This is the Great Ravine



This is all going to get much worse before it gets any better.

In The Dark Forest, volume 2 of the Three-Body Problem science fiction trilogy, Cixin Liu mentions almost in passing a 50-year period of immense social upheaval, destruction and (ultimately) recovery across the globe. He never goes into the details of this period that he calls the Great Ravine. He basically just waves his hands at it and writes “yep, that happened”.

Why? Because the Great Ravine does not advance the plot.

It’s there. It happens. But there’s nothing to be gained by examining its events. Like the Cultural Revolution of Cixin Liu’s real-world history, the Great Ravine is ultimately just a tragic waste. A waste of time. A waste of wealth. A waste of lives. There is nothing to be learned from our time in the Great Ravine; it must simply be crossed.

And cross it we will.

Eventually we will come out on the other side of our Great Ravine to discover a new age where the small-l liberal virtues of personal autonomy and the small-c conservative values of social community are reclaimed, where inspiration is rekindled, ingenuity is rewarded and integrity is recognized. I know these words don’t mean much to most people right now – they never do on this side of the Great Ravine – but I promise you that one day they will again.

But until that day, which I think is probably decades away, some version of an FN SCAR-armed Jesse Plemons asking for our papers and a political loyalty test is 100% part of our American future. Hell, it’s part of our American present.

The truth is that there’s no stopping our collective march into the Great Ravine, fueled by our sadness transformed into focused anger at the Other Party.

The truth is that political violence on party lines is inevitable when everyone knows that everyone knows the Other Party is an existential threat to the ‘real’ America.

Why? Because this is a very stable political equilibrium, just not a pleasant one.

More to the point, no matter how many empty words are spent over the next few days ‘denouncing’ political violence, these guys and their surrogates are never going to stop saying the words that not only encourage but demand political violence.



I mean, I definitely could have included some additional incendiary Team Blue surrogates here, like maybe Joy Reid’s greatest he’s-a-fascist hits, but there’s something so special about the richest man in the world saying that anyone who disagrees with him on election security legislation should be arrested and executed for treason. As for MTG, she’s certainly showing a calmer, more restrained voice since Saturday. You think any of these people, least of all Trump, are going to “tone down their rhetoric” once he’s back in the White House? LOL.

And it’s not even these guys. Not really, anyway. These guys are just the most visible manifestations of the Beast — the monstrous hydra of Big Politics, Big Tech and Big Media that leads us to focused anger at the Other Party, that devours us whole as it marches us headlong into the Great Ravine.


The Widening Gyre (September, 2022)


I’m not asking you to fight the Beast of Big Politics, Big Tech and Big Media.

Honestly I don’t know how you would. This is the end of an age, the fin de siecle, the period of time where the Beast is strongest because it is everywhere and invisible all at once. Big Politics, Big Tech and Big Media are the water in which we swim. We are totally immersed in the co​mmon knowledge​ that the enemy is the Other Party, and until that com​mon knowledge is weakened substantially, any direct challenge to the Beast is a suicide mission. A noble suicide mission, like charging a fascist machine gun nest in the Spanish Civil War, but a suicide mission all the same.



No, I’m not asking you to fight the Beast.

I’m asking you to see the Beast.

I’m asking you to see how the Beast feeds on our anger, which it has renamed as ‘engagement’.

I’m asking you to see how the Beast transforms our sadness into anger with stories, which it has renamed as ‘news’.


That’s Corey Comperatore, who was shot in the head and murdered as he shielded his wife and daughter with his body at the Trump rally on Saturday night. Comperatore was 50 years old. He was an engineer at a local plastics manufacturer, and he served as a volunteer fireman and fire chief in Buffalo Township, Pennsylvania. His neighbor of 20 years, Paul Hayden, said, “He knew I was a Biden fan, I knew he’s a Trump fan. But we never let that come in between us.” Hayden recalled fond memories of riding dirt bikes with Comperatore.

To paraphrase a Steely Dan song, I cried when I wrote that paragraph. The events of the Great Ravine are positively drenched with sadness, a profound sorrow that washes over you again and again and again if you are a thinking, feeling human being.

But soon you discover that sadness is not your only constant companion in the Great Ravine. Anger is there, too.

