The Cycle of Perpetual Fraud
I’ve been watching Dopesick, and it’s The Big Short. It’s the same story.
“We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball.”
He forgot medicine. Eventually we’ll have a Big Dopesick Short about the Covid-19 vaccines, and everyone who goes to the theater — sorry, I’ll start over. Eventually we’ll have a Big Dopesick Short about the Covid-19 vaccines, and everyone who streams it in the isolation of their living rooms will wonder how the villains in the story, the unyielding defenders of the failed vaccines, were so stupid and evil. No one will remember having been these people, or having known any of these people.
The story — thing happens, is declared a spectacular success, critics suggest that there are problems, critics are shamed and silenced and attacked, regulators decline to take notice of critics, critics eventually prevail after years of bruising fights, once-victorious victors slink away in shame, end credits roll — is the story of the last twenty years in America. The housing market is only going up, Wall Street is building prosperity, rating agencies assure us Wall Street’s housing derivatives are safe investments, and only idiots claim otherwise; Oxycontin is safe, effective, and almost totally non-addictive, the FDA agrees, and only fools argue with the doctors and pharmaceutical industry scientists who assure you that it’s a brilliant product.
Also, Donald Trump flew to Moscow to pay prostitutes to piss on him in Barack Obama’s hotel bed, and stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop are a Russian disinformation operation, because former intelligence agency professionals say so. And spies never lie, you moron. Stop with your ridiculous conspiracy theories!
The incredible tediousness at the heart of the current American cultural cycle is that you can see it happening in real time — hey, look, another giant fraud — but you still have to run all the bases. Show of hands: Who thinks it’s a mystery what we’ll be saying about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for Covid-19 in ten years? You know the answer, but you still risk your account if you say it on Twitter, because we’re still in the phase where Oxycontin is completely safe, you idiot, and the housing market only goes up. Obvious truth is still a baseless conspiracy theory.
There are a dozen reasons why, including regulatory capture and the revolving door, but here’s the big one, brilliantly illustrated:
We don’t evaluate information as information; we evaluate information as tribal signals and status symbols. “I still wear a mask because I don’t want people thinking I’m some Trump asshole.” We don’t ask ourselves, is this true or false; we say to ourselves, what is the position I should take on this question to assure that I maintain my status? If you live in Manhattan or work in television or academia, you think the vaccines are safe and effective. You don’t think this because you think the vaccines are safe and effective; you think this because to not think this is to belong in a trailer park in flyover country, fucking your cousins and flying your Trump flag, you idiot. Watch this person emit symbols like a machine making soap bubbles:
It’s a stream of slogans, fully automated. You don’t have four brain cells, wear a fucking mask, you’re racist pieces of shit, you’re a bunch of fascists, “freedom without responsibility is childish bullshit.” It’s a Twitter feed on legs. He’s talking to truck drivers, in front of a line of trucks, and lecturing them about responsibility, which they don’t understand. How does this resident of a big city get food? He’s delivering a condescending lecture on responsibility to…
…our economic circulatory system, the people who keep him alive. You morons!
The perpetual cycle of fraud comes from the death of information, from the automaticity of slogan-chanting, from the status anxiety that underlies all exchanges of what used to be packages of information in social form. Positions are bundled: If you’re pro-this, you also have to be pro-this, pro-this, and anti-that. In my Deep Blue neighborhood, the houses with BLM signs are the houses with the Ukrainian flags, and the people who emerge from those houses are wearing masks. It reminds me of my favorite scene from Head Office, a movie that no one saw: “Child psychologists for a free Poland against whaling!”
Eugyppius: “Believe me when I tell you that the climatists, the Ukrainists, the Covidians, the mass migrationists, and the antiracists are all expressions of the same malign force.”
When you can’t order ala carte — when your identity positioning requires you to load whole bundles into your basket, or else lose social status, like omfg Becky joined us for the BLM rally but she doesn’t believe in the vaccines, did you know she was a Trumper? — you’re gonna load up on a bunch of bullshit.
The tribalization of information is the death of evaluation. It’s the foundation of a society that cycles from fraud to fraud. It’s us, sinking fast.
I don't know exactly when it happened, but at a certain point I decided I would try to understand and accept the truth regardless of the consequences. For the last 20 years I've seen the consequences get progressively more severe. I don't give a fuck how severe they get though, I'll never regret that decision. I don't know if those who chose compromise are more pitiful or contemptible, but I do know I'd rather die than bend the knee to any of these clowns.
I watched the housing fraud unfold from the safety of my lost job and inability to pay my mortgage. I saw Obama and the rest of the criminal fraudsters hoover up trillions of computer dollars while tens of millions lost their homes and livelihoods. And all my now former liberal friends refused to even acknowledge what was going on. They had voted for "their guy" and that was that.
All I know is that this will break. Not exactly when, but it will. Just as a ball thrown into the air inevitably returns to earth and the tides change, reality will assert itself and this era of profound corruption will end when our fake economy finally hits the wall or some other catastrophe lays bare all the lies and deceit.