Adjusting to the Real, Continued
It turned out pretty much just like Thomas Jefferson predicted it would
Nearly all of the commentary I receive about what I write has been provided in private emails sent to my Substack email address, rather than being displayed in the comments section attached to each post. I guess some people are just reticent about publicly expressing themselves.
I got this appreciated private comment about the last Taleb/Desmet/Logan post this morning:
Good read Larry. Thanks. We seem to now be living in - - Uganda? What happened? Who put these people in power? Is this the America that Barack planned it to be or did he mess up a bit? Can our kids take it back, or should we accept it for good?
I responded:
Myself, I think this is all a product of continued penetration of urbanization and financialization. Not much reason to calibrate yourself to the real world in very many ways when all you need to do is get employment, burn fossil fuels to avoid having to do any real physical or mental work, and otherwise just sit on your ass waiting around for the next food pellet to roll down the chute.
Thomas Jefferson called it back in his days when he wanted the US to remain primarily rural, minimize urbanization, and skip the idea of establishing a centralized banking system. His observation [his chief organizing belief] was that cities were the source of all social and cultural disorder.
All in all, it sounds like the modern insular, interventionista-producing, largely urbanized life is just like ‘living’ in the uterine pods shown in The Matrix (or a chicken battery), doesn’t it? I suspect things won’t broadly reverse towards the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal until economic limiting factors (i.e., “market forces”) nudge us in that direction. There is, nevertheless, some early evidence that this reversal is starting to occur despite continuing cultural maladjustment to the real.