The easiest person to fool is yourself.
Richard Feynman
It is fascinating to watch how even the President of The United States still spreads a feeble message of hope as the newfound opioid of the people, without ever addressing the major foundational fallacies of the manmade constructs responsible for human efficacy. Worse, the rest of the world adopts our constructs as the creme de la creme without even thinking twice.
Grandeur
As the included slide indicates, the constructs we designed and collective employ to improve human excellence do quite the opposite. They move the vector of human ingenuity in a direction fundamentally incompatible with how nature evolves. Granting artificial dominance of one person over the other, thereby spawning unnecessary interhuman strife that distracts from our collective quest for survival.
I am adamant about my observations, not because I hate The United States of America, but because the world looks to us for answers. Honoring that reputation requires us to reinvent ourselves, and to inspire the world with newfound excellence we first and successfully apply to ourselves.
So, let’s break down what is wrong with the constructs we have devised and rely on to manage and promote human excellence.
The U.S. Constitution
First, any scripture 233-years old that has evolved only downstream is by definition a relic of its time. As Thomas Jefferson declared, “you cannot expect a man to wear a boy’s jacket, urging the constitution to be completely rewritten every 30-years. We never have.
Our constitution fails systemically because it does not define a theory embedded in a system to describe how and what people must adhere to achieve our collective objectives. Freedom and rights alone do not embody the paradoxical rules needed to manage freedom for all. Hence, the presumption that conformance to our constitution improves human excellence is at best a feeble hope.
The constitution does not adhere to nature’s law, a big mistake since nature’s law defines the regenerative excellence of all species, including humans.
Simply put, the constitution is a bad plan, serving the needs of the legislature out of touch with reality. Its gaping holes and omissions are so large we can easily improve how we operate without constitutional change.
Freedom
Freedom is the hallmark of American society, an attraction that led me to this country to begin with. Little did I know then that I would have to redefine American freedom if I wanted to live amongst it.
Freedom, referred to as liberty in the constitution, is liberally dished out as an inalienable right. A big mistake, since freedom cannot exist without rules; freedom’s paradox. The trust in collective freedom cannot be tarnished by the vile maxim of individual freedoms, as nobody is free unless everyone is free. Hence freedom as an inalienable right must include equally inalienable obligations to protect freedom for all.
Furthermore, freedom is useless when it is not subjugated to a theory to improve human excellence and longevity. Even when curtailed by paradoxical rules, freedom without an evolutionary compass yields a vector of expansion fundamentally incompatible with nature. Freedom must promote human adaptability to nature’s entropy, or else freedom yields the opposite.
Our poor definition and laissez-faire implementation of freedom put humanity on a vector of expansion diverging further from nature’s compass. For the first time, freedom must be subjugated to the evolutionary objectives of nature and be curtailed by rules that promote the expansion of humanity in line with nature.
Democracy
A democracy relies on the notion that the coagulating wants of humanity yield the excellence of human needs.
As a responsible parent, you know that assumption to be a solipsistic fallacy. A child’s desire to eat ice cream every day is a want all children may agree with. Yet, such addictive caloric intake will not benefit a child’s evolutionary needs. The same applies to grownups. The desperate want to acquire as much money as possible leaves seventy percent of American’s dependent on prescription drugs, mostly antidepressants, unable to serve their evolutionary needs independently, and consequently, passes those regressive genes to the next generation.
Nature does not function by democracy. Therefore, if we want to abide by nature’s gameplay to prolong the survival of the human species, we must establish an evolutionary meritocracy instead.
Economics
Economics, as a study of hindsight, will not extrapolate to foresight that breaks the norm. Hence, the reliance on economics yields, by definition, infinite regression.
The easiest way to disclaim the mantra of economics is to evaluate the meaning of GDP considered one of the most important economics metrics on a global scale. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a consequence of human performance, not the cause. In the same way, the final score of a soccer game is a consequence of gameplay, not the cause.
Now, imagine me trying to infer what soccer gameplay must have looked like from knowing the final score. I cannot. Then imagine me proclaiming another game ending in the same score must have come from identical gameplay. That, my friends, is the confounding of cause and consequence impregnating grave depravity of reason in economics.
