By Charles Hugh Smith
November 11, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- While the
much-touted differences between America's
political parties get obsessive, hysterical
attention, the sameness of Imperial corruption,
waste and squalor regardless of who's in power
gets little notice. Scrape away the
differences--mostly in domestic issues--and we
see the dead hand of Imperial Corruption is on
the tiller.
The core of Imperial Corruption is the
disconnect between the nation's ideals of
representational democracy and open markets and
the sordid reality: elites serve their
interests by corrupting both democracy and open
markets.
Unfettered democracy and markets cannot be
controlled by a tiny, self-serving elite.
Stripped of corruption, democracy and markets
are free-for-alls that are constantly evolving,
as highly adaptive islands of coherence
coalesce that influence the quasi-chaos,
competing with other islands of coherence
but never gaining dominance due to the
open-ended dynamism of collaboration-competition
that is the beating heart of both democracy and
open markets.
The only way to control democracy and markets
to serve the interests of the few at the expense
of the many is to corrupt them completely by
destroying the dynamism of
collaboration-competition. Democracy is
replaced by an auction of political power to
the highest bidder that rewards cronies and
devotes all its resources not to solving the
nation's problems but to whipping up
conflagrations of divisiveness and partisan
hysteria that wash away the middle ground where
problems can actually be addressed.
This crippling of the nation's ability to
actually solve difficult problems serves the
interests of self-serving elites whose sole
interest is accumulating personal wealth and
power. Their proclaimed interest in solving the
nations' real-world problems are fraudulent
tissues designed to hide the putrid reality that
all their so-called "solutions" distill down to
sluicing huge sums of state money to cronies and
campaign contributors under the guise of
"solving problems."
The only "problem" America's elites know how
to solve is the "problem" of how to get
personally richer while tightening their control
of the nation-state's vast flood of (taxed /
borrowed) money. Cronies and contributors
get tax breaks hidden in 1,000-page legislation
and overflowing rivers of money (here's looking
at you, Big Pharma, Big Defense, Higher
Education, Sickcare, et al.).
America's elites are masters at misdirection
and distraction: it's always the other side's
fault that the nation is sliding down the wrong
side of the S-Curve. The elites don't really
care which side is in power, as they control
them both to serve their own interests.
But something funny happens on the way to
gaining control of complex emerging systems:
that control destroys the system's
self-correcting mechanisms and adaptability.
Rigging the system to serve one's own interests
destroys the system's ability to adapt to
changing circumstances and selective
pressures/
Once a system has been crippled to serve the
interest of an elite, when forced to adapt or
die, it can only die as its mechanisms of
adaptation were destroyed by the power-grab of
eleites. An economy dominated by a handful
of cartels and quasi-monopolies is an economy
that is doomed to slide into the dustbin of
history, as cartels and monopolies "win" by
crushing competition and competing islands of
coherence, as competition threatens their
profits and control of markets and governance,
a.k.a. "democracy."
Any system that serves the interests of the
few by choking off adaptability and the
dynamisms of a free-for-all churn lacks the
tools needed to avoid systemic collapse. By
enabling elites to organize the nation to serve
their personal interests, America has been
stripped of the dynamics needed to adapt.
Without these dynamics, collapse is the only
possible outcome.
But in the meantime, enjoy the political
theatrics down on the sand-strewn floor of the
Coliseum. While Imperial Corruption
undermines what's left of the nation's ability
to adapt fast enough and successfully enough to
survive what lies ahead, we can cheer the
"winners" of the bloodsport and ignore the winds
of disorder sweeping the land.
Charles Hugh Smith is a
contributing editor to PeakProsperity.com and
the proprietor of the popular blog
OfTwoMinds.com. He is the author of numerous
books, including Why Everything Is Falling
Apart: An Unconventional Guide To Investing In
Troubled Times.
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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