This is the Great Ravine

This is all going to get much worse before it gets any better.

In The Dark Forest, volume 2 of the Three-Body Problem science fiction trilogy, Cixin Liu mentions almost in passing a 50-year period of immense social upheaval, destruction and (ultimately) recovery across the globe. He never goes into the details of this period that he calls the Great Ravine. He basically just waves his hands at it and writes “yep, that happened”.

Why? Because the Great Ravine does not advance the plot.

It’s there. It happens. But there’s nothing to be gained by examining its events. Like the Cultural Revolution of Cixin Liu’s real-world history, the Great Ravine is ultimately just a tragic waste. A waste of time. A waste of wealth. A waste of lives. There is nothing to be learned from our time in the Great Ravine; it must simply be crossed.

And cross it we will.

Eventually we will come out on the other side of our Great Ravine to discover a new age where the small-l liberal virtues of personal autonomy and the small-c conservative values of social community are reclaimed, where inspiration is rekindled, ingenuity is rewarded and integrity is recognized. I know these words don’t mean much to most people right now – they never do on this side of the Great Ravine – but I promise you that one day they will again.

But until that day, which I think is probably decades away, some version of an FN SCAR-armed Jesse Plemons asking for our papers and a political loyalty test is 100% part of our American future. Hell, it’s part of our American present.

The truth is that there’s no stopping our collective march into the Great Ravine, fueled by our sadness transformed into focused anger at the Other Party.

The truth is that political violence on party lines is inevitable when everyone knows that everyone knows the Other Party is an existential threat to the ‘real’ America.

Why? Because this is a very stable political equilibrium, just not a pleasant one.

More to the point, no matter how many empty words are spent over the next few days ‘denouncing’ political violence, these guys and their surrogates are never going to stop saying the words that not only encourage but demand political violence.

I mean, I definitely could have included some additional incendiary Team Blue surrogates here, like maybe Joy Reid’s greatest he’s-a-fascist hits, but there’s something so special about the richest man in the world saying that anyone who disagrees with him on election security legislation should be arrested and executed for treason. As for MTG, she’s certainly showing a calmer, more restrained voice since Saturday. You think any of these people, least of all Trump, are going to “tone down their rhetoric” once he’s back in the White House? LOL.

And it’s not even these guys. Not really, anyway. These guys are just the most visible manifestations of the Beast — the monstrous hydra of Big Politics, Big Tech and Big Media that leads us to focused anger at the Other Party, that devours us whole as it marches us headlong into the Great Ravine.

The Widening Gyre (September, 2022)

I’m not asking you to fight the Beast of Big Politics, Big Tech and Big Media.

Honestly I don’t know how you would. This is the end of an age, the fin de siecle, the period of time where the Beast is strongest because it is everywhere and invisible all at once. Big Politics, Big Tech and Big Media are the water in which we swim. We are totally immersed in the co​mmon knowledge​ that the enemy is the Other Party, and until that com​mon knowledge is weakened substantially, any direct challenge to the Beast is a suicide mission. A noble suicide mission, like charging a fascist machine gun nest in the Spanish Civil War, but a suicide mission all the same.

No, I’m not asking you to fight the Beast.

I’m asking you to see the Beast.

I’m asking you to see how the Beast feeds on our anger, which it has renamed as ‘engagement’.

I’m asking you to see how the Beast transforms our sadness into anger with stories, which it has renamed as ‘news’.

That’s Corey Comperatore, who was shot in the head and murdered as he shielded his wife and daughter with his body at the Trump rally on Saturday night. Comperatore was 50 years old. He was an engineer at a local plastics manufacturer, and he served as a volunteer fireman and fire chief in Buffalo Township, Pennsylvania. His neighbor of 20 years, Paul Hayden, said, “He knew I was a Biden fan, I knew he’s a Trump fan. But we never let that come in between us.” Hayden recalled fond memories of riding dirt bikes with Comperatore.

To paraphrase a Steely Dan song, I cried when I wrote that paragraph. The events of the Great Ravine are positively drenched with sadness, a profound sorrow that washes over you again and again and again if you are a thinking, feeling human being.

But soon you discover that sadness is not your only constant companion in the Great Ravine. Anger is there, too.

That’s a map of the shooter’s vantage point on the left, at most 165 yards away from Donald Trump on stage. By now you’ve seen the video of the sniper team that killed the shooter, trained to take down guys 1,000 yards away. They were locked in on the guy! Locked in on a guy with a rifle, lying prone on a roof, aiming at Donald Trump, locked in before he fired a shot. And yet he shot. Apparently there was a local cop who went up on the roof, got intimidated, and backed down? By now you’ve also seen the video of the secret service agent who was clearly overwhelmed, to the point of not being able to holster her gun. I’m sure there are reasons. I’m sure there are procedures. I’m sure everyone did exactly as they were ‘trained’. Don’t care. This was bullshit, and it made me so freakin’ angry.

Just like Uvalde. Man, I can hardly look at this photograph without waves of anger just washing over me. Sadness at the beginning, but pretty soon I exchanged my sadness for anger, and once I did that … woof. To be clear, I’m still angry. I will never not be angry.

