People often refer to Charles Mackay’s 1841 book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” in the context of financial manias, but the book actually addresses several social manias as well.
This should remind us to look for manias in our social experience, and I argue that the collectivist assault on social norms best typified by “transgenderism” is cut from the exact same cloth as is the notion of assigning a profitless corporation a value of hundreds of millions, if not many billions of dollars.
Some years ago my favorite financial guru, Robert Prechter, penned a newsletter highlighting the market’s embrace of a Jungian archetype: flight.
His discussion noted that the subconscious embrace of this archetype involved a feeling that all Earthly limits were cast aside, and the person experiencing this felt as though they could simply spread their arms and rise into the sky, free of the encumbrance of gravity. His position was that the financial mania was an expression of this feeling of freedom.
I hold that the roots of this shared illusion were planted over 50 years ago, when American citizens experienced the removal of the last physical anchor of the dollar to anything real when silver was removed from coinage in 1964. Seven years later the Nixon administration ceased exchanging gold for dollars with foreign nations and the dollar became a fully free-floating abstraction. Under this new system there was no longer a fixed physical relationship between the dollar and any single thing, freeing the human herd to skip from one dollar-relationship to another, disguising the debasement of dollar-based wealth particularly in terms of dollar-based IOUs (also known as debt securities.)
Freed of all physical laws or relationships, people could see no limit to how much dollar-based wealth could be imagined into existence simply by creating a new “I’ll pay you X number of dollars in Y number of years” bond. Since that time, a virtual (in both senses) ocean of IOU-dollars has been created. Few people ever stop to even try to grasp just how many promises to deliver future dollars have been issued, and even those who do so face difficulties in determining what constitutes such a promise. The current figures vary from something like $60,000,000,000,000 to as high as $1,250,000,000,000,000. Yes, those numbers are simply incomprehensible to every single man and woman. We are cast adrift.
The current fad of transgenderism is absolutely related to this. The rationalists among us see sex as a biologically determined fact. If a human is born with an XY chromosome pair, that person is male, and if born with an XX chromosome pair, that person is female.
This biological law is no longer considered relevant in our modern time. A man who believes he should be a woman can simply state he’s a woman (a magical incantation) and others are now obligated to respect his belief increasingly on pain of legal sanction. Belief about oneself trumps biological fact. Think about that. [Arguments in favor of this sometimes raise the existence of “intersex” persons, i.e., those extremely rare people born with a non-standard sex chromosome combination like XXY or XYY, but in fact these persons are NOT transgendered; they are often reproductively sterile and again, quite rare.]
The basis of favoring respect for transgenderism is a combination of rejecting physical & natural (biological) laws and demanding a level of compassion from society’s members to the point of celebrating the Emperor’s New Clothes (on pain of being stoned by the PC mob.)
Today the main US stock averages are near all-time nominal dollar highs after what is largely a forty year vertical rise. Total credit market debt has simultaneously skyrocketed, filling an ocean of IOU-dollars. These events coincided with the unmooring of “the dollar” (the unit of measure of stocks) from any consistent physical anchor, allowing manic shared optimism to engage in a feedback loop of virtual wealth creation which is nothing more than Tulipmania on steroids, raised to a large exponent. We are still gasping for oxygen at altitude in the greatest asset mania in recorded history.
But at the same time, social rejection of natural laws and limits pounds us like boats moored before a category 5 hurricane. This week the Department of Education ordered an Illinois school district to allow a teenaged male who claims he’s a girl to use the girl’s locker room in a high school, and pop culture rags like Slate now carry columns seeking compassion for pedophiles, an early step in the process that was used to normalize homosexuality.
Speaking of homosexuality, let’s try a thought experiment: What percentage of people are gay or lesbian? Now think about how many people you know in total, personally, well enough to have a sense of their sexual orientation. How many are queers?
I’ve tried this a few times and a common answer to the first question is 30%. When then asked to quantify the percentage in their actual experience, the figure drops to about 1%. Why? Because the former figure is a product of pervasive propaganda saturating TV sitcoms, movies, the nightly “news,” and every other print and electronic megaphone directed at your head. And the same people behind this Big Lie, this attempt to convince everyone that something rare (fact) is something common and normal (lie), are now in the final stage of this with transgenderism while prepping the field for pedophilia.
We used to define when a person categorically rejected objective reality as “mental illness.” Now, everyone is expected to refer to all individuals who think they’re Napoleon as “emperor” and enable every increasingly bizarre delusion people muster.
I’m a microbiologist and biologist by education. I’ve lived an outstanding life so far, raising highly successful kids who are, like their parents, leading very happy lives at a time when so many people embrace utter folly and then predictably wallow in misery and unhappiness. This qualifies me to ridicule, as a form of behavioral aberration, the post-modernist rejection of objective reality suffused with natural, physical and inviolable laws. I know when I’m being sold a lie, and I know that while the appearance of laws’ repeal can continue for a long time, such a condition is not permanent. I know deviancy leads to misery, and I know that demanding we all enable its indulgence does no one any favors.
