Rent-seeking & the “Never (Good) Enough” Social Contract We Live
“When the ideas of humanity are war and conquest,those tools become as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child of three.” Albert Einstein
In a world more legally tailored for corporate persons than real humans, have you ever wondered why adults at large behave like children battling over “I win, you lose”?
As you were growing up, was surviving/getting ahead at all costs somewhat drilled into you?
Are you aware that addicts us to co-building the first rules-based international monetary system agreed upon in 1944 as fiat currency has since weaponized our behavior, with both narcissism and learned helplessness a given?
Consider that to manufacture consent, you need an enemy. A target. With each other as the common enemy, don’t all of us unwittingly co-create the “hunter and prey” dynamics to fuel the system we depend on? Because economics is the science of scarcity, hasn’t scarcity turned insecure people into predators so they wilfully ignore anything outside of wanting to win for themselves?
To paraphrase Dr Bessell van der Kolk, when trauma occurs at an early age, the scars remain as it affects one’s development. The problems that arise are primarily related to attention, including:
a) having a hard time really focusing, concentrating, and filtering out irrelevant stuff
b) overreacting to new triggers. As emotions become too extreme, becoming addicted to reacting to try to calm down in any way possible
c) the two coping mechanisms of standing up for self and to bury insecurities—either becoming a dependent and compliant people pleaser, fearful of the potential hurt, or aggressive, arrogant and distant
(Fawning is a trauma response often developed in childhood where the abuser is a parent or a significant authority figure. To avoid abuse, children ignore their personal feelings and desires and do whatever is required to appease the abuser. Over time, individuals carry this pattern of behavior into adulthood and can be targeted by toxic people with a desire to control and manipulate).
Dr Craig Malkin, psychologist and author of Rethinking Narcissism, opines: “A personality disorder is a pervasive disturbance in a person’s ability to manage his or her emotions, hold onto a stable sense of self and identity, and maintain healthy relationships in work, friendship, and love. It’s a matter of rigidity.”
So, in a paradigm where you constantly feel under siege because you need money to survive, do you simplify complexity by adopting dualistic thinking which you then unconsciously compartmentalize and “clock” label based on your self-interests? Such programmed thinking bias does not require deep understanding. Rather than self-reflect, do you then blindly ape world leaders/celebrities/gurus and/or your peers, act mindlessly and foolishly, and often, end up hurting yourself and those around you? Just like children.
A paradigm is the social contract we live — based on how we perceive, interpret, and actualize our values in a vision of reality shaped by the “artificial intelligence” we inherit but rarely question. With survival/self-interests at stake, traditions, myths, rituals, religions, routines, policies, rules and the like tend to put you on auto-pilot mode.
But what is this power? Why is it so effective and why do we succumb to it so easily?
Isn’t it because rent-seeking is how our economy works?
Honed on self-interests, all of us live a “from cradle to grave” business plan following herd Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) mentality. To self-organize us, fiat currency has been the key systemic tool for allocating work, resources, risks and rewards particularly since Richard Nixon shocked the world by unpegging the US$ from gold.
From young, have you ignored your innate self to embrace how the economy is based on how well rich people are doing and how success is about winning at all costs? Since to win, someone has to lose, can you trust anyone? With trust systemically broken, hasn’t the conditioning to be the winner that takes everything divided us all?