That’s a map of the shooter’s vantage point on the left, at most 165 yards away from Donald Trump on stage. By now you’ve seen the video of the sniper team that killed the shooter, trained to take down guys 1,000 yards away. They were locked in on the guy! Locked in on a guy with a rifle, lying prone on a roof, aiming at Donald Trump, locked in before he fired a shot. And yet he shot. Apparently there was a local cop who went up on the roof, got intimidated, and backed down? By now you’ve also seen the video of the secret service agent who was clearly overwhelmed, to the point of not being able to holster her gun. I’m sure there are reasons. I’m sure there are procedures. I’m sure everyone did exactly as they were ‘trained’. Don’t care. This was bullshit, and it made me so freakin’ angry.

Just like Uvalde. Man, I can hardly look at this photograph without waves of anger just washing over me. Sadness at the beginning, but pretty soon I exchanged my sadness for anger, and once I did that … woof. To be clear, I’m still angry. I will never not be angry.

Just like Epstein’s death while in federal custody. Sadness and shock at first, followed by sheer white-hot anger. Was it suicide? Was it murder? I don’t care! An ‘unlucky accident’ like this is the ONE THING that a non-corrupt State must prevent. It’s the non-corrupt State’s ONE JOB to keep Epstein alive for trial, and everyone knows that everyone knows this is their ONE JOB. It is impossible to violate this co​mmon knowledge without premeditation and malice, without conspiracy and criminality aforethought. It is impossible to have an ‘unlucky accident’ like this in a non-corrupt State.

It was after Epstein’s death that I started saying BITFD — Burn. It. The. Fuck. Down. — because I was just so angry at the necessarily corrupt system of wealth and power that would allow this to happen. And once I started saying it, I found myself saying it more and more about smaller and smaller things, often things that were presented to me as ‘news’ rather than things that I had really thought about myself. I found myself saying it more and more about things that I discovered later were coded as Team Red or Team Blue things.

I was slowly but surely led from a shared sadness over a terrible event to an inchoate anger with the overall system to a focused anger at specific people and institutions.

Sound familiar? I think if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’ve all gone down this path over the past four or five years, where we start with sadness over terrible events, move to a generalized anger with ‘the system’, and ultimately end up with a focused anger at people and institutions that are — surprise! — somehow all associated with one political party or another. And as part of this process of more and more focused anger directed at the Other Party, we find ourselves — surprise! — spending more and more time with social media content and the machines that distribute that content.

This mediated transition from sadness to generalized anger to focused anger is entirely intentional.

It is the optimized algorithmic solution to a duopoly of two political parties and an oligopoly of a handful of giant tech and media companies who want to minimax regret their status as the most powerful institutions in the world.

What does “minimax regret” mean? It’s a decision-making strategy for games where you minimize your maximum regret, and it’s a concept and application that will be immediately familiar to financial advisors and anyone else who deals directly with the sadness and anger of clients.

Financial advisors are, of course, responsible in one way or another for making money for their clients, and an outsider might think, “oh, the maximum regret for a financial advisor must be losing lots and lots of their clients’ money”. But those outsiders would be wrong. Losing lots and lots of your clients’ money is indeed regrettable! It’s very sad. You’re sad, your clients are sad, everyone is very sad. But so long as other financial advisors are also losing lots and lots of their clients’ money, like happens in every bear market or recession, it’s not a maximum regret. Why not? Because while your clients may be very sad, they are not angry. Or at least they are not angry at you. They may be angry at ‘the market’ or they might be angry at ‘the economy’, but they won’t be angry at you.

What makes a financial advisory client angry at you? It’s not losing a lot of money when everyone else is also losing a lot of money. It’s losing a little bit of money or even making a little bit of money when everyone else is making a lot of money. That’s what makes clients angry. Shared underperformance is fine, because that’s just sadness. Relative underperformance is not fine, because that’s what generates anger.

This is true for every professional career and every institution, from finance to politics to medicine to law to tech to education to sales to administration. Whatever ‘client’ means in whatever human field of endeavor you want to examine:

You will not lose your clients if they are sad with you.

You will absolutely lose your clients if they are angry at you.

Every ounce of modern institutional activity is designed with these principles in mind, particularly in largely zero-sum (my rewards come at your expense, and vice versa) duopolies or oligopolies like politics, tech and media.

1) Underperformance and incompetence are absolutely fine, so long as your clients believe that it was not relative underperformance and incompetence, but underperformance and incompetence because you ‘followed standard procedures’ or ‘acted prudently’ or ‘inherited the problem’, or because you share the underperformance and incompetence in a ‘whatabout the other guy’ sort of way. Your client will be sad, but that’s fine!