I now see that stock averages being high, oceans of bonds being priced to yield almost nothing and utterly moronic, misery-inducing social fads springing up like poison weeds all spring from the same natural phenomenon captured by Mackay over 170 years ago. As they arise from the same medium, they will fall more or less together.
I don’t know when that will be; I’ve expected each new lurch into absurdity more astonishing than the previous one, and frankly believed we had reached apogee 20 years ago yet here we are. Sooner or later, however, gravity will reassert. My suggestion is to not be flying high with the fairies when it does.
One can find correlations in just about everything.
“How many are queers?”
Agree with your paragraph, and my guess would be about 1-5%. Believe you will find that liberals will provide the 30% answer.
we made homosexual recruitment into the military a done deal. now,with a homo charge of the army, and military rapes at all time highs, heteros are going to stay away and we will have a eunuch -type class of sissified soldiers getting promotions based on blow jobs. 101st ass-bored division. the pink berets.
and a recent poll found just under 4% of respondents identified sexually as one of the common initials LGBTQIA etc. but a San Francisco high school has kids identifying in the 20% range, so there goes the “born that way” argument. they’re modelling at much higher rate because of their exposure to more fags & dykes + the desire to be trendy (the tattoo effect).
Great post, DC.
What is so frustrating is that I can see the fractures, all the insane imbalances and ridiculous levels of instability in our system. Yet, nothing breaks. It becomes more clear each day that the whole thing is teetering, but I have been actively watching the teeters for a good 4 years…and nothing falls. The fall is inevitable, of course, but it is a very powerless feeling to recognize this inevitability, only to wait (seemingly) endlessly.
Bravo, DC!
As a one-time Elliot Wave guy and big fan of Prechter, reviewer of his books way back when (90s), I’d have to take issue with his predictive ability. As I’ve said before, his take on fundamentals is solid, but his sense of timing has been proven so disastrously wrong that his credibility is shot to shit. In a former life, I was an equities trader and aside from the Fibonacci fan, he was way off base in his tech analysis once the rational market rules went by the wayside. I quit in ´97 and am ever so glad I did! In my worst nightmares, I couldn’t have imagined a US society even approaching what exists now, although I feared the future enough to leave. Glad I did that too!
I keep hoping that “gravity will reassert”, but I’m getting terribly tired of waiting for it to do so and at times wonder if it will do so in my lifetime.
“the desire to be trendy (the tattoo effect)”
Stocks & Bonds inform me that we are in the clutches of a mania. Anyone who has enough sense to simply graph some of the relevant data with a long enough time line can see this.
This informs me that manic herding behavior should be expected in every direction. What do we see?
1. Tattoos, piercings.
2. Funky hair colors.
3. White chicks doing the trendy thing of bedding black guys.
4. Legions of lost, confused young people seeking “specialness” by calling themselves gay or lesbian (not as trendy any more, too common) or transgender or pansexual (much more trendy, rating high on the cool factor.)
All of us herd, it’s how we’re wired.
What disgusts me are those who ONLY herd. When I see heavily tattooed people, white girls hanging out with or having babies with blacks, people who openly seek public status for being LGBT or simply people (overwhelmingly women) who stack up cubic yards of clothes, shoes, boots and handbags in a frenzy of mindless shopping, I see nothing but bovine herd animals who are doomed to lifelong misery.
The path to happiness is not difficult to discern. Most simply follow the herd in wallowing in misery well within sight of it.
When this 50 year period of “rally,” topped by a 20 year (and counting) asset mania finally does end, truly will the Shit Hit The Fan.
The people who will be drowning in sewage at the bottom of the septic tank will be those who indulged most continuously and enthusiastically in the fads of today.
People today are making irrevocable decisions that will utterly DOOM them in the conditions that must follow this current epoch.
Once, I might have pitied them. Now, after being heaped with scorn for year, I wouldn’t pee on them if they were on fire.
Montefrío, I feel your pain. I erred in thinking ANYONE can predict the future, and it cost me dearly.
I now approach all this differently, and am happier for it. I think Prechter’s insights are correct from a very high level, but they are essentially useless in planning actions.
Theory is always right. But applied theory is nearly impossible. Mises irrefutably deconstructed socialism in 1922 yet the USSR outlived him. Theory was and remains irrefutable, yet socialism persists and we face in all likelihood a huge increase in it. That’s the irrationality of life lived in the human collective.
History has not read its “end.” The cyclicality of human social action remains, but there is no objective way to determine “how high is up.” Complex systems defy prediction. You and I know that in spades.
That said, we still know that “this too will end.” We don’t know when (it could have in 1998, 2000, 2007 and any time in the last 5 years, but it hasn’t. I have no idea how much longer it could go on, although I still believe the charts indicate a certain level of risk that the next significant decline will be The Big One.
What I do know is that the trend is the trend, and that while rallies can ignore the toppy technicals, declines NEVER do. Declines are, if you look dispassionately at them, quite well-behaved. Pick your favorite TA tools and you find that rallies either within or at the end of big declines are always telegraphed ahead of time. Interestingly enough, bears follow the rules, bulls don’t…or they haven’t.
