Always be skeptical of your own views. Speculation in our society has a (strange) way of becoming fact. The projected illusion becomes real, and the more real the illusion becomes the more people want it. For too many of us in our privileged lives we think we have done more, accomplished more than we have. Far too many of us have had all ‘the breaks’ as we have stood on the shoulders of life and we have never got down in the dirt to build, to erect a foundation of our own. We have flown too high on borrowed wings…everything came just too easy.
Mass psychosis somewhat hypnotizes people into believing falsehoods as truth, possibilities as absolutes…and belief without question. Today, the internet and ‘not-so-smart’ cell phones spread this psychosis at lightning speed. Social movements, lockdowns, mandates, ‘wokism’, cancel culture all have a hand in spreading fear among those vulnerable to this psychosis.
Conditions must exist for mass formation psychosis to occur in the population or society. There needs to be divisiveness and confusion in the masses as well as lots of anxiety/fear and passive aggression against anyone who does follow or agree. The psychosis addicts us to rage and lies and neither rage nor a lie knows no doubt.
When people are inundated with a non-stop narrative and/or agenda that is seemingly reasonable and fixated on the object of anxiety and a solution, meaning a strategy of coping with it, then large masses of people group together to battle the object of anxiety with a collective singlemindedness and doubt is not allowed into the discourse. The ‘group think’ perception is everyone MUST participate and ‘buy into’ the solution for the agenda to succeed, and only the solution will bring back any normalcy experienced prior to what brought on the psychosis in the first place.
Oppose the solution and you must be suppressed and censored. Freedom and independence get lost in the process when enough people ‘buy into’ the official, group narrative but only a committed minority is necessary and will suffice to force the masses to succumb to the psychosis.
This psychosis may focus its attention on any one or several people or things like a leader(s), a political party, a series of events, an issue, and/or all those trusted influencers of the ‘credentialed ideocracy’ espousing the current prevailing attitude (zeitgeist), and the masses will follow the narrative put forth by who and/or what the population trusts regardless of any new contradicting information that comes to light…put simply until they decide not to follow and trust.
Today, this psychosis may include “crazy investor behavior” indicative of a late-stage stock market bubble, for example, the attraction of investors to ‘meme’ stocks, a buying frenzy in questionable electric-vehicle names including nonsensical cryptocurrencies like ‘dogecoin’ and any number of the hundred other suspect crypto-names, as well as multimillion-dollar prices being paid for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and so on. Wall Street titan, Jeremy Grantham says, “With the oncoming worldwide financial ‘crash’ post 2021, we face the largest potential markdown of perceived wealth in U.S. history.”
Grantham pins the blame for bubbles of the past 25 years mostly on bad U.S. monetary policy. Ever since Alan Greenspan was ‘Fed’ (Federal Reserve Bank) chairman, Grantham argues, the U.S. central bank has “aided and abetted” the formation of successive bubbles by first making money too cheap for too long keeping interest rates at near zero; and then rushing to bail out markets by printing more and more U.S. dollars when the U.S. stock market ‘flinches’ and significantly corrects to the downside.
Subsequently, investors may no longer be able to count on the implied ‘Fed put’ (Federal Reserve Bank bailout) because inflation is running at its highest, fastest clip in the past forty years which “limits” the Fed’s ability to stimulate the economy by printing more dollars, and/or cutting interest rates, or buying back U.S. debt/assets with those newly printed dollars, Grantham said, which will risk even higher inflation and de-valuing the U.S. dollar even more.
Grantham says most all stockbrokers and brokerage houses always tell investors to “buy the dips” when stock market prices go down, but this is how ‘brokers’ continue making money and stay in business meaning you will never hear them say, “Game over, go to cash and stay on sidelines.”
Grantham explains that “the time” to consider buying back into the U.S. stock market will be when #1 the S&P goes down to around 2500 and there is “panic in the street”. At that time only buy into companies with #2 good cash flow with prices for products and services that can be raised higher and higher as need be on things that people basically still must buy despite recessionary, depression, or market crash-like times. And until the supply chain problems subside you may even only want to invest in companies that provide not products but services since services are not as susceptible to manufacturing, commodity and raw materials price hikes.
“The time” to buy back into the stock market also includes buying only companies that #3 have tons of cash and #4 have no debt. All 4 of these parameters must be met to ‘buy and hold’ their stock going forward after the ‘crash’. You will be basically buying beaten down, ‘best of breed’ companies that sell products and services we are addicted to, for example, cell phones, cyber security, rare earth mineral sources, fertile farmland, chocolate, beer, marijuana and tobacco to name a few, as well as invest some in bars of gold and silver, not coins.