To wit:
“A zero-sum activity in which one party’s gain is another’s loss, unlike new capital investment and hiring that expand an economy’s production and income stream. The classical meaning of ‘rent-seeking’ refers to landlords, natural resource owners or monopolists who extract economic rent by special privilege, without their own labor or enterprise.” Michael Hudson on rent-seeking
“The most fundamental lesson of our study [is that] ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” Stanley Milgram
“The characteristic way of management that we have (been) taught … is [to] take a complex system, divide it into parts & then try to manage each part as well as possible. And if that’s done, the system as a whole will behave well. That’s absolutely false, because it’s possible to improve the performance of each part taken separately and destroy the system at the same time.” Russell Ackoff
“Let’s set up a game of Monopoly and you want to buy Park Place. What I can continually do is just print money, give myself more money, lower the value of your money by printing more. No matter how hard-working you are or how successful you are, I can always end up buying you for free.” Catherine Austin Fitts on the fractional reserve scheme
“The greater fool is actually an economic term. It’s a patsy. For the rest of us to profit, we need a greater fool — someone who will buy long and sell short. Most people spend their life trying not to be the greater fool; we toss him the hot potato, we dive for his seat when the music stops. The greater fool is someone with the perfect blend of self-delusion and ego to think that he can succeed where others have failed. This whole country was made by greater fools.” Aaron Sorokin’s The Newsroom
But isn’t power what we each have in abundance yet our self-interests condition us to give that away to fiat currency just to live and to get ahead?
Let’s explore how this paradigm of control psychologically conditions you to not understand the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it and to be like a child. By perceiving that you are never (good) enough, have you unwittingly co-created a system of artificial scarcity out of fear and lack?
The world wars never really ended. Today, that’s just business-as-usual (BAU)
“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” Sun Tzu
If you ask business people to name a writer whose thinking is most clearly reflected in both military and corporate circles, the Drucker Institute’s Rick Wartzman believes the “odds are that you’ll hear the name Sun Tzu,” the ancient Chinese general believed to have penned The Art of War. Or “Peter Drucker.”
Or when you use words like groundwork, strategy, engagement, positioning, targets, intelligence, execute, feedback loops, delivery, escalate, cannibalize, campaigns, surveillance, logistics, lines of attack, hostile takeover, planning, phases, moving targets, reinforcement, advancement, modus operandi, standard operating procedure, etc. — they all have their origins in the military.
After World War II, military strategy materialized in the business world as strategic planning. It focuses you on setting objectives, collecting intelligence and then using that intelligence to make informed decisions about how to achieve objectives to out compete the competition.
With the military industrial complex influence normalized, you may not see how sports and games facilitate extensions of the warring “I win, you lose” mindset in a short-sighted artificial zero-sum game. Or how online or off, gamification is the art of adding play to engage and motivate people to do what you want them to do, competing for rewards.
Just like in war, toxicity and fakeness are the key hallmarks of BAU
“Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred — ergo, highly secure — lifelong position.” R. Buckminster Fuller
Your mind, body and soul is the new war frontier but conditioned to be self-protective and not to trust, the hardest part is realizing your “I win, you lose” role. Even if that stares you in the face, for example when you read books on getting ahead (e.g. Sun Tzu’s tome and Positioning, the Battle for Your Mind), attend meetings in “war rooms,” read/hear The 48 Laws of Power: “Conceal your intentions,” “Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit” and “Pose as a friend, work as a spy” or learn that globally, 87 percent of employees are not engaged.
As BAU has us perpetuating childish war-like behaviors to survive for ourselves:
“Everything is backwards, everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, major media destroys information, religions destroy spirituality and governments destroy freedom.” Michael Ellner
By focusing you on meeting deadlines with numbers, insecurities can super mold the habit of wanting to win at all costs — engaging you in constant battles of egos at home, school, office, online or anywhere you are. Especially in work situations.
With thoughts, lives and relationships commoditized, monetized and weaponized, you will also want what you do not have. The road to hell is paved with good intentions because the best of intentions keep getting hijacked by the way we perceive, think and act “I win, you lose.”
Isn’t this the psychology of co-dependence based on trauma?
Drilled over time
“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions — to define, classify, control, and regulate people.” Michel Foucault
Before the mid-nineteenth century, there were no systems of public education for farmers and live-in servants (then the world’s two largest population groups) but in 1910, Henry Ford created the factory-scale assembly line model, building on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s simplistic “scientific management theory” to try to increase the work rate and eventually, to reduce wages. That has always been at the core of management science.