We’ll see. My philosophy is “Live in Plan A” (the world as it is), be half-prepared for Plan B (something like 1930-32) and have a little preparation for Plan C (shit really gets bad, but not Walking Dead bad, and life goes on.) I don’t worry about Plan D (TEOTWAWKI) because preparing for that is mutually exclusive with all of the other Plans. No one knows the timing.
But today’s insanity has little further to run. I don’t give a damn if a President authorized prosecution of anyone who objected to their 7 year old daughter or son being molested by a pedophile (because society decided that pedophiles are people, too, and just like gays and trans must be accommodated), if someone harmed a member of my family that way they’d be screwed, right along with anyone who tried to normalize their acts. The social insanity is finally bumping up against something that is primordial. Primordial will win this round, no matter how high the manic social mood goes.
The LBGT entryist assault on the US military strikes me as not a big deal, given that the US military is doing absolutely nothing to actually protect the country and for all practical purposes is now the private praetorian guard of whoever occupies the White House.
Given that those who rule the USA seem inclined to consider US citizens the enemy, I’d rather see soldiers and Marines marching around in high heels while wearing thongs and bras.
While the author says that the percentage of people that he knows who are queer is about 1%, my experience is much higher. Of course, that is due to visiting this site so much.
“We used to define when a person categorically rejected objective reality as “mental illness.” Now, everyone is expected to refer to all individuals who think they’re Napoleon as “emperor” and enable every increasingly bizarre delusion people muster.”
Spot on!
I had to re-draw the cycle of turnings because a wheel doesn’t make much sense but a sine wave pattern does since it describes forward movement in time where a circle seems like an endless loop. So, in the current upswing of the sine wave, we are at the point where anything goes. There is no respect for authority and no demand for authority. It’s a fucked up place to be. There is not discrete point at which the country falls off a cliff because square waves or saw tooth waves are not a natural occurrence. Waves are also not pure but they are accompanied by noise that is part of the wave, the noise rides on the main wave. These are the associated symptoms of the cycle: manias, delusions and heresies.
HST said, when the going get weird, the weird go pro. Seeing all the weirdos coming out to the forefront and hogging the attention of the media is proof enough that the going has gotten weird. The Mardi Gras prarades in NO had gotten so weird that homos were penetrating each other while parading down the public thoroughfare. Katrina took care of that shit. Now the pervs are back at it on a national scale. We can expect a Katrina size flood someday. My projection is not so wild. Legitimate scientists predict a huge earthquake to hit So Cal as early as tomorrow or sometime within the next 3 years.
Woe to you who add house to house
and join field to field
till no space is left
and you live alone in the land.
9 The Lord Almighty has declared in my hearing:
“Surely the great houses will become desolate,
the fine mansions left without occupants.
10 A ten-acre vineyard will produce only a bath[a] of wine;
a homer[b] of seed will yield only an ephah[c] of grain.”
11 Woe to those who rise early in the morning
to run after their drinks,
who stay up late at night
till they are inflamed with wine.
12 They have harps and lyres at their banquets,
pipes and timbrels and wine,
but they have no regard for the deeds of the Lord,
no respect for the work of his hands.
13 Therefore my people will go into exile
for lack of understanding;
those of high rank will die of hunger
and the common people will be parched with thirst.
14 Therefore Death expands its jaws,
opening wide its mouth;
into it will descend their nobles and masses
with all their brawlers and revelers.
15 So people will be brought low
and everyone humbled,
the eyes of the arrogant humbled.
16 But the Lord Almighty will be exalted by his justice,
and the holy God will be proved holy by his righteous acts.
17 Then sheep will graze as in their own pasture;
lambs will feed[d] among the ruins of the rich.
18 Woe to those who draw sin along with cords of deceit,
and wickedness as with cart ropes,
19 to those who say, “Let God hurry;
let him hasten his work
so we may see it.
The plan of the Holy One of Israel—
let it approach, let it come into view,
so we may know it.”
20 Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter.
21 Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes
and clever in their own sight.
22 Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine
and champions at mixing drinks,
23 who acquit the guilty for a bribe,
but deny justice to the innocent.
24 Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw
and as dry grass sinks down in the flames,
so their roots will decay
and their flowers blow away like dust;
for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty
and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel.
25 Therefore the Lord’s anger burns against his people;
his hand is raised and he strikes them down.
The mountains shake,
and the dead bodies are like refuse in the streets.
Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
his hand is still upraised.
26 He lifts up a banner for the distant nations,
he whistles for those at the ends of the earth.
Here they come,
swiftly and speedily!
27 Not one of them grows tired or stumbles,
not one slumbers or sleeps;
not a belt is loosened at the waist,
not a sandal strap is broken.
28 Their arrows are sharp,
all their bows are strung;
their horses’ hooves seem like flint,
their chariot wheels like a whirlwind.
29 Their roar is like that of the lion,
they roar like young lions;
they growl as they seize their prey
and carry it off with no one to rescue.
30 In that day they will roar over it
like the roaring of the sea.
And if one looks at the land,
there is only darkness and distress;
even the sun will be darkened by clouds.