Victimology
In a juicy nexus of irony and karma, the Fed hikes rates one day before a recession becomes official.
Well, official at least for those that avoid the memory hole of White House pronouncements.
According to a tortured exchange with the current propaganda secretary, two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth does not a recession make.
Yeah, yeah…they take a holistic approach to defining a recession (which they seem to be making as complicated as defining a woman).
But official definitions aren’t really the point.
What is the point is that the economy is no longer growing. It’s worse off than it was. And there’s nothing they can do to change its trajectory.
Not that reality will stop them from using semantics to insert their own version.
Which is also the point.
Words limit thought as much as they can expand it. Words don’t convey meaning, your reason does.
And no one muddles meaning better than Marxists…
The Ends Never Justify the Means
The single, truly brilliant innovation of Karl Marx was using the word Capitalist to limit rational thought.
By drawing a line between capitalists and laborers, he perfectly applied Hegel’s work on the dialectic to sew division and bring about a complete and total belief in nothing.
His critique on capitalism (critique or criticism being the root of Critical Theory) ignores the cause of progress and focuses solely on the results.
It’s all “ends justify the means” with them. Provided the ends are equal, all means are just.
But Marx relied on more than just Hegel. The ideas of Marxism first took root (as far as I can tell) with the Jacobins who, upon taking power during the French Revolution, immediately wrought the Reign of Terror upon the French.
Égalité – or equality of ends – first began to stink up the joint here. And it was here that the French along with pretty much the rest of Europe first contracted the Marxist disease.
A disease that spreads by absolving its acolytes of responsibility by turning them into victims.
Suffer No Marxist…
In a world devoid of reason, how can you as an individual be held accountable for your own actions?
You can be nothing but a victim of circumstance. And those who benefit from circumstance – which can be defined however you want – must be continuously pulled down by force so that we can all suffer equally.
The ultimate result of Marxism is a never-ending cycle of identifying a source of power, redefining a word to label that power, and using that label to pull that power down over and over until there is no power left – i.e. nothing.
Wealth, the West, race, sex, thin physique, intelligence all create fertile ground for a constant churn that strives to turn all of humanity into a big, grey mass of victims.
And Marxism ironically somehow gained in strength as soon as the U.S.S.R collapsed.
I Can’t Quite Put My Thumb On It
Perhaps some ideological idiot bomb went off that scattered Marxists ideas much like catapulting diseased cows over city walls spread illness. Maybe the creeping post-modernism – read Marxism – of the 50s and 60s finally leaped like so much crab grass upon my ill-tended lawn. Could it be that The Matrix was right about society peaking in 1998?
In any case, I first noticed the rise of Victimhood in the 90s through the See and Say lens of political correctness. Climate change debates then turned science into ideology creating another batch of victims into which Marxists could then sink their fangs. Legitimate efforts to address racism proved fertile ground for Hegelian-dialectic division. Then a bunch of crazy talk that somehow ended up defining women out of reality.
But the truly “high art” of victimhood came about with COVID-19.
The lockdowns turned fear into a virtue. And the victims were anyone who could conceivably come to harm by those who rejected, in whole or in part, the destructive policy responses of the political class.
And boy did that lockdown catch us on our back foot…
The easy money bread and circus that has sustained economic activity since the Great Financial Crisis of ’08-’09 is what put us on our back foot. It is now unsustainable and will either resolve itself through defaulting on debt or hyperinflating it away.
The current tumultuous geopolitical scene reflects not just the consequences of tragically misguided COVID policies (or tragically deliberate – depending on your interpretation of The Great Reset) but the culmination of a decades long single-minded foreign policy deliberately at odds with a free and open society.
And Marxist-rooted absurdities of victimhood such as defining a woman, Critical Race Theory, and climate-alarmism has rent American culture in two. (And we narrowly avoided a Department of Truth…for the moment).
All of which have coalesced into a new era for financial markets far more volatile than the past.
It doesn’t matter who’s to blame. In a way, we have all done our share. We are where we are.
What matters is whether you fall victim to semantic games or use your reason to cut your way through.
Think Free. Be Free.
P.S. To see how I reject falling victim to an overly manipulated market, join my free Prosperity Pub Telegram channel.
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