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A tail wagging the dog is the notion I wish to deplore the most. Way too many people think that pure logic (and wisdom of experience) is what leads to their value-judgements and opinions. Like my example mom-and-pop broker above (who is no fat cat in the scheme of things, just someone too invested in the neoliberal capitalist paradigm to think straight anymore), they will switch their value judgements when their one true god (money, joint-stock ownership, and the corporate form of governance) tells them to switch. When weed is blacklisted, they can invent reasons to hate weed. When weed is legal, it's just another glorious benefit of our market system to provide this good/service to all the people who demand it. (And for them to rightfully earn a profit somewhere in the trade, or in the ownership of the business providing the service.) They make up reasons to believe what the markets tell them to believe. A dog wagged by a tail, if you will. Likewise, when you have central banks and too-big-to-fails in this environment buying up everything in the stock markets with an exponentially growing supply of USD, JPYs, and euros, you wind up in a situation where the market tail is actually trying to wag the economic dog. We forgot that it was supposed to be the other way around, because of how far we've gone off the rails into our deficit-spending-until-death mode of existence, since year 19XX, for some value of XX, I favor about the time Reagan took over, but you can go back further if you like. Thanks for sharing your reference, by the way. |
It happens in terms of literal power and ownership, when money is produced and awarded in toxic ways, yet it is all that matters for obtaining power and ownership.
And it happens in terms of the mind: of people working in aid of a status quo which is being driven the wrong way.
Well guess what, you're not going to let some insane human elitists (how close is that guy Donald Trump to them? anything is too close for my comfort) try to drive me through the tail of the dog that is my life. If you have an insane and toxic system, then it's better to start getting radical.
Ah, but now -- how to get radical? There we all explode.
update, with recommended reading:
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer
We either do or don't have people successfully playing at money/power/mind-game for the stakes of controlling the planet from the top down. Either way, I am afraid. Because a bunch of moronic dictators fighting each other unsuccessfully is no better than a single one successfully winning such a game.