[So many systems are failing – financial, healthcare, education and government, to name a few of the biggies – that one might think it had all been planned that way by the “experts” who hold sway over our lives.  In the essay below, a friend, V.R., a management consultant, takes note of some disturbing signs that things are likely to get worse before they get better. RA]

Remember the bumper sticker “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”?  I propose that attention itself is an investment, and like all investments, requires vigilance in execution and bypassing the “noise,” The marketing pitch of “New and Improved” slowly engulfed our entire culture. It conditioned (i.e., brainwashed) everyone to believe more in what’s new than what has worked. We are, in effect, addicted to newness as a panacea, having little memory of what worked before. With U.S. education falling to about 30th in the world, we have a population that knows little and whose analytical reasoning ability is as shallow as the latest newscast.  This spells opportunity for some.  For example: Through the promotion of pharmaceutical medicines by “captains of industry” who had a vested interest in replacing what still works for a minority of believers, the medical world brushed aside the accumulated knowledge of natural remedies to sell patented pharmaceutical wonders.

Also sidelined was the “prevention” idea, such as exercise, and only eating food not technologically tampered with.  The population has been conditioned to believe in drugs, despite glaring evidence to the contrary that is easily found (and discounted).  In this case “they” are the doctors who all attended medical schools funded primarily by big pharma, so what else could doctors know?  Vioxx, an FDA approved drug, was on the  market till 50,000 people died from it and Merck sold $2.5B of it .  The quiet media, which depend on revenues from drug ads, made so little mention of it that if you’d asked someone if they’d heard of an FDA-approved arthritis drug that killed as many Americans with heart attacks as the Vietnam war in half the time, they would have shaken their heads and said, “Huh?”

Alvin Toffler’s 1970’s book Future Shock explained  “… the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving people disconnected and suffering from shattering stress and disorientation”.  Too much change at once destabilizes any system.  There is also the “Kansas City Shuffle,” a song by jazz pianist Bennie Moten about an advanced form of confidence game employing misdirection, subterfuge, and playing on the mark’s “arrogant ignorance.” An excessive change rate creates an information overload that distracts the marks.  Look at how much information and IT tools the banks had to operate with to “manage” things; then look at the result. The subsequent failure of capitalism to find sufficient working capital within capitalism itself has been overlooked.

$1 Billion Per Word

The banks wrote a 700-word document detailing their plight to a President who gave them $1 billion per word, with no congressional oversight.  Capitalism had to be saved by a loan from the very “democracy” that had no say in the matter.  Make sense?  Of course not.   In traditional terms, that’s called theft. That’s how changing the rules that worked, like keeping banking and insurance separate, resulted in the failure of our over-complex and overly interconnected systems. With that in mind, can we say that a future-shocked nation acquiesced to this, as well as it does to the food business takeover by Monsanto and the “Just say yes to drugs” pharmaceutical business?  Mass helplessness has ensued due to information and systemic change overload, leaving only a sinking feeling that we are all along for the ride as this vehicle of newness crashes into the inevitable wall.

Our current “run-by-experts” world is as hard to ignore as a car crash in slow motion.  Observing a crash doesn’t stop it, but observing one’s own surroundings and taking evasive action is one’s first priority as a pedestrian at the intersection of the crash.  Being nimble and focused on one’s own safety by controlling what you can is the winning strategy.  In trading, too much attention to “news” and even to trends is unwise, as reality’s outcome is subject to more elements than can be accounted for.  Hence, a mechanical trading system that ignores the overload of wordy predictions and data, capitalizing on chart patterns, is arguably the wiser strategy for ensuring one’s success.  Reduce your own future shock on purpose, to sidestep being the mark in the “Kansas City shuffle” of global corporatism.

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