The Good News Is People Are Realizing We're On Our Own

We no longer care who's behind the curtain because we're in charge of our own lives now.

The Good News is people are realizing We're On Our Own and starting to take action accordingly.

This article describes how people in one low-income county are localizing self-reliance rather than remain dependent on government subsidies.

The War on Poverty Failed Them--and They're No Longer Waiting For Help (wsj.com, paywalled) Federal money and projects have come and gone so many times that McDowell County locals have little faith in the government to restore their fortunes; 'We're on our own.'

Here in the heart of America's War on Poverty, some two-thirds of households with children still get food stamps, among the nation's highest rates, and the estimated median household income hovers around $35,000. Nonfarm employment has plummeted 78% since 1975, according to data compiled by West Virginia University economist John Deskins, as the coal that once powered this rugged place is now mostly mined with machines, if at all, and no other industry has replaced it. The county has lost 67% of its residents over those years, the largest drop in West Virginia, its population dwindling from just over 51,000 to roughly 17,000.

With little faith left in government to break the cycle of poverty, those who remain say it'ss up to them to forge a brighter economic path.

"We're on our own," said Jason Tartt. "Nobody's coming down here to save us."

Tartt, the grandson of coal miners, is teaching locals, including retired miners and those recovering from opioid addiction, how to farm the forested hillsides. Down the winding, two-lane roads that connect communities, a pastor organizes bottled-water drives for neighbors whose tap water is undrinkable, while the local utility patches together funding for long-term solutions. A tiny, former coal town is trying to transform a shuttered Walmart into a new factory it hopes will jolt the local economy.

Their efforts are small in comparison to the government programs that have sought to revive McDowell County, and can't make up for the prosperity that slipped away when the coal companies left. But they are spurring hope for renewal in some places, driven by one of the few constants here: resilience.

Nobody includes not just the federal government; it also includes Corporate America. Walmart pulls the plug on under-performing stores regardless of their local importance, and the rest of Corporate America is equally focused on next quarter's profits.

Dependence breeds helplessness, passivity, addiction and the decay of community. There are alternatives. Those seeking to maintain the status quo dismiss alternatives that don't require Wall Street, federal monies and Corporate America ownership because those institutions are buttering their bread.

But out in the real world, there are alternatives--underfunded, dismissed as impractical, etc., but real nonetheless, for example: Regenerative Farmers of America (6:19 minutes) (via Chad D.)

As I observe in my book on Self-Reliance in the 21st Century, we all have to start somewhere, and as the Chinese saying put it, the journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. (A thousand li in the original, of course.)

Self-reliance sounds like an individual journey, but it's fundamentally a community effort as no one person can fulfill every function. As the number of people participating expands, the self-reliance of each participant expands, too.

Those working on self-reliance tend to lead by example. Get the work done, share the results, keep moving forward. There's no jetting around to meetings and conferences, just do the work on the ground. Get it done, learn from mistakes and from others' experiences, experiment to identify what works best in local conditions.

When we realize we really are on our own, things change for the better. We start taking full responsibility for our health, work, goals and integrity. We start thinking through Plans A, B, and if things unravel, Plan C. We lose interest in addictive technologies and substances and other hindrances. We start noticing improvements and taking well-earned pride in them.

We no longer care who's behind the curtain because we're in charge of our own lives now.




Podcasts: Insane Financial Imbalances and a Social Revolution (36:34 min)

Ultra-Processed Life: Unhealthy, Addictive, Deranging, Artificial (36 min)

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)


Check out my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

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My Christmas Letter

As I said, having a sense of humor will get you in trouble nowadays, and this whole thing would be funny if I wasn't in leg-irons.

Dear friends and family:

I'm writing this Christmas missive while my court-appointed lawyer trades cryptocurrencies on his phone. He was recently laid off by an investment bank and since he's never been in court and has zero criminal justice experience, I expect my future missives will be postmarked Alligator Alcatraz.