Just like Epstein’s death while in federal custody. Sadness and shock at first, followed by sheer white-hot anger. Was it suicide? Was it murder? I don’t care! An ‘unlucky accident’ like this is the ONE THING that a non-corrupt State must prevent. It’s the non-corrupt State’s ONE JOB to keep Epstein alive for trial, and everyone knows that everyone knows this is their ONE JOB. It is impossible to violate this co​mmon knowledge without premeditation and malice, without conspiracy and criminality aforethought. It is impossible to have an ‘unlucky accident’ like this in a non-corrupt State.

It was after Epstein’s death that I started saying BITFD — Burn. It. The. Fuck. Down. — because I was just so angry at the necessarily corrupt system of wealth and power that would allow this to happen. And once I started saying it, I found myself saying it more and more about smaller and smaller things, often things that were presented to me as ‘news’ rather than things that I had really thought about myself. I found myself saying it more and more about things that I discovered later were coded as Team Red or Team Blue things.

I was slowly but surely led from a shared sadness over a terrible event to an inchoate anger with the overall system to a focused anger at specific people and institutions.

Sound familiar? I think if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’ve all gone down this path over the past four or five years, where we start with sadness over terrible events, move to a generalized anger with ‘the system’, and ultimately end up with a focused anger at people and institutions that are — surprise! — somehow all associated with one political party or another. And as part of this process of more and more focused anger directed at the Other Party, we find ourselves — surprise! — spending more and more time with social media content and the machines that distribute that content.

This mediated transition from sadness to generalized anger to focused anger is entirely intentional.

It is the optimized algorithmic solution to a duopoly of two political parties and an oligopoly of a handful of giant tech and media companies who want to minimax regret their status as the most powerful institutions in the world.

What does “minimax regret” mean? It’s a decision-making strategy for games where you minimize your maximum regret, and it’s a concept and application that will be immediately familiar to financial advisors and anyone else who deals directly with the sadness and anger of clients.

Financial advisors are, of course, responsible in one way or another for making money for their clients, and an outsider might think, “oh, the maximum regret for a financial advisor must be losing lots and lots of their clients’ money”. But those outsiders would be wrong. Losing lots and lots of your clients’ money is indeed regrettable! It’s very sad. You’re sad, your clients are sad, everyone is very sad. But so long as other financial advisors are also losing lots and lots of their clients’ money, like happens in every bear market or recession, it’s not a maximum regret. Why not? Because while your clients may be very sad, they are not angry. Or at least they are not angry at you. They may be angry at ‘the market’ or they might be angry at ‘the economy’, but they won’t be angry at you.

What makes a financial advisory client angry at you? It’s not losing a lot of money when everyone else is also losing a lot of money. It’s losing a little bit of money or even making a little bit of money when everyone else is making a lot of money. That’s what makes clients angry. Shared underperformance is fine, because that’s just sadness. Relative underperformance is not fine, because that’s what generates anger.

This is true for every professional career and every institution, from finance to politics to medicine to law to tech to education to sales to administration. Whatever ‘client’ means in whatever human field of endeavor you want to examine:

You will not lose your clients if they are sad with you.

You will absolutely lose your clients if they are angry at you.

Every ounce of modern institutional activity is designed with these principles in mind, particularly in largely zero-sum (my rewards come at your expense, and vice versa) duopolies or oligopolies like politics, tech and media.

1) Underperformance and incompetence are absolutely fine, so long as your clients believe that it was not relative underperformance and incompetence, but underperformance and incompetence because you ‘followed standard procedures’ or ‘acted prudently’ or ‘inherited the problem’, or because you share the underperformance and incompetence in a ‘whatabout the other guy’ sort of way. Your client will be sad, but that’s fine!

2) In a system with a winner-take-all payoff structure and a captive client base (like American politics!), you maximize payoffs by creating client anger at your competitor, not by efficiency and performance gains that reduce client sadness across the board. Your competitor has to deal with max regret, and that’s great!

So that’s what we get morning, noon and night from the Beast: a constant flow of ‘news’ designed either a) to deflect anger at Your Party by excusing/disowning/whatabouting underperformance and incompetence as ‘normal’ or b) to create anger at the Other Party by highlighting their relative underperformance and incompetence. All the while generating ‘engagement’ for the Big Tech and Big Media heads of the Beast.

It’s all perfectly rational, all perfectly optimizing. Fortunes are made. Power is gained. But over time you have to make bolder and bolder claims to create anger at the Other Party. You are forced to respond in kind if the other side escalates the nar​rative attacks, like using mustard gas in World War I, until eventually the entire game breaks because the anger you’ve created can’t be contained by the rules of the game. And that’s when you are well and truly in the Great Ravine.

Earlier I wrote that I’m not asking you to fight the Beast, but to see the Beast and the way it feeds on our anger, an anger created and transformed out of sadness. Well, there’s something else I’d like for you to see … something I’m asking you to see about yourself.

I’m asking you to see yourself as an autonomous human being, brave enough to own your anger and your sadness, brave enough to refuse the Beast when it offers to exchange your well-earned sadness for a delicious new anger that is not your own and which is not well-earned and which fuels you into actions that you never thought you’d be a part of.

Actions of anger for which, in the end, you will not forgive yourself.

Yeah, it’s maybe the oldest story in the Book, that offer of the Beast as you find yourself stumbling through the Great Ravine. And it’s maybe the oldest question, how we get to the other side without becoming the baddies ourselves.

The answer then is the answer now.

We make a community of those who see with cl​ear eyes and love with fu​ll hearts. We protect our autonomy of mind and our community of spirit. We teach anyone who will listen.

Can’t lose.