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
The ET Election Index – May 2019
This is the second installment of Epsilon Theory’s new monthly feature – the ET Election Index. Our aim with the feature is to lay as bare as possible the popular narratives governing the US elections in 2020. That includes narratives concerning policy proposals and candidates found in the news, opinion and feature content produced by national, local and smaller outlets.
Whatever It Takes
It’s the truest thing I know about the State: what begins as emergency government action ALWAYS becomes permanent government policy.
So now here we are, where “whatever it takes” has morphed from saving the entire European project to … [checks notes] … preventing a garden-variety recession.
A Zeitgeist Portfolio
In today’s narrative-connected news, New Mexico makes a major shift in their portfolio allocation, away from broad equity indices and core fixed income, and towards real assets.
It’s a very Zeitgeist-aware portfolio shift, and boldly done. I love it!
Office Hours – 6.4.2019
Ben and Rusty update subscribers on the shift from cooperative to competitive games and our narrative research program, with a focus on the China Trade War and US electoral politics.
The Weekend Zeitgeist – 6.2.2019
It’s the Weekend Zeitgeist! In which we get a flood of flood coverage, everybody is a contrarian, Bloomberg covers abortion, Time magazine does Time magazine things and Raleigh invites an unexpected guest or two to the 2019 Zeitgeist.
Fellow Contrarians Unite!
We spend a lot of time on our trade ideas, and do a lot of hand-waving at what we believe that everyone else believes. It’s a core problem for investors, and one that can’t be avoided.
Space for Rent
The pecking order is a social system designed to preserve economic inequality: inequality of food for chickens, inequality of wealth for humans. We are trained and told by Team Elite that the pecking order is not a real and brutal thing in the human species, but this is a lie.
On Tilt
It’s like he’s a drunk dentist in Vegas for a convention, sitting down at the poker table and getting bored after three hands. So he decides that he can “impose his will” on the table by opening up out of position with rags and making a continuation bet all the way through the river. Like everyone else at the table doesn’t see him for EXACTLY who he is.
Citizen Trump / Citizen Xi
This isn’t a US thing. This isn’t a China thing. This isn’t a Trump thing. This isn’t a Xi thing.
This is a social animal thing.
The words are not lies. The words are not wrong. The conflict may be just.
But you are being played nonetheless.
B3 Debt is the New Black
I’m not sure that people who aren’t immersed in this world realize how crappy B3 debt is. Or how much of it is getting pushed into the market.
THIS is financialization.
Red Dawn
How will you know that the US-China trade narrative is shifting towards a protracted game of Chicken?
When the narrative becomes dominated by national security language and clusters.
Rusty and I have been all over this for a year. More to the point, we have been right. If you want to know what’s happening with the Trade & Tariff narrative structure, you should subscribe to ET Professional. This is what we DO.
Spree
The word “spree” is so evocative in narrative-world, implying at a minimum some sort of wantonness and excess, some sort of moral bankruptcy.
How threadbare and slow-growing is the financial services world today? It’s a “hiring spree” just to open up a New York office. With 30 people. By 2022.
Amazon, Facebook and the Modern Trust [the ET Zeitgeist]
Facebook is a master at implementing price increases under the narrative of “optimization”, as if the company was doing you a favor by raising their ad prices so much. Now Amazon is reading from the same playbook in their advertising business.
Time to break up the trusts. Again.
Never Run the Same Gag Twice [The ET Zeitgeist]
It’s the best line in a movie full of great lines: You don’t run the same gag twice. You run the next gag.
Elon Musk is running the next gag.
A Song of Ice and Fire
We are the human animal.
We are non-linear.
We ARE a song of ice and fire.
It’s a song that has built cathedrals and fed billions and taken us to the moon. It’s a song that can do all of that and more … far, far more … if only we remember the tune.
The Pack remembers.
A Holy Day
If Memorial Day is anything, it is a day for telling and re-telling stories about Full Hearts. Let me tell and re-tell you the story of Milton Lee Olive III.
The Holiday Zeitgeist – 5.26.2019
It’s the Holiday Weekend Zeitgeist! In which we see an election season narrative make its way into other topics, hear the FDA’s plans to deal with expiring salt, hear from local man about local bear, hear from local man about local swimming hole, begin to doubt our judgment about the political import of impeachment proceedings, and read some perverse New York Times fanfic.
Going Gray
Huawei Founder Says U.S. Won’t Disrupt Business As Analysts Warn Of Sales Slowdown [Forbes]
Narrator: The cause-and-effect was, in fact, that simple
The Fed Is Likely to Make an ‘Insurance’ Rate Cut [Bloomberg]
The Zeitgeist – 5.22.2019
Retirement plan menus are ground zero for what is delightfully referred to as “choice architecture” … steering and Nudging you into making the “right” choice.
Ad men understand choice architecture. So do mob bosses. It’s all about creating a Hobson’s Choice … a choice that’s no choice at all.
It’s not a Wheel. It’s a Carousel.