Confounding of consequence and cause is the reason we build disheveled systems fundamentally incompatible with our ability to produce. It also deprives us of our most basic human right, universal freedom.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wisely wrote:
“There is no more dangerous error than confounding consequence with cause.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Very well put, as that error in judgment is omnipresent in societies dangerously contented with their status quo.
Cause is quite a bit harder to find than consequence, for one needs to stop looking for band-aids and traverse backward to a root-cause by repeatedly asking the question “why?”. A “why” that puts conventional thinkers in a very uncomfortable position. A position that will make them run out of answers.
The question “why?” is vital to reinventing our future. A bright future requires constantly reevaluating the truth in pursuit of its most accurate proxy. A disastrous policy is the outcome of the disheveled systems we build, in blissful ignorance of the pursuit of truth lodged in cause, stuck instead in the spiraling perpetuity of endless consequence.
The perpetuity of consequences
I wrote about occurrences of that phenomenon in “We fail because we lie”, “The difference between derivative and value”, “The Bitcoin before the Horse”, “The Boulevard of Broken Ideologies“, “A Fantasy World Running Out of Character” and in many other articles describing the fallacies of our financial and economic policy.
As I explain in my version of the evolution of evolution as the perpetual mediocrity of downstream consequences, a world driven by short-term focus is naturally inclined to face the problems described by the supposed experts at face value. And then, find and implement band-aid solutions, and move on with life.
That process leads to the inevitable regression of the evolution of mankind, deepening government interference with the inner workings of the private sector, and more distance and less clarity to the originating cause.
Let me give a few examples:
Freedom
We build elaborate policies to chase the many undesired consequences of unbridled freedom. For the simple reason, we never defined what stipulates universal freedom, the cause.
Monetary policy
We devise new fiscal policies for every apparent and embarrassing monetary infraction that has occurred. Without having spent any serious time on the systemic fading of the trust in money, the cause.
Venture Capital
We deploy many new and popular distributions of subprime risk as to the arbitrage of innovation. Without realizing the erosion of prime risk is what kills the exploration of groundbreaking innovation, the cause.
Consequence without a cause
For generations, we have not addressed the root-cause associated with our failed policies, tucked comfortably under the hood of oligarchic supremacy.
We may still be considered the world’s most powerful nation, with a hydrocephalus of finance eleven times the size of production keeps us at the leaderboard of nebulous Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and with the largest army in the world, many countries in the world bowing down to us.
Be forewarned:
No society has ever thrived because it had a large growing class of parasites living off of those who produce. – Thomas Sowell
All while we comfortably ignore the staggering poverty and loss of regenerative learning ability associated with 25% of our children (in the U.S.) uncertain where their next meal is going to come from. The reason why we now need more flexible immigration policies for we have neglected how to raise and inspire our children, and we must now skim resources from the top of other countries to keep “growth” rates going.
Keep calm and finish your masters
Our education system adds to this confounding of consequence and cause. Absurdity does not quite describe spending $60K per student per year for what one adjunct professor, after some deep-dive probing, admitted to me “to teach them what is prevalent today and prepare a bed for our children to lay in.”
We teach our children fundamentally flawed fundamentals at an expense far outweighing its $250K 4-year Ivy League tuition. The economics we teach them is voodoo science. Finance, void of sound principles to secure a meritocracy, perpetuates a tundra of commoditized production. Students in business school are taught a term sheet (investment terms) constitutes a business. A parasitic focus that steers their attention away from developing a knack in the discovery of outlier production.
We all have been drinking the Kool-Aid of mediocrity for quite a few generations now, supported by an education system that thrives on keeping those self-serving dreams alive. Finish your masters, and your future will be secured, is what these kids are made to believe.
Admittedly higher education will still open doors, but as one Harvard alumnus once cleverly explained, “doors I never wanted to have opened.”
The experts of depravity
We put the experts of the continuity of undesired consequences on a pedestal, or we vilify them by rejecting ulterior perpetuities we are predisposed to.
