Essay Finance Life Future
Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying
We continue to build labyrinths like the one in Hawara or Crete or like those of the pyramids, but now in digital fields, not so much the analogic terrains. What for? To complicate rather than simplify. What for? So that the elected, the specialists, the trained can come and go. The 2008 crisis patently, satirically and brutally synthesized by The Big Short showed the incomprehensible and unnecessary of the muddles and entanglements of the financial geniuses. Why do we keep looking the other way if everything changed?
The originals were simple, modern ones are bullshit
When I was a kid, whenever I’d feel small or lonely, I’d look up at the stars, wondered if there was life up there. Turns out I was looking in the wrong direction. When alien life entered our world, it was from deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. A fissure between two tectonic plates. A portal between dimensions. The Breach (…) And then the third one hit Cabo, and then the fourth. And then we learned, this was not gonna stop, this was just the beginning. We needed a new weapon. The world came together, pooling its resources, throwing aside old rivalry for the sake of the greater good. We got really good at it… winning. Then… then it all changed. (Raleigh Becket, Pacific Rim opening scene, 2013)
The first time I saw Pacific Rim, that raspy voice of Charlie Hunnam and those opening words of the film caught my attention. The idea that we were looking the wrong way while waiting for the aliens seemed to me, at least, a witty idea. As David Epstein writes in Range (2019), it is necessary to think with analogies, comparisons or metaphors, because they help us to see what we do not see and discover the hidden meanings of the problems that we have in front of our noses, precisely by analogy. Taking the opening sequence of the film and comparing it with our present day, I think that everything changed at some point, that everything got complicated, that we, the people, made it complicated, not an alien invasion. Anusar Farooqui’s essay The Making of the Mother of All Economic Booms (March 2021) has it explanation of when it all started, with exhaustive and vehement emphasis. I do believe is interesting, although I do not share his conclusions. You can see some of his ideas at the bottom of this article.
There was a time when we walked a narrow, straight and simple path that filled us with happiness. What was the exact moment when we stopped seeking the fullness of heart and mind? I do not know, but the answer is not in the stars, far away, it is in our own human depths, in the trench of the ocean of our vital land, inside each one, crossing The Bridge of Khazad-Dum with the soft music of Eurielle. Because instead of going there, to that sacred land we went looking for the unattainable infinite, filling ourselves with unnecessary complications, incomprehensible game rules, repeating unheard things like parrots, without time for reflection and, finally, suffering the disastrous consequences of not wanting to see the reality that has become a very complex maze. Of which we were bricklayers, putting our hands and minds to lock ourselves there.
As we did so, we were leaving behind our little threads of humanity. They fell on the road, piece by piece, not like Theseus and the “Thread of Ariadne” that would have allowed us to leave, but instead, we voluntarily destined ourselves to die there.
We were and are busy letting ourselves die and we don’t care about letting ourselves live, to paraphrase Red (Morgan Freeman) in The Shawshank Redemption. Many people are too busy letting themselves die, putting “Please do not disturb” signs on their doors. They still did not understand that they are in crisis, they do not see another wave coming because their lives are set up as if they were a modern Mortgage Bond. One thing is what is seen on the surface, another is what is below and cannot be seen.
Continuing with filmic analogies, the movie The Big Short comes up, where Mr. Bennet with a Jenga wonderfully explains what living has become:
This is your basic mortgage bond. The originals were simple. They were just thousands of triple A mortgages bundled together, guaranteed by the US government. The modern ones are different. They’re private. And they’re made up of layers of tranches. Highest level, triple A, is getting paid first. Now, obviously, if you’re buying B’s, you could make more money. But they’re a little risky. Sometimes they fail. Somewhere along the line, these B’s and double B’s went from a little risky to dog shit.
Basically, in the structure of our modern lives above is the time to do things that you are passionate about (AAA). The original moments are very simple. One tranche of time linked to another, guaranteed by the In God We Trust. Below those are the rest of our lives. Although they are highly public, they are locked in a (privatized) labyrinth. And they are made of layers of filters, masks, lies, and accommodations. But the simple life, the one at the top, the Triple A’s dedicated to doing what makes you happy, pays off first, like childhood. Now, obviously, if you are buying superficiality, immediacy, speed and ease, complex jobs not so worthy, you can make a lot of money with your BB life. Not to mention if you decide to fall for corruption and negotiations forget the basic values (don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t lie) of coexistence in order to earn money, your living your (Bs). To live like that that you must grow quick, but that is a little risk to pay comparing to income. Not always, but sometimes that kind of life fails. Somewhere, between tranches or days, these B’s lives or double B’s lives go from risky to bullshit.
So, we make sure that the blow is not so strong. We prepare and develop more walls, more mechanisms that protect us (equivalent to Credit Default Swaps in the financial world), adding even more complexity to our lives, always worth the paradox, in order to simplify it. Thus, we add more labyrinths to the entrance of our tomb, like the pharaohs. What for? To take care of two coins, our disintegrated bones and three worthless clay pots.