By breaking the assembly of the Ford Model T into the simplest repeatable activities any unskilled immigrant could do, Ford removed the need to think and turned work into a rote task. The less human the workers and the more they resembled machines, the better Ford’s system worked.
Since then:
“Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines, ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized in two separate subjects. We still educate children by batches. we put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? It’s like the most important about them is their date of manufacture … you don’t start from this production line mentality. These are essentially about conformity. Increasingly, it’s about that as you look at the growth of standardized testing and standardized curricula and it’s about standardization.” Ken Robinson
Self-interests programmed on competition
Standardizing humans brings out our worst insecurities because it is not natural and that dehumanizes us.
“When we set children against one another in contests — from spelling bees to awards assemblies to science ‘fairs’ (that are really contests), from dodge ball to honor rolls to prizes for the best painting or the most books read — we teach them to confuse excellence with winning, as if the only way to do something well is to outdo others. We encourage them to measure their own value in terms of how many people they’ve beaten, which is not exactly a path to mental health. We invite them to see their peers not as potential friends or collaborators but as obstacles to their own success … Finally, we lead children to regard whatever they’re doing as a means to an end: The point isn’t to paint or read or design a science experiment, but to win. The act of painting, reading, or designing is thereby devalued in the child’s mind.” Alfie Kohn
“The whole idea [of ranking] is harmful in itself. It’s kind of a system of creating something called ‘economic man.’ There’s a concept of economic man, which is in economics literature. Economic man is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his own status (and status basically means wealth). So you rationally calculate what kinds of choices you should make to increase your wealth, and you don’t pay attention to anything else. Maximize the number of goods you have, cause that is what you can measure. If you do that properly, you are a rational person making informed judgments. You can improve your ‘human capital,’ what you can sell on the market.” Noam Chomsky
“When you set up highly competitive environments, you’re really encouraging people who are more ruthless. That’s where the narcissists are going to flourish, because they are willing to do more to get ahead than the average person would. We’ve set up a society that encourages the narcissist as opposed to one where that kind of behavior is discouraged.” Dr. David Ludden
Intoxicated by power, are not psychopathic money-chasing machines rewarded to blindly compete so corporate persons can legally keep having no greater god than growth?
In its 2020 Report to the Nations, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners announced that corruption retains its top spot for the most common occupational fraud scheme in most industries.
Our BAU way of life
“Machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.” Charlie Chaplin
Powered by our self-interests, the BAU paradigm does not allow you to easily step back to identify and address systemic root causes together. Instead, you are incentivized to self-organize and to get lost in solving “clock” problems, one problem at a time.
Over time, BAU enables corporate persons to have no greater god than growth. That direction remains intact so very few people have as much (or more) wealth as the rest of us, combined.
As early as in 1955, Victor Lebow had made this observation about consumption:
“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats, his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies. These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only ‘forced draft’ consumption, but ‘expensive’ consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption. The home power tools and the whole ‘do-it-yourself’ movement are excellent examples of ‘expensive’ consumption.”
With “I win, you lose” ingrained, the behavioral tendency is for you to do more of the same, do nothing or blame other people as that’s how the operating system (OS) molds our behaviors on self-interests:
“The people of your culture blame human nature for their troubles. It’s still true that you think of yourselves as belonging to a flawed, doomed race, but now we both have a better understanding of why you think of yourselves this way. It serves a purpose. It enables you to shift blame from yourselves to something that is beyond your control — human nature. You are blameless. The fault is in human nature itself, which you cannot change.” Daniel Quinn
Culturally reinforced, any new technology or invention is likely to build upon the paradigm you were born into — the social contract we live is legally more tailored for corporate persons than our well-being while egoistic money-chasing machines are prized over what it means to be human.