No “expert” who, amidst severe economic malaise, fails to ascend to the root-cause should be taken seriously, regardless of his stance on consequences. The expert who revels in consequence, is, in the context of evolution, merely a rebel without a cause.
We breed people who operate in and are handsomely rewarded by the spiraling sub-optimization of change. Some are modern-day “bank robbers” who take advantage of the increasingly opaque complexity of consequential policies. Others serve up yet another ingenious refinement of complexity. They are feeding each other in endless perpetuity.
Our policies become farther and farther removed from their original cause until the cumulative effect of the causal inefficiency can no longer be averted, and both purveyors are bound to be tagged as accomplices of its declining status quo.
Ignore the regime
As a child, I learned early on how to ignore traditional conventions lacking sound reasoning. That experience formed my entrepreneurial attitude to have a healthy disdain for an unchecked “religion” of the past, combined with a ferocious appetite for a more egalitarian future. I know what it means to be repressed – I was – and fought my way out of it.
Real change has no precedent, so stop looking for answers from the regime. Any process of fundamental change does not need nor require, consent from the purveyors of incalculable consequences from our unchecked past. It requires only permission from those negatively impacted by the failed policies of the past, looking for a better future.
New economics, by which we deploy a more egalitarian system, also does not require the consent of economists stuck in the mathematical and statistical reasoning of our malformed and bloated past. It requires only the permission of the people unjustly corralled by their failed policies.
The vast majority of us.
Don’t blame the depraved
Many people born into a system wait for approval and consent from precisely the people who are assigned merit by a system that confounds consequence with cause. The improper merit, for it is steeped in a maelstrom of consequence. And the people who submit to their judgment become just like their hostage-takers, the depraved.
A political system that elects our leaders cannot govern a meritocracy when its electoral process putting them in office violates the most rudimentary principles of a meritocracy. Their judgment will, by definition, not be in correlation with the will or needs of the people. Hence the stature and relevance of today’s politicians ought to be reduced by their ignorance of the principles that stipulate a meritocracy.
Despite some having valid arguments for change at times, I seldom side with activists. For we cannot blame the oligarchs for deploying the powers we have implicitly given them. Activists confound the consequence with the cause of that assignment of power with their well-meaning yet nonetheless life-less accusations.
One cannot blame our President for the failed economic policies he inherited – and under a stifling political system, subsequently can only regurgitate. The President himself is a product of a broken political system that assigns extraordinary value to those who are rewarded by and revel in consequence rather than cause.
Consequence gets Presidents elected. Cause awards a President meaningful recognition in the history books of evolution.
Perpetual iterations of consequence are the reason why partisan political preference has a diminishing effect on the policies shaping our nation. The choice of President is not as relevant as the political system wants you to believe. Nor will their performance, steeped in consequence, yield a significant agent of change.
The future
Our outlook remains grim, despite flip-flopping statistics suggesting the quality of a game of basketball can be assessed by the number of baskets scored. No extrapolation of hindsight will yield reliable foresight toward a better future. Statistics are a measure of consequence, not a matter of cause.
But do not fret. The reinvention of economics will go down as my life’s work. I expect a lot of resistance from those who are cramped by consequence. Such is the resistance I have coped with all my life (don’t be sorry, I am happier for it).
Not unlike getting no analyst support and, thus, no investor support in the early stages of my first startup (the one that returned over $100M). We focused on getting customers negatively affected by not having their sizeable identifiable problem solved. Just what I intend to focus on with the new economics I invented to ignore the “experts” of depravity and speak directly to those in need of a better future.
Soon described in my first book and available to anyone, I expect its readers to carry their weight in enthusiasm and begin to demand the new standards of governance I will have laid out, and they so rightfully deserve. I will continue to carry the torch of fundamental economic change “as the most tenacious person I have ever met” (quote by Oracle SVP) for the sake of a more robust evolution of ourselves.
Economic innovation will come from demonstrating new ways to build a more egalitarian world for all of us systematically. Causal change erases the need for spiraling consequences and puts an end to the depravity of reason, thus bringing an end to the depravity of our freedoms.
