And they should be. They’ve been financially raping the West in general and the USA in particular for the last 52 years, kicking the can down the road, and now the time of reckoning is rapidly approaching. And trying to setup President Trump as the scapegoat for things that have been playing out for decades isn’t going to work for them.
“I think that right now we are at a decision-making point and very close to a recession,” Dalio said. “And I’m worried about something worse than a recession if this isn’t handled well.” Dalio explained that the US economy is confronting several overlapping challenges: rising debt, internal political divisions, growing geopolitical tensions, and shifts in global power.
“Such times are very much like the 1930s,” he warned. “If you take tariffs, if you take debt, if you take the rising power challenging the existing power – those changes in the orders, the systems, are very, very disruptive.”
Asked about the worst-case scenario, Dalio pointed to a potential breakdown of the dollar’s role as a store of wealth, combined with internal conflict beyond the norms of democratic politics and escalating international tensions – potentially even military conflict.
“That could be like the breakdown of the monetary system in ‘71. It could be like 2008. It’s going to be very severe,” Dalio said. “I think it could be more severe than those if these other matters simultaneously occur.”
Most of these men can’t pretend they weren’t responsible in some way, that their actions didn’t exacerbate the situation, and that they haven’t used their wealth, power, and influence to make things worse rather than attempting to fix things.
No wonder they’re all terrified and trying to build bunkers and go to space to get away from everyone, for fear that their angry victims will eventually come for them, as the Douglas Rushkoff book I reviewed recently for White Bull, Survival of the Richest, describes.
However, one thing I omitted from my review, as being inappropriate for an apolitical, business-oriented site, was my observation of the fact that for all his criticism of the billionaires, Douglas Rushkoff refuses to accept that their Mindset is, and has always been, fundamentally evil in its rejection of Christendom and traditional Western civilization.
Here are a few of the quotes I highlighted while reading Rushkoff’s book.
- The solution sets imposed by the technocratic elite—true to the logic of scientism—refuse to acknowledge the human soul, irrational though it may be. People want their leadership to be more than utilitarian. As nineteenth-century journalist Walter Bagehot explained, the English constitution needed two parts: “one to excite and preserve the reverence of the population,” and another to “employ that homage in the work of government.” The latter is the pragmatic function of Parliament; the former is the holier role of the Crown. Where the elected government values efficiency, the Crown respects dignity. Or at least, according to Bagehot, it should. Sadly, along with his complaints about the failure of the Crown to meet its divine obligations, Bagehot’s later work descended into pseudoscientific racism, positing that those of mixed race lacked the “fixed traditional sentiments” on which human nature depended.
- The much-feared angry mob is real. We see them act out in alt-right conspiracy groups online, Promise Keeper rallies in the streets, threats of violence by anti-vaxxers against local school boards, and resistance to any globally coordinated mitigation of climate change. Only it’s not, as The Crowd author Gustave Le Bon believed, a pre-existing condition of society that needs to be tamed from above, but a direct response to that top-down, technocratic effort to control them—and everything—in the first place. As the underlying logic, technology, messaging, and remote control of The Mindset is palpable everywhere—school, work, healthcare, warfare, the environment—it’s no wonder so many people are frightened and angry. But instead of pushing for an alternative to the dehumanized, misogynist, antisocial, and catastrophic biases of The Mindset, the resistance is a mirror image of The Mindset itself
- The bigger problem with these would-be reformers ignoring their influences, however, is that they deny themselves any theory of change or social practice. They miss out on the lessons of history, including the mixed legacies of Lippman, Bernays, Bateson, and Mead. They’re destined to repeat the same, well-intentioned, mistakes.
But those legacies aren’t “mixed”. The evidence is now conclusive: Bagehot was correct all along, the culture is not transformative and the dirt is not magic. Those “mistakes” are not “well-intentioned”. Rushkoff is a ticket-taker, and what purports to be a critique of his superiors in the current Clown World elite really amounts to just another futile defense of them.