A Preview of Our Upcoming Book
Saturday, December 22, 2018 12:49
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“A Preview of Our Upcoming Book”
By Bill Bonner
Editor’s Note: Today, something different for our Saturday Diary. In lieu of our usual guest essay, Bill picks up the pen (or keyboard) once again to write to dear readers. Below, our editor outlines a special project he’s working on, and reveals what dear readers can look forward to in the new year…
“After our most recent book, “Hormegeddon,” came out, we had vowed never to write another. It was just far too much of a distraction. Too much time. Too much work. Too little reward. Besides, after “Hormegeddon,” we thought we had said all we had to say. “Hormegeddon” explored an important, and often forgotten, point: More of a good thing is not necessarily better. A little military spending, for example, may be necessary… even good.
But as we have been exploring in the Diary, the U.S. now spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined. Has this made Americans in Tulsa or Boise any safer? The returns from this level of military spending, as we have argued before, went negative long ago.
This concept seemed to explain why even good ideas can turn bad, and why we have to be careful about extrapolating positive results onto bigger experiments. This is the problem of scale, which we have again mentioned in these pages. A local democracy in a small town may work well enough. But expand the idea to a nation of 300 million people and you end up with candidates you know nothing about and elections where your vote means nothing at all.
But after the book was published and time passed, we began to accumulate new ideas. At first, we comfortably sorted them, and stacked them on the shelves or fit them into drawers. But soon, there were too many. The shelves groaned under the weight. The drawers would no longer shut. And the ideas demanded an audience, a stage, and a chance to explain themselves in a coherent way.
Us Versus Them: What we had noticed initially was that the “public space” was very different from the “private space.” This made it dangerous to project the small ideas, conventions, and instincts of a small community onto the large screen. Things were inevitably distorted… and often turned grotesque.
The most dramatic of these is the impulse to separate humankind into “us” versus “them.” Throughout much of our time on this green and blue ball, this impulse was probably very useful, and perhaps essential.
If the archeological/bone record is to be believed, murder rates were very high during mankind’s earliest years. And most murders were probably between different tribes, rather than within tribes. This is the hint we get from studying troops of chimpanzees and from looking at pre-colonial North American massacre sites.
Chimpanzees are generally peaceful within troops. But they will stalk and attack members of other troops and tear them apart. This is true even when the other group is closely related or is a recent breakaway.
Likewise, the bone record in North America suggests striking levels of violence – in which whole settlements were wiped out – at a tribal level. Within their own tribes, there is no reason to think that Native Americans were particularly bloodthirsty. But even pre-colonial tribes were likely engaged in long, protracted wars for dominance and territory. The tribal wars between the Iroquois and Algonquian tribes of New York in the early 17th century are just one example.
This “us versus them” instinct must have enabled some groups to triumph over others. Present-day humans are more likely the descendants of the victors in these, and related, conflicts… and carry with them the urge to inflict “us versus them” violence on others. At the very least, they are prepared to rally to the “us” side in case of an attack – whether real or imagined. But in today’s world, with its huge nations, complex alliances, mixed cultures and races, and infinitely elaborate chains of supply and commerce, aggressive “us versus them” reactions seem to make a whole lot less sense.
Who’s “us”? And who’s “them”? It’s hard to say… and probably not worth trying. The instinct that worked so well in the private space of a small tribe is a catastrophe in the large, public space. It cuts off trade. It leads to wars, persecutions, and genocides. This insight led to further thinking about the public space. It was then that we connected it to “civilization,” which only exists in it.
Small tribes, roaming the wilderness 10,000 years BC, were – by definition – not civilized. It was the development of the public space and the myths and rules that went with it that were either coincidental to or a necessary pre-condition for civilization. One thing led to another. Before we knew it, we had the outline of a new book… and many hours of work ahead of us to make it readable and worth reading.