I'm in a bit of a pickle at the moment, as I was arrested near the Canadian border while attempting to beat the high tariff fees by sneaking a load of lumber across the border via an old logging road. Apparently a drone spotted me. Since it was still dark, maybe they have infrared cameras on the drones now, who knows.

I might have skated through that bust except they ran some kind of scan on me and concluded I was a domestic terrorist. I know having a sense of humor will get you in trouble nowadays, but does my "Yoda for President" bumper sticker make me a terrorist?

They seemed to take an uncommon interest in the Grateful Dead logo on my rear window, and since the Dead have fallen out of the culture's meme-scape, maybe they reckoned that was some secret membership sign or something.

I guess I didn't do myself any favors when the interrogation started, because after a while I said, "If I had a wooden leg, would that make me a table?"

Apparently my lack of online activity raised a red flag, and my explanation that I'd been banned from every Big Tech platform only stoked their suspicion. I always joked that I should watch more videos of puppies and kittens to blend in some, and I guess that's not far off the mark. If I'd viewed more videos of puppies and kittens, I might be a free man right now instead of a suspected terrorist heading for Alligator Alcatraz.

After I told the interrogator to put it where the sun doesn't shine, they rigged up some AI interrogation gizmo. The male voice asked me questions, and I spun out a tall tale that yes, I was intent on bringing down the status quo with my truck and a load of lumber, and maybe the AI chatbot would like to guess how this fit into my compadres' grand plan.

It did its sympathetic therapist number on me but I didn't bite, and I threw all sorts of wacky clues about the real plan at it. When it started asking me about the connection between Hannah Arendt, The Little Prince and Sugar Frosted Flakes, I reckoned it was either hallucinating or working on some mirror-universe thing that was way above my pay grade.

As you know, I am often my own worst enemy, and my last clue to the AI chatbot interrogator was to mention that the whole terrorist plot was based on protecting our precious bodily fluids, and investigators should ask to speak with Colonel Batguano.

As I said, having a sense of humor will get you in trouble nowadays, and this whole thing would be funny if I wasn't in leg-irons. Anyway, put a Grateful Dead skull or a Dancing Bears bumper sticker on your vehicle, if you dare.



Because yes, if you have a wooden leg, you will be taken for a table.



It turns out this quote is a paraphrase, not an actual quote:

The closest in spirit and content, and also the most easily available, is from an interview with Roger Errera in 1973, what turned out to be Hannah Arendt's last public interview. Arendt spoke about the importance of a free press in an era of mass manipulation of truth and public lying: She said:

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie--a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days--but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

The key point in Arendt's statement is that as lies multiply, the result is not that the lie is believed but that people lose faith in the truth and are increasingly susceptible to believe anything. When cynicism about truth reigns, lies operate not because they replace reality but because they make reality wobble--a phrase Arendt employs in her essay Truth and Politics. In that essay, Arendt argued that mass lying undermines our sense of reality by which we find our bearings in the real world:

"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world--and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end--is being destroyed."

The Arendtian point is that constant lying by a propaganda machine does not lead to the lie being believed but leads, instead, to cynicism. This is an argument that Arendt made, already, in her first published book The Origins of Totalitarianism. In that book, Arendt writes:

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."


New Podcasts: Insane Financial Imbalances and a Social Revolution (36:34 min)

Ultra-Processed Life: Unhealthy, Addictive, Deranging, Artificial (36 min)

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)


Check out my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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Insane Financial Imbalances and Social Revolution

A rebalancing of the economy and society will ultimately prove very positive, but first we must navigate the model collapse of insane financial extremes.

I've endeavored to explain how self-referential models veer into hallucinations that are accepted as accurate reflections of the real world. Models are by definition synthetic abstractions of the real world, and as these "train" on their own output, they drift away from authentic understanding without the users being aware that their "world" is both artificial and self-reinforcing: each iteration reinforces their belief in the model's accuracy.

Patient users of AI programs can force AI to admit its output was a hallucination, at which point AI tends to abjectly apologize. But human pride--especially strong among those with high opinions of their intelligence and mastery of life--precludes recognition of catastrophic error (i.e. believing in a hallucination) and apologizing for the error.

