I vowed not to write another damning article about ESG. But I changed my mind after I was in NYC this and last week, again confronted with a dumb stampede towards sustainable investment strategies.
Futile Defense
During those meetings, I explained to ESG proponents and Chief Investment Officers how sustainability is nonexistent anywhere in our universe, and I was again given the excuse the difference between sustainability and renewal may just be a matter of semantics – an excuse I hasten to swat like a fly.
The supposition of sustainability is as feeble as trying to explain to a traffic-court judge it is okay to drive through a red light because you drove at the speed of light, at which point red will turn green (courtesy of the wavelength of light).
I suggest you do not attempt to defend that case in court, not in the least because of the excessive speed. By nature’s law, any interpretation of absolutism, including an assignment of color, is only valuable as a reference of inter-human understanding when its definition is equally understood.
A-La-Carte Make Belief
So, dragging the semantics of sustainability to the edge of unsustainable, because the definition is simply indefensible and nonexistent in our universe, yields the terminus of the term by any reasonable judgment.
The defense uttered above is commonplace to purveyors of any manmade make-believe, however. When a theology, for example, runs out of viable options to defend its history and dogmas, the same evasive stance is deployed, with its believers hanging on to a diminishing a-la-carte selection of said theology.
To proclaim sustainability is not a declaration of absolutism is like proclaiming Islam to be a religion of peace. You cannot have it both ways and expect anyone but a greater-fool to fall for such idiocracy.
Nails In The Coffin
- Sustainability infers infinite existence, while nothing in our universe exists forever. Instead, everything in nature revolves around the strength of individual renewal contributing to the elongated, yet finite, existence of a species. Hence, the presumption of sustainability is the inverse of the reality of renewal and thus, incompatible with nature.
- Sustainability also assumes absolutism of merit, deployed by a frozen theory that determines what can be discovered. Reality is, the assets to which an investment thesis applies, constantly evolve by the laws of nature, forcing the investment thesis to adjust to what can be discovered continually. An investment thesis of sustainability is incompatible with the moving target of assets to which it applies.
- Sustainability coagulates around the best-practices of commonalities while the renewal of anything in nature evolves courtesy of the value of, often minute, differences. The reason why despite the fact we are all humans, we look, act, and perform differently. Hence, sustainability artificially limits meaningful diversity.
- Sustainability narrows the standard deviation of merit by regurgitating the index of self, yielding regression, while renewal breeds outliers capable of continually expanding the fractal of ingenuity, yielding progression.
- Sustainability colludes around an oligarchy of popular and socially accepted opinions conjured up by humanity resistant to relinquish once-established control, while renewal relies on a dynamic equilibrium defined by nature’s meritocracy constantly reassigning merit. Sustainability is a stale manmade confabulation while renewal relies on constantly evolving adaptations to nature’s rule, with nature as the ultimate arbiter of value.
- Sustainability relies on the extrapolation of hindsight to optimize access to an existing, yet steadily commoditizing, addressable market. Renewal relies on the continual adaptation to nature to develop new foresight to seed newly discovered addressable markets.
- Sustainability relies on agreed-upon monisms of best practices as the thesis that determines what can be discovered, while renewal depends upon the plurality of dynamic capabilities and freedoms innate to nature’s relativity to modulate the thesis to the nature of assets. Hence sustainability is fundamentally unable to trace the evolution of its assets while renewal continually adapts to the evolving nature of assets.
- Sustainability deploys a theory of absolutism while everything in nature revolves around relativity. Sustainability is, therefore, an unacceptable and incompatible theory determining what humanity can discover, falling many dimensions short of expanding the fractal of human ingenuity.
Entropy
Only renewal as the evolutionary cause can promote a mere proxy of sustainability as its consequence, in that order only, as predicated by the asymmetrical process of entropy. The natural phenomenon of entropy dictates no supposition of sustainability can be retrofitted to meet the needs of evolutionary enforced renewal. Moreover, the rules to strengthen renewal are fundamentally different from the fabrications of ill-conceived sustainability.
Confounding consequence and cause, as in confounding sustainability with renewal, leads, in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, to grave depravity of reason. The depravity that exemplifies how financiers are overwhelmingly misinformed about the nature and thus risks of their investible assets.
Smarter Finance
Sustainability signals grave depravity of reason again unnecessarily tarnishing the evolutionary relevance and reputation of finance.
We must improve the evolutionary wherewithal of finance to produce the consistency of repeatable returns only the compliance with nature’s rule can guarantee, and for finance to finally improve the excellence of human adaptability with its arbitrage.
I suggest you attend one of my masterclasses when you too are stuck in the hopeless depravity of reason stemming from irreversible entropy.