The predictability of an economy is determined by the theory embedded in the system of gameplay you deploy, not by measuring the performance of consequential convulsions from a lack thereof.
Sustainability
Sustainability does not exist anywhere in the universe. In fact, nature’s entropy, described as the reduction of available energy by Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman stipulates nothing is stasis and instead requires humanity to do more with less as time goes by.
Sustainability is an evolutionary oxymoron to which new asset allocation and investment programs, like ESG, cling to give its much-needed reinvention new cachet and new indices of self to regurgitate. A dangerous and damaging predicament considering the expansion of human ingenuity is now directly tied to an evolutionary philosophy incompatible with nature.
What could possibly go wrong when the arbitrage of innovation -finance- violates nature’s principles? The right strategy would be to deploy a renewable investment thesis with completely different first principles directly tied to nature’s evolutionary principles and values.
A System
“Everyone names everything wrong,” is a quote from Richard Feynman I borrow to explain the frivolous use of the word “system” for everything under the sun.
For example, a weather system is not a system; it is a weather pattern—a consequence of cloud formation, no indication of causation. The reference to systems that are not, hides the grave depravity of reason emanating from the confounding of consequence and cause (Nietzsche) that murks the water of expectations—a distinction much more important than a merely linguistic one.
You see, a system is the selection of input run through a theory to produce the desired output.
None of the constructs we have instituted today, such as capitalism, socialism, communism, or democracy, can be called a system. They would all require the defensible definition of the theory, the process of selecting input, and the description of the desired output. Call me when you get there.
Out of the thin-air implementation of “systems” you ought not to expect or debate desirable outcomes. Only when we establish a theory for humanity can we establish systems that produce the desired outcomes for humanity. I have one.
Markets
Markets are highly temporal inanimate consequences from animate interaction in a marketplace as their cause.
Markets are a consequence, not the cause of human behavior. This confounding of cause and consequence again traps humanity in grave depravity of reason, especially when monumental decisions are tied to the inanimate consequence rather than animate causal behavior. Markets, in stock-market vernacular, do not behave or fluctuate; people do. Cause over consequence.
The reliance on the movement of markets is as idiotic as the reliance on GDP explained in the section of economics above. We should create marketplace systems, using the appropriate definition of a system described above, to produce the predictability of outcome we wish to see.
Capitalism
Capitalism is nothing more than the collective exchange of money for products or services rendered. Capitalism is not a system from which any expectation can be inferred. It fails the description of a defensible theory and the identification of input to yield the desired output, as described above of what a system should entail.
Capitalism today is merely a way of allocating and distributing money, bound by rules and regulation, that does not infer a human theory to warrant or direct such distribution. Hence, we ought not to expect conformance to a human theory we have not embedded in capitalism. Do not act surprised when the outcome of capitalism is what humanity wants rather than needs.
Again, the absence of a human theory to which capitalism should be normalized wreaks major havoc for humanity. To the tune of eleven times the size of production (in the U.S.), finance distorts and limits the renewal and expansion of human capacity in line with nature’s rule. We must redefine the role, priority, and goal of capitalism to serve humanity.
Socialism
Socialism, like capitalism, is a symptom, not a system. Again, a consequence, not a cause. And hence, no expectation of outcome can be inferred from capitalism or socialism.
Socialism, defined as groupthink, is omnipresent in capitalism, where asset managers cling to socially accepted standards of asset allocation strategies and investments based on the regurgitation of, say, the S&P 500, the socialist index of self. Vice-versa, in a country deemed socialistic, the role of capital is crucial in maintaining order.
And do not kid yourself. Healthcare is not free under socialism. The cost is the same under capitalism because the collective care burden of its people (roughly) is. Socialistic societies merely ask more for health insurance upfront by taking more out of people’s paychecks. Capitalistic societies depend more on the acute risk and payout borne by an elective health insurance program, fraught with sneaky exemptions.
Again, suggesting socialism is better than capitalism or vice versa is moot, for neither are systems from which an expected outcome can be inferred.
Healthcare
Healthcare is no longer about health nor care.