2) In a system with a winner-take-all payoff structure and a captive client base (like American politics!), you maximize payoffs by creating client anger at your competitor, not by efficiency and performance gains that reduce client sadness across the board. Your competitor has to deal with max regret, and that’s great!

So that’s what we get morning, noon and night from the Beast: a constant flow of ‘news’ designed either a) to deflect anger at Your Party by excusing/disowning/whatabouting underperformance and incompetence as ‘normal’ or b) to create anger at the Other Party by highlighting their relative underperformance and incompetence. All the while generating ‘engagement’ for the Big Tech and Big Media heads of the Beast.

It’s all perfectly rational, all perfectly optimizing. Fortunes are made. Power is gained. But over time you have to make bolder and bolder claims to create anger at the Other Party. You are forced to respond in kind if the other side escalates the nar​rative attacks, like using mustard gas in World War I, until eventually the entire game breaks because the anger you’ve created can’t be contained by the rules of the game. And that’s when you are well and truly in the Great Ravine.


Earlier I wrote that I’m not asking you to fight the Beast, but to see the Beast and the way it feeds on our anger, an anger created and transformed out of sadness. Well, there’s something else I’d like for you to see … something I’m asking you to see about yourself.

I’m asking you to see yourself as an autonomous human being, brave enough to own your anger and your sadness, brave enough to refuse the Beast when it offers to exchange your well-earned sadness for a delicious new anger that is not your own and which is not well-earned and which fuels you into actions that you never thought you’d be a part of.

Actions of anger for which, in the end, you will not forgive yourself.

Yeah, it’s maybe the oldest story in the Book, that offer of the Beast as you find yourself stumbling through the Great Ravine. And it’s maybe the oldest question, how we get to the other side without becoming the baddies ourselves.

The answer then is the answer now.

We make a community of those who see with cl​ear eyes and love with fu​ll hearts. We protect our autonomy of mind and our community of spirit. We teach anyone who will listen.

Can’t lose.



To learn more about Epsilon Theory and be notified when we release new content sign up here. You’ll receive an email every week and your information will never be shared with anyone else.

Comments

  1. Woke up too early, far too early as I am wont to do far too often these days.
    Ben was going to write an article Monday, I had been looking for it, and found it here in the wee hours of the morning.

    Thanks Ben for encapsulating what’s going on, and especially how to think and deal with it.
    It’s not funny how often my first thought on a “news” event is the irrational, maybe even angry one.
    It takes a second thought to recognize and recalibrate.
    Epsilon Theory helps.
    The Pack helps.

    If this helps, one way I have found work for me to get to the calmer, rational being is when seeing an inflammatory comment that sort of makes sense, that ACCUSES the other side, is to think of a friend, a very good friend , who you know is part of “the other side”, and realize he ( or she) is certainly not that way so obviously I’m being taken and mark that writer as someone to avoid in the future.

    Would love to see how other members of “The Pack” handle and avoid being pulled into the fray.
    Perhaps we can all share, and Learn from each other.

    Anyhoo, as always, thanks Ben and glad I found this place

  2. I’ve discovered Mother Nature is actually cruel, not fair.

    Just say’n.

    Tom

  3. No, I’m not asking you to fight the Beast.

    I’m asking you to see the Beast.

    I’m asking you to see how the Beast feeds on our anger, which it has renamed as ‘engagement’.

    I’m asking you to see how the Beast transforms our sadness into anger with stories, which it has renamed as ‘news’.

    I’m taking a pause in the epsilon between the map and reality or thinking and feeling to let my sadness go through the stages of anger and hopefully emerge with a plan. I’m presently focusing on The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
    The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
    -Sun Tzu

    And we do it in a way that they think they came up with the idea themselves.

    -jimmy

  4. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. --Sun Tzu

  5. Thank you Tom. I corrected it.
    Jim

  6. Avatar for drrms drrms says:

    When I was talking at the dinner table with my family about this event my main comment was, “The media are absolutely thrilled with this assassination attempt. It’s great for their business!” So sad to say.

  7. I agree with so much of this, and I thank you for writing this, as it encapsulates so much of what I, and I’m sure others, have been thinking.

    My one pushback/question is: are we giving too much credence to the notion that things will one day correct themselves? For all the warts on the left (and my god are there warts) the current incarnation of what used to the Republican party is as close to the line of “we’re gonna smash the place and we’re letting you know now” as you can get. And maybe it’s hyperbolic, but I think when we cross that Rubicon (we’re about to cross that Rubicon much farther than Jan 6) all bets are off. All of em. And this thing may never self correct. This thing was designed never to go into the black hole of fascism or dictatorship. Every system was put in place to stop that from happening. But, if they system breaks…I’m not sure anything local saves the day.