Human hubris leads us to double-down when faced with evidence we've placed our faith in a hallucination. We deny that our system/model is a self-reinforcing hallucination even as we go over the falls. The faint cries of "save me!" are short-lived.

Models collapse from their own internal dynamics. They don't need our approval. Our disapproval doesn't stop their collapse. Our choices boil down to 1) go over the falls as models collapse; 2) snap out of the hallucination or 3) enter the netherworld of hyper-normalization, the state of mind where we embrace two contradictory "truths": the hallucination is forever and we're not surprised when it collapses.

Model collapse manifests in many ways: people and systems break down. Anti-social behaviors become normalized, and extremes are accepted as normal as we habituate to dysfunction and breakdowns.

I call this Anti-Progress: what we're sold as "progress" actually reduces our quality of life. In my book The Mythology of Progress, I describe Progress as a powerful mythology, but it can also be understood as a model that is collapsing into a hallucination we cling to with hubristic tenacity.

In everyday life, these extremes manifest as Ultra-Processed Life, a synthetic world in which artificial substitutes have replaced authentic life and experiences because the model increases profits via unhealthy addictions in both the consumer and digital realms.

But people break down in this Mouse Utopia of ultra-processed abundance, and the model's self-reinforcing iterations veer ever farther from authentic experiences.

Which brings us to my latest podcast with Richard Bonugli, Insane Financial Imbalances and a Social Revolution (36:34 min). The word "insane" is jarring, for the dominant model of the global order holds that financial extremes are not just sane, they're proof that all is well, and so calling these extremes "insane" is what's insane.

This is classic model collapse: up until the point of breakdown, the model seems to be functioning perfectly, because being self-referential, there is no other possible output other than the system is performing nominally.

In my new book Investing In Revolution, I describe the two structural flaws in the current model: 1) due to its success in generating abundance, the model's adaptive capacity has decayed, leaving it incapable of adapting to rapidly changing real-world conditions, and 2) the dominance of the financial model has fatally imbalanced society and the economy, an extreme imbalance that will be rebalanced by the pendulum swinging to the opposite extreme.

I call this systemically predictable rebalancing a social revolution, as meet the new boss, same as the old boss is no longer sufficient: the values and incentives that maintain a sustainable balance between society and the economy must change. This Reformation is not financial or political, it is fundamentally social in nature.

This imbalance is visible in the widening divide between the share of the economy going to labor and capital: wage earners' share has been declining for decades, reducing their capacity to afford a secure quality of life without piling up debt:



The earnings generated by ownership of capital go mostly to the very top of the wealth-power pyramid: the majority of income from capital flows to the top 0.25%, with the rest dribbling down to the top 5%.



The bottom 50%'s share of financial assets amounts to signal noise--2.6%.



This imbalance is so extreme that it will catalyze social disorder, yet to call it unsustainable is "insane."



The health of the non-elites has reached crisis levels, yet this too is unremarkable because the model has a "solution": more costly medications that must be taken for life: highly profitable, so all is well.



The hallucination that this is all wonderfully sustainable reveals the dominance of the financial model of how the world works. That society is breaking down is of no concern because natural gas is so abundant that we can easily power up AI data centers, and GDP is rising.



The problem is we only manage what we measure, and all the financial analysis "trains" on its own output. Those staring at screens of soaring stocks and corporate profits declare this is the best possible world while the social order breaks down around them.

A rebalancing of the economy and society will ultimately prove very positive, but first we must navigate the model collapse of insane financial extremes, extremes that are unrecognized in the current hallucination. The collision of the self-reinforcing hallucination with the real world will be challenging.

If we accept that the dominant models have lost their capacity to adapt, and that the imbalance between economic forces and society have reached extremes that demand rebalancing, we can return to the real world in good order. If we cling to the hallucination, then over the falls we will go.


New Podcasts: Insane Financial Imbalances and a Social Revolution (36:34 min)

Ultra-Processed Life: Unhealthy, Addictive, Deranging, Artificial (36 min)

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)


Check out my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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All the Dominant Models Are Collapsing

Every nation is operating on models that are collapsing without those at the controls being aware that the implicit assumptions of their models no longer map reality.

