Hearts and Minds

What people think: matters.

Billions of dollars are spent every year trying to manipulate public opinion. This could be for the greater good, nefarious purposes, generating a profit, or even sparking a revolution. People will go to war over a tax on tea and elect politicians based on paid advertisements. Humanity is a very weird place when put under a microscope on a statistical level.

Take the obesity rate in America for example.

It is quite high. Why is it so high? It shouldn't be so high. Lazy Americans should get their fat asses to the gym, amirite? Well it's not that simple, now is it? Trying to apply personal accountability to an entire population is a losing strategy that will leave people confused about why their model doesn't work. How many mid-wits out there are running around blaming fat people for being fat and just assuming that the problem should resolve itself by way of magical thinking? Spoiler alert: it's a lot, and it's embarrassing. People love to comment on the problem without offering any real solutions. Solutions are difficult, and complaining is easy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPMMNvYTEyI&ab_channel=itsthevoiceman

Some people can deal with it.

Some people can live out their hamster-ball life and do just fine. They can get on a treadmill and walk in circles for an hour without getting depressed. They can lift heavy weight up and down over and over while still receiving dopamine hits to the brain and get a sense of accomplishment from what they have done.

And some people: CAN'T

This is what many do not understand. Everyone is different; diversity is everywhere. What works for one group of people isn't going to work for everyone. Someone who works 50 hour weeks and hates their job isn't going to have the energy to do extra stuff on top of it. Sitting at a desk full time isn't going to do anyone's posture or energy levels a favor.

I'm always seeing people post pictures of the beach in the 70's and pose the question: 'Where are the fat people?' What kind of a question is that? Where's the Internet, low grade food, and entire generations of people who can live vicariously in a digital age? Where are all the trash jobs with no pensions or ability to be promoted? Why are there so many stay-at-home moms?

This idea that the past is better than the present is not a productive one. We can not move backwards. What worked for 1970 does not work for 2020. It does not matter if the dollar lost 99% of it's value over the last century because who was storing their value in fiat for the last hundred years? Time and time again we see data get manipulated and exaggerated to paint some picture of a problem that doesn't exist in the way it is presented, nor can it be fixed using the implications therein.

So how can these problems be fixed?

Society and culture have been in a state of severe growing pains for decades. Technology have been terraforming our environment at a rate so fast that it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep up. Capitalism cuts all the corners in the name of profits. The only models that can scale are the ones that not only generate value, but capture it.

And so the answer to a lot of these problems is a complete paradigm shift of how humanity interacts with itself. New scalable models are appearing where the transfer of value from one person to another doesn't inevitably lead to a single agent being in charge. Used to be if you wanted to get something important done one person would have to take a big risk, and would hire people to help them take that big risk and get the thing done. Employees hired in this way are not taking any risk: they are paid by the hour. No risk no reward; they don't get any ownership of the final product. Crypto is changing the game.

At the same time 3D-printing & artificial intelligence is beginning to make a massive appearance. How long before non-human agents start to partake in the new digital economy being forged without the helping hand of an actual person? This is something that's been talked about for over a decade and seemed far away, and is now right around the corner. With the ability to permissionlessly move money around, purely digital agents with no KYC to speak of will be able to convey value directly via the Internet. Surely this will lead to some amazing and potentially terrifying outcomes, but hopefully mostly good will come from it, as pathways that were always closed begin to open up.

Too many people believe the lies.

The entire model for society is shifting toward a data-driven mindset. Trust is profitable, and then the lies derived from that trust are even more profitable. People trust their bank even after they've been fined billions of dollars. People trust their government even after being provably lied to over and over again.

Why does this keep happening?

Because society completely breaks down without trust. No one can do everything, and you have to trust someone, so why not trust who everyone else is trusting? It's really the ultimate in brand recognition and selling out. Many would rather blindly trust what they are told rather than admit they were fooled. The two-party system makes it easy to simply blame all failures on the other side. This is psychology 101, and the science of trust and half-truth has been perfected for decades. There is no end to the depth of this rabbit-hole.

Sounds bleak!

Yeah, it can be depressing, but also shifts in public perception can turn on a dime. One day everything seems to be going fine and then the next a government has been overrun because the price of gas doubled. It's usually not rooted in any kind of logical rhyme or reason. These things are emotional.

We really have to wonder what the future holds considering what a volatile state we find ourselves in. By all accounts it seems like the banks are preparing for disaster. If we thought FTX insolvency wasn't pretty, just wait until actual banks just shrug and tell the common public they don't have their money. This has been happening in developing nations for a while, which is to be expected, but it seems all but certain that the trend will spread to Europe and potentially even the States. FDIC insurance will only go so far. Bail-ins and legally stolen customer funds are the real backstop. Most people do not believe this can happen to them... until it does and they lose all trust.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-QHhpbgscY&ab_channel=TonyTheCloser

The interesting thing about all of this is how people handle it. It wasn't so long ago that when citizens lost all faith within the banking sector that they would stuff their mattress full of cash or find other sub-par ways to store their value. Now that we have crypto and community being built from the ground up, it seems like this time around should be completely different than previous iterations.

It's going to get quite awkward when average people have complete distrust for all the institutions around them, while at the same time being offered an invite to communities that control their own currency with a much better track-record than said institutions. It's never been easy to opt out of the mainstream system and try something new, and the ability to onboard will only get more streamlined as time goes on.

Conclusion

Always be on the lookout when it comes to shifts in the narrative and how public perception is changing. Take now for example: we are seeing very little change in what people believe. Instead, most of us sit in an echo-chamber that reinforces what we already 'know'. It takes massive events and catalysts to occur to change hearts and minds on a global scale, but it does happen. Given the current economic and political climate we can be sure that these shifts in narrative are guaranteed to occur at some point. It's not a matter of 'if' so much as 'when'. The lies of the establishment can only carry them so far.

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