The latest BAU Gold Rush: Still rent-seeking
“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” Bertrand Russell
The internet is the biggest disruptor to life as we know it because we can cut out the middlemen and directly connect with one another. However, fueled by our self-interests, the paradigm of control does not permit that. Instead, evolved around an incredible nineteenth-century lie that “Corporations Are People,” seven of the world’s 10 largest companies by market capitalization are tech companies that deal primarily in data.
In 2017, The Economist declared the world’s most valuable commodity is no longer oil but data. As technocrats drive how data becomes the future of (no) money, remember the next time you buy a “smart” device, YOU are the product, not the device.
On June 21 2018, Bank of England’s Mark Carney proclaimed, “Data is the new oil” and called for “a new world order.” It’s possible Carney was articulating what’s been in the works for a very long time.
During the original Mac development days, Steve Jobs had set the startup world on fire when he said: “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.”
In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740, Mark Hanna cautions: “The history of piracy is actually trying to compel other people to do things.”
Once there is documentation to show that you agree, wouldn’t you be held accountable, legally?
Even though addicted to being online, to learned helplessness and to giving away our value, hardly anyone reads the Terms of Use for the platforms/devices they use. Or how, once the offerings gain traction, the terms are adjusted periodically to keep benefiting the corporate persons.
Is that how the original assembly line model Henry Ford got traction for, with corporations paying us a salary, is transitioning us from money to our data?
As we go from the world’s dumbest idea to the world’s most dangerous, Shoshana Zuboff has warned: “You are not the product, you are the abandoned carcass.”
To recap, the BAU revolutions:
The more things change, the more many will try to defend an OS that is no longer sustainable because normalized, you may not even realize it keeps extracting your most important essence.
Driven by the same Bretton Woods organizations that have us living the first rules-based international monetary system, the United Nations (UN) has been signaling since the second Earth Summit in 1992 that Agenda 21 (since evolved as Agenda 2030/Sustainable Development Goals) is a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”
Former Minister for the Environment of Denmark and Davos elite Ida Auken predicts this scenario by 2030 as the Sustainable Development Goals signal us to live a new social contract, albeit still based on our self-interests:
“I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes … One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.”
In June 2019, the UN quietly signed a memorandum with the World Economic Forum — the backbone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — to implement the Strategic Partnership Framework for Agenda 2030.
Two months later, Carney told the Federal Reserve’s annual gabfest at the Jackson Hole Wyoming retreat that central bankers could develop a network of national digital currencies to create a new, basket-managed “synthetic hegemonic currency.”
That same month, the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of America’s largest companies headed by Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., stated that 181 top US CEOs realize companies need a Purpose beyond Profit.
Can this be an open push for a global bankers’ dictatorship? Of foxes guarding the hen house (us)?
Not long after, the entire world went into lockdown hysteria and universal basic income has cropped up again on how to keep feeding the insatiable beast. Is that because in 2001, two Microsoft researchers Banko and Brill had released a paper that explains that the bigger the data set you analyze by orders of magnitude based on keeping the algorithms the same, the lower the error rates you get?
Klaus Schwab has since called for a Great Reset but that reset is likely to go from control with money to control with our data as the Global Rent-Seeking OS evolves to become the Global Brain OS.
The mindset and the direction have not changed because fueled by our self-interests, we have developed the OS to benefit corporate persons (especially Big Business) rather than real humans.
Living our social contract, haven’t insecurities (fear/fame/fortune) lured you to keep feeding yourself to the insatiable beast? In anxious times, many keep looking for a hero or try to be one, unaware that no one person can catalyze the paradigm shift from Control to Empowerment or that together, each of us has the answer.
Btw, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City hosted central bankers, policymakers, academics and economists from around the world at its annual economic policy symposium in Aug. 27–28, 2020. It was a virtual event.
Change is the hardest because you will have to unlearn everything you have accepted as reality. Not easy for the frightened and traumatized (child) adult conditioned to believe he/she is never (good) enough. Isn’t that why adults continue to behave like children in the playgrounds?