A recent article lays out the collapse of the dominant geopolitical model of "rising powers generate conflict": The Stagnant Order And the End of Rising Powers (Foreign Affairs, paywalled). The basic idea is that the foundations of "rising powers"--demographics and productivity gains--no longer support grandiose planetary dominance.

Rather, demographics is already baked in as a crushing liability to all existing powers, and despite endless claims that technology will jumpstart productivity, the reality is productivity gains have flatlined for decades. "Growth" is a function of expanding debt, not productivity gains.

This dynamic extends beyond geopolitical models: all the models being used to explain and control the world are all collapsing: economic, social, political, they're all collapsing because they are all constructs assembled in eras that no longer map the present.

As I explained in The Entire Bubble Economy Is a Hallucination, models collapse because of two limitations that define all models:

1. All models are self-referential, as they "train" (i.e. generate current analysis) on a limited spectrum of metrics that are presumed to summarize the immensely complex "real world." The model is blind to its own self-referential feedback loop and the limits of the metrics it bases its output on.

Over time, this self-referential "training" degrades the output--the analysis and the decisions based on that analysis--to the point of hallucination: the model is generating output of how the world works that has drifted to far from authentic understanding that it is a hallucination, one that is taken to be "real" by those controlling the model.

2. The metrics being measured leave out enormous fields of the real world, but what's been left out isn't explicit, as it's all based on what is considered "knowable" and "known," as I explained in What We "Know" Is More Dangerous Than the Unknown: these assumptions are hidden limitations of the model, as we only manage what we measure.

I break this down in my book Investing In Revolution.

The collapse of the dominant models is visible everywhere, but perhaps most painfully in economics, which has become the dominant model of how the world works due to the dominance of statistical models of finance and the policies those models generate.

I addressed this failure of economics to accurately predict outcomes back in 2013: Why Isn't There a Demonstrably Correct Economic Theory? (August 16, 2013)

"This system is intrinsically unstable, as the financial claims of credit and fiat money on limited real-world resources and wealth eventually far exceed real-world resources, and the system of claims collapses in a heap.

Although economics doesn't recognize it, the operative phrase here is systemic injustice."

Why Economics Will Never Be a Legitimate Science (December 24, 2013)

All the extant economic models are artifacts of bygone eras. The economic models of the 19th century--all based on the implicit assumption that resources were endless--were modified in the 1930s into Keynesian hallucinations still based on endless resources: let's just pay people with freshly printed "money" to dig holes and fill them. This presumes endless resources to squander on digging holes and filling them, as if that is a productive use of labor and resources.

This hallucination continues to be the dominant paradigm: resources are endless because we're clever and there will always be a substitute for whatever is depleted, so the "solution" is just print "money" to pay people to dig holes and fill them.

The "problem" is "growth" of consumption, and so if we "solve" that problem by goosing consumption by any means available, we enter "Mouse Utopia," an artificial world of never-ending abundance.

The book Money, Blood and Revolution: How Darwin and the Doctor of King Charles I Could Turn Economics into a Science takes a stab at turning economics into "science," but that's not actually "the problem." The real problem is all models have intrinsic limits and end up hallucinating, but those controlling the gearing of the model depend on it to maintain their own power, so they are blind to the failure of their precious model to track the real world and generate authentic understanding.

So we're told that all is well because GDP and the stock market are rising, and since we have lots of natural gas to power AI data centers, we're entering a "Mouse Utopia" of endless abundance. That these are all hallucinations is lost on those clinging to collapsing models as the means of maintaining their power.