    Will Durant, eloquently stated “When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.” We are well into chaos and they’re showing us the playbook for dictatorship. I come from an Eastern European background, so maybe I have some neurons firing a little too hard, but this ravine may very well be an ocean instead, with an unreachable other side.

    I hope not. I pray not.

  8. How do we get through the Great Ravine? This.

    Epsilon Theory is not part of big politics, big tech or big media. It’s their antidote. We know real humans are writing these lines (and have even met them in the flesh!) Hopefully ET will be a refuge for a pack of clear eyed, full hearted core to grow slowly but surely into something significant at the end of the Ravine.

  9. Ben has mused that he hopes his daughters get to see the other side. Great usually has positive connotations as an adjective. In this case, it is unlikely that the decades long set of pressures put in place can be broken and rebuilt without facism or authoritarianism being a likely feature. We have to expand our sense of history to centuries across various societies. The last 3-4 generations in the US for the top 10% is an anomaly of larger than Great proportions. Rather than the images our brains conjure like fantastic, amazing, and wonderful when we hear Great. This is more likely heinous, appalling, terrifying and cruel. Not a pleasant message, but clear eyes are a must.

  10. To me, part of not getting angry but staying sad is understanding how modern human history is centered around cycles.

    I’m still reading Ray Dalio’s 2021 Changing World Order which turns out to be another confirmation that the flow of military, political, social and economic events follow cycles big and small, with the most powerful cycle being the longest (roughly a hundred years end-to-end.)

    Things look not just the worst, but inexorably so, when we’re on the bad side (or worse, near the extreme of that side) of this biggest of cycles.

    However, personally, I’m pretty sure that tragedy is unavoidable in a cosmic sense. When both wealth and confidence (which is a big part of wealth itself, in the modern setup) go up, everyone is happy not just to enjoy them, but to rig things up in order to enjoy them just a bit longer. When the chickens come home to roost (and I wouldn’t want to live in a world where they don’t,) we have to lose wealth and power collectively, and the negotiation over distributing this loss can easily get nasty, as we’re all so used to the benefits of the good side.

    It is just plain human nature. It’s not pretty, but it’s us. The ‘bad’ side of the cycle can also be thought of as a time to sober up and regroup, which we seem to be doing here at ET.

Continue the discussion at the Epsilon Theory Forum

89 more replies

Participants

Avatar for bhunt Avatar for chudson Avatar for CSWilson Avatar for psherman Avatar for handshaw Avatar for Zenzei Avatar for chipperoo Avatar for Carl_Richards Avatar for jpclegg63 Avatar for lpusateri Avatar for Desperate_Yuppie Avatar for BScaletta Avatar for acoates Avatar for RobMann Avatar for Phyllis Avatar for rechraum Avatar for Cactus_Ed Avatar for JohnMcGraw Avatar for gabbana92 Avatar for Ludwig Avatar for drrms Avatar for joeymoore9324 Avatar for KCP Avatar for zltomlin

The Latest From Epsilon Theory

DISCLOSURES
This commentary is being provided to you as general information only and should not be taken as investment advice. The opinions expressed in these materials represent the personal views of the author(s). It is not investment research or a research recommendation, as it does not constitute substantive research or analysis. Any action that you take as a result of information contained in this document is ultimately your responsibility. Epsilon Theory will not accept liability for any loss or damage, including without limitation to any loss of profit, which may arise directly or indirectly from use of or reliance on such information. Consult your investment advisor before making any investment decisions. It must be noted, that no one can accurately predict the future of the market with certainty or guarantee future investment performance. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

Statements in this communication are forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements and other views expressed herein are as of the date of this publication. Actual future results or occurrences may differ significantly from those anticipated in any forward-looking statements, and there is no guarantee that any predictions will come to pass. The views expressed herein are subject to change at any time, due to numerous market and other factors. Epsilon Theory disclaims any obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or views expressed herein. This information is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of any offer to buy any securities. This commentary has been prepared without regard to the individual financial circumstances and objectives of persons who receive it. Epsilon Theory recommends that investors independently evaluate particular investments and strategies, and encourages investors to seek the advice of a financial advisor. The appropriateness of a particular investment or strategy will depend on an investor’s individual circumstances and objectives.