Powerful Myths: Now, we approach the end. We expect to publish next year. But where did it lead? What insight makes it worth all the trouble? What good comes from it… for you, the reader? Since you are a regular reader of this space, we will give you a preview of what we consider to be the important ideas that have revealed themselves in the course of writing this book (almost all of which you may have also glimpsed in our Diary).
First, people are programmed with “myths,” not necessarily true or untrue, but powerful and unprovable. “Workers of the world, unite!” was a myth powerful enough to topple a centuries-old regime and implant a communist government in its place. “Making the world safe for democracy” was a myth that sent millions of Americans to early graves in the trenches of Europe.
Myth-based protocols evolve along with human civilization, enabling large-scale initiatives and organizations. The pyramids, nation-states, Apple computers, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia… none of them would be possible without public myths.
But civilization requires restraint; not all myths are created equal in the public space. Civilized communication means following rules and unwritten vernacular codes. Property rights… common law… manners… language… money – all are based on elaborated myths that limit and guide human behavior.
Do Unto Others: The second important idea is that civilization ultimately requires win-win deals. Jesus of Nazareth put it most elegantly: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This, too, is a “myth.” We don’t really know whether it is a good rule or a bad one. But it seems to be a sine qua non of civilized society.
Some force may always be necessary. But force is acutely sensitive to the phenomenon illustrated in “Hormegeddon”: It quickly reaches the point of declining marginal utility. Then, its returns are starkly negative. Uncivilized deals are win-lose; they are imposed by the threat of violence.
Win-win deals are winners because they allow people to decide for themselves what they want… Then, through the information carried in market-set prices, these deals help businesses and individuals maximize their satisfaction. The baker does not light his oven at four in the morning for the love of baking. Neither does the bakery patron share his wages with the baker out of compassion. Rather, both are engaged in a win-win deal of mutual benefit and voluntary exchange. And at the heart of win-win deals is civilized money.
Civilized money is like writing; it conveys information across space and time. It tells us who has a claim on the time and resources of others… and how much of it they claim. Civilized money must be limited – restrained by real resources, and most importantly, time. If you can create it at will… or “out of thin air”… then it is not civilized money. Civilized money is, therefore, win-win money. It is given value by real things – resources, work, skill, and time. As you add to the world’s wealth – by working, saving, and investing – you also gain real money.
Much of our work in the Diary over the last 10 years has been focused on showing how today’s U.S. money is uncivilized. It is win-lose money, which is gained by taking wealth away from others who work. If you earn a dollar by working, investing, or inventing, the dollar is a measure of how much additional wealth (products or services) you have helped provide. People regard it as fair and are happy to share in the economic progress it creates.
But if you get a dollar at artificially low interest rates from the banking system – one that was never earned or saved – you can still use it to acquire goods and services. But the conveyance is fraudulent. You have gotten something without giving something of equal value. The people who didn’t get the cheap money – and must work for their dollars – feel cheated. They feel the system is unfair… and indeed, it is. Some people gain, but only at the expense of others. Win-lose.
Finally, politics is inherently win-lose and uncivilized. The only thing that separates government from, say, Kiwanis International or the Loyal Order of Moose, is violence. The feds insist on a monopoly on the use of force. Even their most socially useful acts – prohibiting rat-poisoned cheese… providing succor to old people… removing drunk drivers from highways – are backed by the threat of extreme violence. That is why government, too, is subject to the “Hormegeddon” rule: a little of it is better than a lot.
It is primarily these three ideas – the power of myths, the need for win-win deals, and the equity of civilized money – that have dominated our thoughts since the publishing of our last book. And it is these three ideas which we will elaborate more thoroughly on as we near completion of our new book. Readers of The Bill Bonner Letter will have first dibs when it is published. If you’re not a Bill Bonner Letter reader, you can join right here. More to come…”
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Download, in PDF format, “Hormegeddon”, by Bill Bonner, here:
Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-preview-of-our-upcoming-book.html
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