I feel blessed to live in a country with some of the greatest minds in the world. The inventors of new products that have changed and inspired the world. A culture of innovation that under unprecedented levels of freedom has spawned outliers to think free and unabashed.
A culture that has given our country such a majestic start.
Pirates of freedom
That same unbridled freedom breeds many “pirates” with less holistic minds to take the downside of freedom for a glorious and selfish ride.
Finance, stuffed to the gills with endless diversification, and without direct alignment to marketplace merit is a man-made hoax. Not just to the tune of eleven times the size of production (the ratio of finance versus production, according to a presidential advisor), but also as the unquestionable arbitrage that yields the erosion of outliers with the propensity to reinvent our world anew.
Uncontrolled freedom (stuffed with a lack of merit) is as damaging as a football game without a referee. For it favors the immediate gratification of “brute force” deployed by players, who free from the enforcement of the rules of the game, turn their focus from collective ideals to the pursuit of their personal stardom, and end up playing a different “sport” altogether.
To believe however that the United States is full of con artists is a conspiracy theory that gives those who manage to convince greater-fools too much credit, and our greater-fools too little.
I would not assign a grandiose conspiracy theory to all of us who drive our cars beyond the speed limit, just because we can (at times). Rules are meant to be broken, but we cannot allow the rules that endanger our peers – or worse – our offspring unable to defend its future just yet, to be willfully ignored.
The systems we have invented and applied to control the rules of our collective household (i.e., economics) are seriously broken (and have been for a long time) and thus have invited and bred the wrong behavior of its participants.
Leaking systems
The systems we built to control and inspire the “American Dream” have also not evolved along with the unstoppable evolution of its participants.
In totality, our systems fail because:
- they favor the pursuit of personal freedom over collective freedom.
- we do not recognize that freedom is a relativity theory.
- they are decidedly not free (by any relative measure), and therefore limit the renewability of our evolution.
As a result of the defunct systems we seem resistant to reinvent, the easier life to live is not to produce something and be faced with harsh and immediate marketplace merit, but to cunningly take control of production’s arbitrage and ride the gravy train of endless diversification along with the remaining greater fools, only to jump off right before the train is about to hit the wall of public merit.
Instead of punishing that selfish and flighty behavior, that hurts our propensity to renew ourselves, we have glorified and financially rewarded Jack Sparrow’s antics in real life and now suffer its dire consequences.
We have bred too many Jack Sparrows (and pirates of pirates) who now rule our disjointed roost.
A man makes, a pirate takes
Today, our pirates outnumber men by at least a factor of eleven.
With this imbalance, good luck trying to figure out who is a pirate and who is not. Those who are not (and there are some in finance too) have a hard time distancing themselves from those who are. And many of those who are pirates, by how they have been raised, genetically deny they are. Or disguised as Jack Sparrow pretend to save the world from pirates by becoming a pirate of pirates. A hero of sorts, but a thief nonetheless.
This mess should be sufficient to send our government into a tailspin to reinvent our systems and rebalance those who make and take. And assess how to re-establish merit in finance and production that supports the evolution of humanity, and thus promotes the unique, innovative culture of the people of the United States.
Instead, our government keeps mindlessly filling the holes of the boats attacked by pirates with endless legislation and corrective measures that even employ pirates, hoping the pirates will someday magically disappear. Ignoring comfortably many in government, of course, are pirates too, who have built a formidable fortress that inhibits the same lack of merit as the outdated systems from which their politics were derived.
Our country is ruled by pirates who will never admit they are, so their “shopping spree” of dirty capitalism without meaningful contribution to the evolution of humanity can continue.
All, while we as greater-fools have forgotten the pirates are only there because we allow them.
Stand up and fight
The only war we need to fight – right now – is to protect the renewable evolution of humanity. An internal battle aimed to rid our systems from pirates who continue to ride the waves of the dysfunction we built.
To free ourselves. For real this time. To let outliers shine again and prevent our economies from turning further subprime.
If we do believe in our hearts we are and can remain, the leader of the free world, then we must show the world – by example – how we clean our own house from the fallacies of our portrayal of freedom first. We must show the world how we build systems that are robust and authentic, with our deeds of excellence as its undeniable witnesses. That is what leadership is all about.
I will lay out a system that systemically removes pirates and breeds renewable excellence and innovation that supports our renewable evolution. The heavy lifting is done, the path to reinventing ourselves is clear. I will finish up my (first) part soon, all you must do is spread the word. For the sake of your evolution.
Let’s make sure we win this war. And there will be much less need to impose our will onto others because they will want to follow in the footsteps of our inspiring reinvention.
