead intentionally pursuing the communal, the local, and the national.
…embracing that men and women are unique and different.
…the refusal to subordinate yourself and your family to the whims and anxieties of activists and bureaucrats and relearning to trust your eyes and ears.
…spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete.
…a healthy suspicion of credentialism and a return to human judgement.
…living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth—whatever the cost.
It could even sound like… the actual patriarchy. Yikes.
No simping for bureaucracy. No hiding behind “group” dynamics, and instead handling all of life like an adult individual, with senses, valid intuition, opinions, and some god damn rights.
This kind of all sounds a lot like a very pleasant society, one that actually works, and whose core value is measured by its sacred potential, primarily at the individual level - “the group” is a natural beneficiary. It does not however work the other way around, despite what progressivism would have you believe.
Thanks to the Marc Andreesens, Musks, Vivek Ramaswamys, and various other prominent Internet Dads - a fabulous term coined by Scott Adams - we have some leadership on this front.
As Paul Portesi says, “manage the downside, the upside takes care of itself. Manage wrong.” Or the complimentary idea that many VC types now talk of, “increase your luck surface area”. Just do not leverage yourself and your life on progressive (fiat) delusions. This is always fatal.
No Delusions
Bitcoiners who have gone down the rabbit hole proper will tell you how their time preference has changed, how they see value, time, risk in a new light, and how the natural state of the free market is actually deflationary. (Say it again.) The ability to hold this vision in one’s head alongside the day to day reality of fed-induced hyper-stagflation is itself a mark of intelligence and hope which we need to protect at all costs.
Longhouse culture is but another symptom of fiat financialization - and the distorted and unbalanced dynamics it brings to our lives are not Lindy. The arc of world peace and stability tends toward male wiring, local authority and practical risk management.
Festina Lente.
The best other explanation of "the natural state of the free market is deflation":
https://x.com/stackhodler/status/1866416759277748516
"read and right"- yeesh, that's my worst typo yet...