Being clear-eyed and full-hearted doesn’t mean being passive, weak, or silent.
It means resisting every effort to supplant our autonomy of mind with symbols of identity, no matter the source.
Extreme language during election season isn’t anything new.
But this time it really is different. Our response must be different, too.
The question is not whether Trump will accept the election result if he loses. He won’t.
The question is whether a Missionary with actual power will join him.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m thoroughly despondent about the calcification, mendacity, and venal corruption that I think four years of Clinton™ will impose. Trump, on the other hand … I think he breaks us. Maybe he already has. He breaks us because he transforms every game we play as a country — from our domestic social games to our international security games — from a Coordination Game to a Competition Game.
The outcomes of NFL games are inordinately influenced by officials relative to other sports. This is not new. The Narrative environment faced by the NFL in 2021, however, IS new.
I’m not sure they’re ready for it.
When a famous person shakes his or her finger at you, they’re not telling you a fact.
They’re telling you how to think about a fact.
Called It - Election Edition
Men of God in the City of Man is a nine part series about a narrative virus that infected the charismatic and Pentecostal churches in the United States. It isn't a story about Christian Nationalism. It isn't a story about January 6th. It isn't a story about why people voted for Trump. It is a story about a story. It is a story about the language that created a self-sustaining movement defined by its unwavering belief in a fundamentally corrupt electoral system.
Recent Notes
We Hanged Our Harps Upon the Willows
Because the danger of powerful memes, cartoons and narratives is not that they demand our acquiesence. It is that they demand our participation.
Credit and Debt Monitor – 1.31.2020
The decline in the strength of the Q4 Narrative of a risk of “collapse” in credit markets continued in January.Uniquely among our macronarratives, cohesion actually…
The Promised Land!
Every once in a while, narrative-world gives you a gift that just keeps on giving. So it is with outgoing CEO Ginni Rometty’s regime of despair at IBM.
Today my focus is on the IBM-sponsored hagiography that is springing up like slime molds on the underside of rotting swamp cabbages.
The Inevitable Afterbirth
Two weeks ago we were being told about the coronavirus outbreak. This week we are being told how we should think about it. Right or wrong, it is important to have Clear Eyes about this kind of Fiat News.
Once You Buy a Prize, It’s Yours to Keep!
Outgoing IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has filed 167 SEC Form 4s detailing her stock transactions in the company.
So I downloaded and compiled all of them to see how much money she has sucked out of IBM, just like I did for outgoing Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg.
Stuck in the Middle With You
There is a median narrative theorem that can serve as a central pillar of a NEW approach to social choice theory, an approach less pedantic in its assumptions about human nature and less naive in its assumptions about modes of social power.
The median narrative theorem generates powerful predictive hypotheses about elections, hypotheses that predicted Trump’s Republican primary victory in 2016 and – if current data holds – predicts Sanders’ Democratic primary victory in 2020.
The Curious Case of Candidate Sanders
Everyone complains that their favorite candidate isn’t being treated fairly in the media. It’s the Bernie Bros’ turn…but are they right?
You Had One Job
Forget about impeachment and its partisan Kabuki theater. It’s a joke.
If there’s some rich dude who bought his way onto that Wuhan evacuation flight, and you know there is … if this Administration is forsaking its ONE JOB to protect American citizens, and you know they are …
THAT’S what brings down this government.
A New Road to Serfdom
There are many roads to serfdom, and they have all become faster and more perilous. We are walking down one of them now.
Pleased to Meet You, Hope You Guess My Name
It’s the one thing that Donald Trump and Rachel Maddow can agree on … “who the hell cares about the budget?”
If you don’t see that every government in the developed world is about to embark on a massive deficit spending spree, with modern-day ziggurats constructed in every burg and hamlet … you’re just not paying attention.
The Drum Major Instinct
On MLK, Jr. Day, we present an excerpt from a powerful and under-read sermon about status delivered to the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The Church of the Long Now
I know, I know … it’s me being mean to Neel Kashkari again.
Sorry, not sorry. Belittlement and scorn is the only weapon we have against the creeping ensorcellment of the Long Now.
That Which We Call a Law School
More from the world of universities-as-guilds and the weird war between the merely rich and ultra-rich.
Shot, Chaser
So I downloaded and compiled every SEC Form 4 filing that former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg has ever made, to answer one simple question:
How much money did Dennis Muilenburg suck out of Boeing over the last ten years?
Alpha/Beta Amnesiacs
We are emerging from the year end, so the language shared across financial media articles is performance language. How did stocks, markets, benchmarks, funds and strategies perform in 2019?
Frequent readers will recognize Gell-Mann Amnesia as a favorite topic here at Epsilon Theory.
An Experiment
There is a chart I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and I want to tell you about it. Before I do, I also wanted…
Normalize This
I feel like the Billy Crystal character in Analyze This all the time. There’s always some mob boss politician or central banker or CEO or asset manager pinching my cheek and telling me that it’s all gonna be okay, that I’ve just gotta understand how things are.
My god, I am so tired of having my cheek pinched. I am so tired of being nudged in such an artless, heavy-handed way. I am so tired of being told that 2 + 2 = 5.
A Perfect Meme
Every day we run The Narrative Machine on the past 24 hours of financial media to generate a list of the most linguistically-connected and narrative-central…
The Long Now, Pt. 4 – Snip!
The Long Now has severed the tether between taxation and spending – the most important macroeconomic policy relationship in our social lives as both investors and citizens.
Here’s what that means.
And here’s what we’re going to do about it.