The People are Revolting

"In the meantime, however, I have a question and a challenge: give some thought to your philosophies as investor and citizen. Think about your most passionate views which began as earnest, scientific, fact-based beliefs. Think about some of those beliefs which encountered resistance. How did you respond? Did you change the way you told the story about them? In doing so, did your beliefs slowly become abstractions of the real thing you believed in originally?

My free market / capitalism / libertarian leans, which developed out of a reasonable, to my mind, understanding of my economic and history studies in my school days and early work years (with real-world experience confirming book learning) hardened in my later twenties into Randian absolutism, in part, owing to equally strident resistance from the all-around-me liberal New Yorkers.

(One of the great misconceptions - a false meme - is that Wall Street is populated by all hard-core conservatives and libertarians; whereas, the reality is that there’s always been a meaningful population of liberals on the Street, which, IMO, has increased in percentages over the past three decades.)

After spending a decade in my mid twenties to mid thirties building Fort Libertarianism with a Randian moat around my ideology, I realized I had let passion replace reason and have been trying, ever since, to reverse course and let reason replace passion.

The challenge is that few people today want to have a reasoned, nuanced conversation about these type of ideas - those on the right think you’re “squishy” or not a “true believer,” while those on the left either are angry that you don’t fit into an ideological “right” box that they are familiar with (and have set arguments against) or use any “concessions” you make as evidence your entire philosophy is a fraud.

Said another way, having a thoughtful, rational and reasoned conversation with a passionate believer - someone on either side whose ideas are “abstractions of the real thing -” is frustrating and has had me pulling away from interactions with others.

So, while I believe (or am kidding myself) that I’ve moved past my “abstractions of the real thing” phase, I’m finding that while it is helping me grow as a person, it is also causing me to grow further away from other people.

I was actually meaning to write you via email and ask if you could do a Quid cloud of the climate change! meme. I did some Google Trends analysis on the subject and it looked like the number of searches was down significantly and I wondered if your Quid software was seeing the same things.

“In the meantime, however, I have a question and a challenge: give some thought to your philosophies as investor and citizen. Think about your most passionate views which began as earnest, scientific, fact-based beliefs.”

Losing GOP States Try To Lock In Power Before Democrats Take Over

Two years ago, North Carolina set the precedent for this kind of move, when the Republican-controlled legislature stripped then-incoming Democrat Roy Cooper’s power over Cabinet appointments, made the state’s judicial system more partisan, and ensured that the state’s board of elections would be controlled by Republicans in election years. Cooper has been in legal fights over the changes since.

Now Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan are playing by the same book.

“We simply cannot and are inherently ill-equipped to predict how people will respond to an incredibly complex set of climate change outputs that will manifest in changing prices for real estate, agricultural commodities and labor, even before we consider any explicit policy action.”

Yes, its across the full spectrum of belief and policy!
…After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth.

Respectfully, I think you may have missed something in the Grantham piece. He doesn’t postulate that the real disaster will be running out of fossil fuel before better energy sources are found. In fact, he stipulates that new wind and solar plants have already achieved economic superiority to existing coal and nuclear (even assuming the latter’s initial capex is already paid-off).

He also doesn’t mention increased CO2 as a direct threat to agriculture (because, I suppose, he knows it’s not). Rather, he postulates that topsoil erosion (stemming from a combination of existing use and climate-related causes), diminishing productivity gains from fertilizer, loss of fertile land to sea level rise, and to a lesser extent the collapse of pollinators and competition from C4 weeds, may all combine to flatten or reduce global food supplies at roughly the moment we hit peak population. The resulting tension (mass migrations, aridification, and global demand for higher standards of living) may cause quite a few “disasters” that are quite apart from the direct perceptional experience of living our present lives a few degrees warmer.

It’s not an existential threat, because humans are remarkably adaptable and ingenious, but why make the planet so much less hospitable to ourselves and go through the awful process of adjusting to that when alternative paths exist at affordable costs?

What struck me was the “They’re Doing It Wrong” reaction by the NYT given that there was no spokesperson(s) for the protesters:

“But when the government tried to open talks, there was no one to talk to. Some unofficial interlocutors appeared but were pulled back by threats from other yellow vests. So Mr. Macron and Prime Minister Édouard Philippe were left with no choice but to retreat…”

Maybe the NYT was nonplussed and annoyed by their inability to determine label the protest or tell the story through the individual(s), but it strikes me as an interesting dilemma for the Macron administration as it precludes the strategy of divide and conquer. Speaking to the leaders of the protests provides the opportunity to co-opt or intimidate the group through the individual(s) to minimize the changes offered to appease the protesters. The individual can be turned either by the carrot (becoming an elite or having their particular grievance addressed) or the stick (detainment or worse). After the individual is turned, they are used to placate or cow the group. Centralization, even among protesters, provides authoritarians a means of control.

This seems to dovetail nicely with Alex Gladstein’s thoughts around the potential use of blockchain as an anti-authoritarian technology , as long as leadership is distributed, there is limited ability to capture and control the protest. While it seems inevitable a charismatic leader will emerge to continue the old system with new faces, distributed leadership might delay the process or offer a path to maximizing change until the critical mass of the protest is lost.