What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing

If we believe substituting self-serving cover stories for a truly realistic appraisal is going to generate real solutions, that is the ultimate delusion.

One way to summarize the present zeitgeist is What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing: all the intellectual frameworks that “made sense of the world” are now reduced to cover stories masking a reality that defies reduction to the old ideas that have shriveled into misleading cliches.

Exhibit #1: ideology. Capitalism vs. socialism, left vs. right, progressive vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican--none of these make sense of what we actually experience, and the manic effort to make the world fit these contrivances only increases our civilizational psychosis.

So Capitalism with a capital C “makes life better for everyone by rewarding innovation.” Or in econo-babble, Capitalism allocates capital to optimize efficiencies and innovations that “bring good things to life,” in a classic marketing slogan.

So Capitalism good. Okay, got it. Now let’s look at the world we actually live in. Private equity snaps up veterinary clinics to assemble informal cartels and then jacks up prices without improving the services at all. Does this “innovation” “make life better for everyone” by “optimizing efficiencies and innovations”, or is this just “rational actors” exploiting “capitalism” to extract more wealth from customers without adding anything other than cost and misery?

There’s no risk here, only gains, so we’d be foolish not to stripmine people who value their pets’ health. “Capitalism” at its most profitable and therefore at its best.

To those who protest, this isn’t capitalism: okay, then what is it, and why is it now the dominant structure of our economy?

Or how about “healthcare” insurance? Is there actually any real competitive price/service difference between two shades of gray touted as “the best system in the world”? Or is this just another cover story for a system that corrals everyone into privatized totalitarianism--i.e. a system of false choices that actually leaves no real choice-- that maximizes extraction that those reaping the gains deceptively glorify as “free market Capitalism”?

Or how about when the state (central government) bails out private banks because the collapse of those banks poses an existential threat to the citizenry and the state? Is the state enabling banks to privatize gains and then stepping in to socialize the banks’ losses actually “capitalism” or is it socialism for the wealthiest few at the expense of the many?

You see the point. In a system that optimizes extraction, exploitation and the distributing of risk and consequences to others, the line between “capitalist” and “socialist” blurs to the point of being useless in explaining what’s actually happening.

Is this “democracy”, or is it as correspondent Simons Chase put it, “what’s moral is what’s legal, and what’s legal is for sale”? And what’s for sale in a transactional structure is, well, everything, especially when the consequences can be offloaded onto someone else and the gains skimmed off for those who own what by a common-sense definition is a criminal network.

Consider what my friend Mark Jeftovic calls network states, private enterprises of such scale and reach that their power rivals or exceeds those of traditional nation-states. Big Tech corporations reward their owners and managers via pulling strings invisible to all but those doing the pulling to maximize extraction of data, profits and control of the data, which then draws the nation-states in as partners in these structures of control.

Does making the distinction between public and private actually elucidate anything, or is trying to distinguish between the two itself an obfuscation?

If all we see is varying shades of monochrome gray because that optimizes control and extraction, then we have no lived experience of what bright colors look like. This is what I call privatized totalitarianism in my book Investing In Revolution: an artificial realm in which the option to leave the corral of limited choices doesn’t exist.

This blurs the line between private and state totalitarianism to the point that separating the two no longer makes sense of what we experience. The structures of control are both private and state, and trying to fit all this into the false choice of either-or ideologies simply widens our disconnect from reality.

Exhibit #2: health. Health is easy to define: we’re fit and feel good and have no need for medications or interventions. Having to take medications for the rest of our lives is not the same as being healthy, because health doesn’t depend on medications, ill-health depends on medications.

Here is a map of obesity in the US 40 years ago in 1987. Yes, we can quibble endlessly about defining obesity via BMI (body mass index) and a hundred other misdirections, but the point here is obvious: there were no states in which the populace qualified as obese.

Here are the national statistics, circa 2017-18, 30 years later:

Fast forward to 2023 and the nation is now awash in red and orange. Note that this data is self-reported, which introduces the possibility that people under-reported their weight as that’s what we tend to do.

The US did not need GLP drugs that must be taken for life in 1987, and now GLP drugs are being heralded as miraculous meds everyone should take for life because they don’t just shed pounds, they reduce “inflammation” and the risks of various cancers.

For privately owned enterprises making and selling GLP drugs, the future looks bright indeed. Left out of this marvelous “news” is that all medications have side effects which then generate their own effects, the lifetime costs and consequences of taking these meds for life cannot yet be calculated, and the possibility that some other pathways to health other than taking meds for life might exist that don’t have the same high costs and risks as these medications.

Once again, “health” is portrayed as varying shades of medicated monochrome gray, with the bright living colors of real health not even visible because authentic health isn’t profitable in Ultra-Processed Life.

Exhibit #3: Progress. As I outline in my book The Mythology of Progress, Technology and Progress are one in the same in the ideology of Progress is inevitable and unstoppable.

Yet what we actually experience is technology is being deployed to obsolete products so we must constantly replace them, profitably degrade the quality of services, extract higher profits not by increasing value but by exploiting data (dynamic pricing) and foster an illusion of choice and “freedom of movement” within a corral that’s not delineated clearly because then the herded masses might grasp they’re trapped in an extractive, exploitive artificial realm of monochrome gray that claims to be alive with vivid colors.

This isn’t Progress, it’s Anti-Progress, the opposite of authentic progress.

An electric vehicle (EV) charged with electricity generated by coal or natural gas is consuming coal or natural gas. If the battery in the EV was manufactured with lithium extracted in an open-pit mine in a region where the people are too poor and powerless to stop the ruination of their land and the industrial expropriation of their water, is this “sustainable” or “ecological”?

The difference between this claim and Emperor Norton wandering the streets of old San Francisco declaring himself emperor of all he sees is, well, there isn’t any difference. To the poor and powerless, our “progress” is Anti-Progress, the opposite of authentic progress.

Since we longer have any direct experience of authentically vivid colors, we accept this artifice as “the way it is,” deepening our civilizational psychosis as what we’re told makes sense drifts ever farther from reality.

What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing, and the substitution of self-serving artifice for authenticity is now so embedded that all explanations serve as self-serving cover stories, misdirections or complexity thickets that have the superficial appearance of explanations but none of the substance.

The more visibly our quality of life decays, the more frantic the apologists’ denials. If our quality of life was in fact improving wondrously, the frantic denials, manic claims and delusional “explanations” wouldn’t be so visibly self-serving and psychosis-inducing.

If we believe substituting self-serving cover stories for a truly realistic appraisal is going to generate real solutions, that is the ultimate delusion.