"It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day.
One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.
So many letters to the editor and comments on the Internet have this same tone of thrilled vindication: these are people who have been vigilantly on the lookout for something to be offended by, and found it.
The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves. Which would seem to suggest that they’re both correct.
Some part of us loves feeling right and of being wronged. But outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out. Except it's even more insidious than most vices because we don't even consciously acknowledge it's a pleasure. We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it's a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again, like compulsive addiction.
Quite a lot of what passes itself off as dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own (selfish) choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish and wrong. So it's easy to overlook that it all arises out of insecurity.
Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective.
Timothy Kreider, We Learn Nothing
“Americans had built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 1967
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
The madness serves none but itself.
Keep that in mind. That may help us understand some of the more bizarre things that are going to be happening for a while.
I cannot believe some of the things that I see and hear these days. People have always been nuts, but as least they were ashamed of it, and somewhat furtive.
Now they are prominent in the news and the government, shamelessly.
The Democrats are urbanely corrupt, cynical elitists and accomplished liars.
The Republicans are barking mad. They don't even try to hide it anymore.
Trump's cabinet nominations are 'odd.' And not in an eccentrically engaging way.
So, as we toddle on towards mo' better wars, and another financial crisis, stocks once again managed to rally near to all time highs.
The Dollar rallied on euro weakness. And its weak because the European nations are obligingly self-destructing, trying please their true masters.
Gold and silver were sold.
VIX has now declined enough that I think it is flashing a strongly cautionary signal.
The timing is questionable, because it's hard to tell what event will trigger the actual slide.
But the threshold for a slide keeps getting lower and lower.
Powell will be speaking on Wednesday. Most likely he won't say much, but there is always that chance.
Non-Farm Payrolls and the reading of the tea-leaves up to that will likely be market moving.
Remember to care for your soul, because that is what this is all about.
Have a pleasant evening.