The strength and resistance to pathogens define the health of a human being (or any other species). But, unfortunately, with seventy percent of Americans chronically dependent on prescription drugs, many antidepressants, the needs of the evolutionary walking-dead has spawned a gigantic vending machine of medicine instead.
The delivery of care is a beast of burden, a cost center, to the health insurance companies. The less attention they provide, the more profit they make.
That approach has evolved to make insurance companies the arbiters of the care a patient receives, not the doctor. The payout to doctors, often below 50% of billings, makes doctors recommend treatment that is not most effective but allows them to pay for their time.
The plot thickens how primary care physicians are now being made responsible for the effectiveness of the drugs they prescribe to their patients, a responsibility that exposes doctors unjustly to the lofty promises made by pharmaceutical companies and the inherent lack of absolutism in the understanding of the human body.
Care suffers greatly as doctors become more and more enslaved by health insurance companies and less driven by morals and merit to do the right thing for patients. Again, the absence of a human theory has created practices that consistently damage the evolutionary excellence of humanity.
Crypto
Crypto is like a religion, not becoming more true because you can find more believers.
Unsurprisingly, in a country where fake wrestling is enormously popular, a giant pool of believers in anything exists. Thus, investing in crypto makes sense as long as the supply of those greater-fool believers is not depleted.
Currencies are a consequence, not the cause of human performance. For human performance delivered through products or services rendered, instill trust in the “I owe you” that pays for them. Crypto lacks the exchange of any kind of production, and thus lacks intrinsic value capable of improving humanity.
To suggest crypto changes our economics for the better is, again, an ill-formed inference from consequence to cause. A currency is a consequence, not the cause of human ingenuity and performance. Grave depravity of reason is the malaise at the foundation of the faith in a currency that does not comport with or spawn human excellence. Kill it before it kills us.
Asset Management
Most people believe the decisions made by the government influence the compass for humanity the most. They are wrong. The asset allocation and investment thesis of the asset management practice does.
By the theory that determines what can be discovered, according to Albert Einstein, global institutional investors in actuality decide how the fractal of human ingenuity and capacity expands, accelerated by immense capital.
And yet, I came to find out asset management allocators, sometimes referred to as expert risk managers, understand very little about the actual risk they deploy as part of their distribution strategy. Ten levels of bottom-heavy diversified embedded risk before a single dollar is spent comprises the standard operating procedure by which asset managers expect consistent investment returns.
Moreover, the default, highly socialized, stacked, and interdependent investment allocation strategy regurgitates hindsight with the infinite regression of an index of self to narrow the investment thesis and, therefore, diminishes humanity’s fractal expansion. Therefore, I devoted and narrated a video on the subject.
Again, without an overarching theory for humanity, finance only accelerates the diverging compass of humanity vis-a-vis nature.
Venture Capital
Having worked in venture capital in Silicon Valley, I discovered firsthand how the failure of many innovations is related to the misplaced theory of venture capital that holds innovation hostage. As a result, I coined the term subprime venture capital to describe how, again in the words of Einstein, the theory (of venture capital) determines what can be discovered.
As I predicted some fifteen years ago, the unchecked rush for anything called innovation moves power from government institutions to technology companies. It opens the unprotected doors to nation-state sovereignty.
Few people were listening to me then, but the chickens of the right to sovereignty have come back to roost. Suddenly, technology companies are getting sued left and right to combat their overt constitutional overreach. Who cares, say a few venture capitalists who escaped the wrath of subpriming, pumped and dumped their private shares, and made a killer return to make them look like humanitarian geniuses.
And yet, tell me, which technology innovation today accelerates the expansion of human ingenuity and capacity to adapt to nature’s entropy?
In summary
The constructs we in the United States have built promote and preserve our megalomaniac agenda to remain on the leaderboard we ourselves invented. But nature does not care. Therefore, the normalization of human truth must shift to our best proxy of nature’s truth, for humanity (and my daughter in it) to excel and live as long as humanly possible.
Precisely for the reasons above and many more engrained fallacies in society I can talk about, did I begin some eight years ago to invent a new theory and operating system for humanity. The specifics I am happy to discuss through my advisory.
If we continue to ignore the above, we, collectively, are doomed.