China is buying up fertile farmland worldwide and now owns millions of acres, to date, even owning 150,000 acres in the USA and there is no U.S. law stopping them from buying even more. However, no one outside China is ever allowed to buy up any land in China. Capitalists are obsessed with making a profit in the here and now, too often without much regard for consequences later while the China’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is obsessed not with making profit but with world domination.
Furthermore, most all the world’s yet to be mined lithium for making batteries for transportation, including the military, is found in China and Afghanistan to date. Cornering the market on commodities is all part of China’s Belt and Road Project. Since China controls 80% of the world’s lithium this is a national emergency since all U.S. military vehicles, weapons and aircraft are dependent on lithium. Moreover, every electric vehicle, wind turbine and solar bank also depends on lithium.
And then there are cryptocurrencies that China cannot control. We are on the cusp between entrepreneurial ownership of cryptocurrencies and institutional adoption and government regulation of cryptocurrencies which will finally make ‘crypto’ legit and alright to trust and own. Cryptocurrency is the only common property that lives in cyberspace, which is like owning gold or land, but gold and land are not easily obtained and/or safely held without the risk of having it stolen by thugs or confiscated by corrupt governments.
Most people on the planet do not have access to or can afford the U.S. stock market but most all people want to own property. Very few people in the world do not want to own property. Property has value and, compared to currencies like the U.S. dollar that continues getting de-valued, generally property maintains value compared to currencies worldwide like the U.S. dollar, which today is losing more of its real value faster than ever before. Is the U.S. dollar going the way of the Mexican peso and Turkish lira currencies which are on their way to becoming almost worthless like so many other countries’ currencies worldwide?
Larry Summers, economist, President of Harvard University and former Secretary of Treasury under President Clinton said, “The desire to maintain ‘credibility’ when you have made a big mistake is the source of some of the biggest disasters in U.S. history,” like the Vietnam War during the 1960s and ‘70s. However, mistakes are rarely admitted to by the ruling parties through their use ‘plausible deniability’. Instead, history will record the mistakes but by then it is too late. Summers goes on to say, what is most important is that American political, military and monetary policy MUST have ‘credibility based on competence’ and not simply based on ‘maintaining credibility’. And the ensuing decisions must have the ability to predict, diagnose and respond to changing events. Are policymakers competent or more so just ‘tongue-waggers’ trying to save face?
Summers said the worldwide financial collapse in 2008, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank (Fed), which controls U.S. monetary policy, responded by printing billions of U.S. dollars to fill the coffers of bankrupt U.S. banks. At that time the Fed admitted it had no idea what would happen after this, meaning the monetary policy worldwide would be in uncharted, unprecedented economic times.
Then before the Fed could figure out the worldwide economic ramifications of the worldwide financial collapse of 2008, the Fed then found itself faced with the pandemic of 2020 and printing 10 trillion dollars for government ‘handouts’ in the U.S. equal to 50% of America’s gross national product (GNP) of 20 trillion dollars. This caused massive inflation, followed by an even newer problem, record labor shortages in 2021 raising wages to all-time highs, all creating an annual inflation rate the highest in forty years. Follow this with the Ukraine-Russia War sanctions on Russian oil and disruption of 30% of the world’s wheat exports from Russia and Ukraine. All or some combination of what is noted above could have ‘crashed’ the U.S. stock market in the past.
Summers said none of us know what the future holds. This includes our U.S. monetary policymakers who rule the world’s financial ‘ups and downs’ affecting especially what happens to middle and lower classes of U.S. taxpayers and the poor. So, statements of self-righteous ‘confidence’ made by public officials like, “Don’t worry inflation is transitory”, or “We will ‘act’ to beat back inflation”, but they are never asked to speak ‘in detail’ exactly how these ‘objectives will be reached and when’. Too often grandiose statements with too little detail made by public officials with little or no substance turn out later to be embarrassing to public officials and a potential disaster. Monetary policy is about balancing risks, predicting and diagnosing monetary problems then responding with competent policy…not simply maintaining the image or perception of credibility of its policymakers.
Mass formation psychosis truly does have a way of hypnotizing the masses to, as the ‘code of the street’ says, “Don’t buck (resist) the jack (hijacking)”. Resist and you get shot, and possibly killed, for disrespecting the hijacker so get on your knees and submit to the psychosis.
SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCES: THE BOOK: THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM BY DR. MATTIAS DESMET and THE BOOK: AND THEY WILL RIOT IN THE STREETS, A NATION DECEIVED, A NATION ENSLAVED BY KENNETH E. LONG