The labyrinth
The first man-made labyrinth is believed to be that of Hawara (circa 19th century BC) which was about 305 meters long by 245 meters wide (about three football fields). It was surrounded by a wall and was divided into two floors. The upper one was distributed in 12 covered patios, 6 on each side, and in each courtyard there were rooms that, according to Herodotus, reached 3,000 between the two levels. The lower floor was perhaps identical to the upper one and housed the mummies of the kings and the sacred crocodiles of the neighboring city of Medinet el-Fayum. To finish off the grandeur of the ensemble, the white stone on the walls featured a multitude of hieroglyphs. Unfortunately, the temple was used as a quarry since Roman times and its structure remains only a few rubble scattered on the sand, but it must be spectacular. Since it achieved great fame during antiquity, perhaps it could have been the landmark that inspired the Cretan labyrinth, believed to be the first man-made labyrinth. (Tombs, gods and labyrinths, 2019)
“…as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold — everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment — an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by — I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, ‘Yes, wonderful things.” Howard Carter
In Cairo on the plain of Giza the pyramids of Cheops, Khafren and Menkaure have risen from circa 2,500 BC. C., royal crypts that show the majesty and power of those who reigned centuries ago. They guarded the treasures and mortal remains of their makers. More than 600 kilometers to the south, in 1922 the British Howard Carter, borne by Lord Carnarvon, discovered the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun. Some deaths, accidents and supposed millennial curses of the pyramids fed the tabloids for years. This discovery was the beginning of years of vast creativity and imagination on the part of reporters and discoverers, also spurred on by curiosity, of great public interest in Egyptology, its mysteries, mysticism and alleged curses. Supernatural or alien forces were necessary given the grandeur of the buildings and the cryptic hieroglyphics inscribed throughout.
Every day more Egyptology resembles the current ‘financiology’ which with its modern hieroglyphs and labyrinths lead nowhere, to nothingness itself, whereas as humanity we march chanting: We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control.
The ‘financiology’
For the Egyptians, labyrinths were tools that expressed their culture and horizons. It was what they had to do by divine mandate from Pharaoh. It was his job and his legacy, a requirement. It seems inescapable for men to develop riddles, enigmas, challenges and complications, intentionally complex places to confuse whoever enters them, and thus express an intelligence superior to others. This vital need continually locks us up in unnecessary labyrinths. We are like a builder of a tomb in a pyramid from which we will no longer emerge, it will be our trap, we dig our own grave.
Why did the Egyptians build it in the first place? To protect something that was intrinsically worthless: gold, wood, clay, silver, chairs, jugs, mummies. Nothing. We enjoy applying that same logic so that others cannot follow or elucidate, we like it! That’s why we make things like this, because it gives us a certain power. But power is not certainty and certainty is not always true. The truth is simple, too simple many times to believe.
Financial engineering follows the logic of building the labyrinths of Egyptian mortuary pantheons like Hawara or Greeks like Crete. Possibly, 5,000 years from now, remnants of these works of finance from the brilliant minds of MBAs will still stand in some form. The humans of the future will think that some aliens were responsible for the bureaucratic and administrative outrages of this highly complex conspiracy of numbers. There can be no other explanation. Unless they discover through the magic, work and grace of some complicated algorithm that some genius of tomorrow will invent, that in reality all that engineering was the work of people who dedicated their days to filling their time with formulas, diagrams and tables. Those lights, yes, they will leave a legacy for posterity like the pyramids.
We have to occupy ourselves, or to continue building monumental labyrinths that are useless and lead nowhere except the death of the In Money We Trust, or to occupy ourselves in retaking that narrow, straight and simple path of passion, truth, and simplicity, the sincere joy that enlivens us when we remember the In God We Trust.
The Making of the Mother of All Economic Booms
Anusar Farooqui’s essay The Making of the Mother of All Economic Booms (March, 2021) found in Pitchforks Economics:
The first to go was the belief in the wisdom of financial markets. This was a direct consequence of the global financial crisis. Wall Street’s pretenses of being the smartest guys in the room were irredeemably destroyed when the market-based credit system erected by the dealers endogenously generated the greatest risk to economic fortunes world-wide since the 1930s… All organic connections between elites and masses were thus severed with ‘the big sort’ whereby the social classes became geographically segregated from each other over time… The masses had simply had enough of the fucking technocrats from Harvard and Yale. By 2015, they were ready to burn the world constructed by the elites to the ground… But this is the short-term conjuncture. Why would I call the turning point of the secular cycle?? The coming economic boom is not enough. The turning points of the secular cycle need not just the destructuration of features that generated the secular downcycle but also restructuration with features that generate the secular upcycle.
So, the way is now open for at least a decade-long great green boom… The plan is now for the technocrats to handover control over economic affairs to the politicians, and for direct fiscal stimulus to give way to an infrastructure and green tech investment-driven economy. This is probably the only way out of the impasse of American class relations. Even those who don’t get it now will get it eventually.
