by Objective Reality After spending three weeks with objective truth at the ranch, we are now forced to return to the world of myths, delusions, and claptrap. Yes, we are in Buenos Aires looking at a TV! And there they are… talking about the world of politics, money, culture… the world of Facebook and CNBC… of Trump and Clinton… of ZIRP and NIRP… and of Game of Thrones. Photo credit: HBO The royal seating accommodation fought over in “Game of Thrones”. It looks decidedly uninviting – a literal pain in the a**, you might say. High political office strike us as very similar in this sense, so the iron throne actually works quite well as a symbol. We have often wondered why anyone would want to have a job the main purpose of which is to meddle in the lives of other people against their will. What could possibly be more off-putting? Some people don’t believe in objective reality. Descartes, for example. “I think, therefore I am,” he said, famously. But he would have existed whether he thought or not. It wasn’t because he thought that he existed; it was the other way around. At least, we think so. That is why we like life at the ranch. We don’t have time for Descartes. Objective reality presses against us like a fearful cow in the manga. The sun. The wind. The drought. It hardly matters what you think. You have to live with it, adapt to it, and protect yourself from it.
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Bill Bonner considers the following as important: Debt and the Fallacies of Paper Money, Featured, Hillary Clinton, newslettersent, On Politics, René Descartes, Trump
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Objective Reality
After spending three weeks with objective truth at the ranch, we are now forced to return to the world of myths, delusions, and claptrap. Yes, we are in Buenos Aires looking at a TV!
And there they are… talking about the world of politics, money, culture… the world of Facebook and CNBC… of Trump and Clinton… of ZIRP and NIRP… and of Game of Thrones.
Photo credit: HBO
The royal seating accommodation fought over in “Game of Thrones”. It looks decidedly uninviting – a literal pain in the a**, you might say. High political office strike us as very similar in this sense, so the iron throne actually works quite well as a symbol. We have often wondered why anyone would want to have a job the main purpose of which is to meddle in the lives of other people against their will. What could possibly be more off-putting?
Some people don’t believe in objective reality. Descartes, for example. “I think, therefore I am,” he said, famously. But he would have existed whether he thought or not. It wasn’t because he thought that he existed; it was the other way around. At least, we think so.
That is why we like life at the ranch. We don’t have time for Descartes. Objective reality presses against us like a fearful cow in the manga. The sun. The wind. The drought. It hardly matters what you think. You have to live with it, adapt to it, and protect yourself from it.
When a bull charges you, or your horse throws you, it doesn’t matter what you think; whether you are a Republican or a Democrat… a Roman Catholic or a Buddhist… a prescriptivist or a descriptivist. You just have to do what you have to do.
René Descartes, who thought, and therefore was. Sorry old chap, no time for you! Painting by: Frans Hals
But back in the more sophisticated, more civilized, more modern and technologically advanced world… it is all moonshine. The bull is cut into pieces and sold at the meat counter. What matters is subjective reality. What we think is, often, what we get.
Extravagant Confections
Take the U.S. presidential primaries, for example. Elections are real. But they wouldn’t exist if we stopped believing in them. They are features of subjective reality… extravagant confections created by the human mind.
Without our collective thoughts, we would have no elections… no candidates… no government… no president… nobody to tell us what to do.
The whole idea of it is monumentally block-headed. Millions of people stand in line to cast their votes for someone whom almost none of them really knows, whose policies few of them understand, which may or may not be pursued, and with consequences that are usually unknowable.
A fundamental belief system problem… Image via pinterest.com
Then, the person chosen by this process gets to tell us what to do! The voters elect a man who pledges to keep them out of war; the next thing you know, he’s sending the “doughboys” to Europe. They vote for someone who says, “Read my lips: no new taxes”; the next thing you know… they’re facing a tax hike.
Then, learning nothing from the experience, they put his son into the White House – a “fiscal conservative” who promises a “humble” foreign policy. A few years later, you turn around and find he’s run up the biggest deficits and gotten us into the longest and second most expensive war in U.S. history.
The system is so riddled with preposterous hallucinations and outrageous conceits that it needs the “willing suspension of disbelief” on the part of practically every sentient human being in the nation to hold it up.
If they ever caught onto what a scam and a farce it is, the whole thing would fall down in a heap. There is no objective reality to it. It is all “lies, lies, lies,” as Republican frontrunner Donald Trump would say.
Trump Landslide?
“Trump is amazing,” began a conversation with a group of Americans last night.
“When he started his campaign, people thought he was just a spoiler or a buffoon. But now, I think he’s going to win the White House. Nobody likes Hillary.”
“I thought the polls showed Hillary winning by a landslide,” we replied, a bit behind the news cycle.
“Want to bet?”
The Donald, preparing to have Deep State candidate Billary for breakfast Photo via imgflip.com
At our table of six Americans, at least four were so sure that Trump would take the White House that they were willing to put money on it.
“Look, a lot of his program is amateurish and silly. But he understands the soul of the American people much better than Hillary. Just wait until he starts going after her.
“Hillary has never had a job. She has a long history of corruption. She has no idea what life is like for ordinary Americans. And those Sanders voters… they’re never going to go for Hillary. Hillary is an insider, through and through. The Sanders voters, like Trump voters, want an outsider.
“And there are now as many millennials as there are baby boomers. The boomers may go for Hillary. She’s safe. She’s practically the definition of the Establishment. She’ll protect Social Security and free pills.
“But the millennials know the system is screwing them. They will have to pay for it… to keep us old f**** living in the style to which we’ve become accustomed.”
Addicted to Illusions
Hillary is the Deep State candidate. Mr. Trump’s relationship to the Deep State has yet to be determined.
All we know for sure is that his recent foreign policy speech must have upset the neo-con empire builders, the beribboned pencil pushers at the Pentagon, the think-tank heroes, and New World Order enforcers.
Mr. Trump said, in effect, he could turn the country’s attention back to its own interests.
Image credit: DionWorx
Trump’s message, repeated on occasion of his recent foreign policy speech. We don’t know what he will really end up doing (Mr. T. often contradicts himself after all), but we do know assorted globalists and NWO stooges absolutely hated what he had to say.
“America first,” Trump says, echoing a foreign policy theme not heard for half a century. “After Reagan, our foreign policy began to make less and less sense. Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, which ended in one foreign policy disaster after another.”
The elite won’t like that. They caused those disasters. They profited from them. They want them to go on. The elite depend on the illusions of the system – especially, the scammy, credit-backed dollar – for the objective reality of their jobs, their wealth, their reputations and power.
They won’t give up easily.
Image captions by PT
The above article originally appeared at the Diary of a Rogue Economist, written for Bonner & Partners. Bill Bonner founded Agora, Inc in 1978. It has since grown into one of the largest independent newsletter publishing companies in the world. He has also written three New York Times bestselling books, Financial Reckoning Day, Empire of Debt and Mobs, Messiahs and Markets.
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