That the hallucinations are sustainable is itself a hallucination:



That the inhabitants of "Mouse Utopia" are not focused on how natty gas and AI are going to make Utopia even more utopian is lost in the current model collapse: antisocial behaviors are accelerating due to the the artificial nature and exploitive structure of our "Mouse Utopia," but these realities aren't measured and so they don't exist in the current model's self-referential hallucinations:



All the dominant models are collapsing at once, and no nation is immune to the consequences, as every nation is operating on models that are collapsing without those at the controls being aware that the implicit assumptions of their models no longer map reality:

If We Measured the Economy by Quality-of-Life Instead of GDP, We'd Be In a Depression (October 16, 2025)


New Podcast: Insane Financial Imbalances and a Social Revolution (36:34 min)

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)


Check out my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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The Wile E. Coyote Insight: What We "Know" Is More Dangerous Than the Unknown

This is why "knowledge is power": those who define what is "knowable" and "known" shape the reality of everyone in the model / system.

Oh crikey, is this another boring post trying to make philosophy relevant? No, it's a post about survival of the fittest, as what we "know" will lead us straight off the cliff in a state of delusional confidence. What we "know" is a mix of what we accept as known and what is knowable, which is defined by the system / zeitgeist / frame of reference we inhabit.

Nowadays we can't talk about "knowing" without invoking AI, which claims to have gathered all of human knowledge and made it available to us in natural language. But as I've taken pains to describe this year in dozens of posts and two books, what AI presents as "known" has been processed in ways we don't see, and these processes limit the reliability and trustworthiness of what AI presents as "known" and "knowable."

The danger here is our ill-informed confidence in AI and in what our system presents as rock-solid "knowable." The system says Gross Domestic product (GDP) is a rock-solid measure of the economy, and since it's rising, you can be absolutely confident about chasing gains (the Roadrunner) off the cliff. (See Wile E. Coyote below.)

Here's the thing that gets passed over: AI hallucinates, but it doesn't "know" it's hallucinating; it presents fabrications as "known facts." AI didn't "knowingly" take digital Ayahuasca and LSD and "know" it will be hallucinating as a result. It "thinks" it's reporting what are established "knowns"--first, this is knowable, and second, this is known.

We're no different when we're fed hallucinations as if they're "known facts." We're unaware they're hallucinations, and so we blithely walk off the cliff because we placed our confidence in fabrications, models that have collapsed without us being aware that 1) we accepted a model as reality and 2) the model collapsed and is now generating "information" that isn't entirely knowable and isn't "fact."

You see the difference: when we knowingly take hallucinogens such as Ayahuasca or LSD, we know our experiences no longer reflect "facts." We understand our experiences may veer into territory that science defines as "unknowable," yet we are experiencing it anyway. We know it is unwise to walk along a cliff edge at dusk in a hallucinogenic state.

But in model collapses, we think the hallucination is the real world. It is in this confused state that we place our confidence in a hallucination and walk calmly off the cliff to our demise.

This is where the survival of the fittest kicks in: confusing reality and a model-collapse hallucination does not generate positive survival outcomes. I explain the systemic sources of this confusion in my latest book Investing In Revolution.

As I explained in Model Collapse: The Entire Bubble Economy Is a Hallucination, model collapse is the inevitable result when those controlling the model's gearing / programming begin using the output of their previous results (output) to "train" the next iteration of their "knowledge," i.e. what they consider knowable and known.

Using probabilistic functions and overweighting what is accepted by conventions as knowable and known both skew the outputs, which accumulate as each iteration "trains" on the skewed outputs. Knowledge that is on the margins or discounted by conventional definitions of what is being measured as "facts" is edited out of the knowledge base or reframed in conventional terms: in AI "training," this is the Silicon Valley frame of reference.

Those who control the gearing / programming trust their own judgement and models, and so they resist recognizing the increasingly hallucinogenic nature of their model. Their frame of reference is we have god-like powers and are building utopia, and the idea that they have a poor grasp of what is knowable and what is known doesn't penetrate their hubris.

The inhabitants of their Mouse Utopia have been trained to trust their techno-leaders as demi-gods because "technology is Progress," and so their core survival skills--skepticism, a keen awareness of what is unknown because reality has one foot in what is intrinsically unknowable--have atrophied. Surrounded by novelties, addictive distractions, conveniences and comforts, they have lost the ability to differentiate the real world from a (highly profitable) artificial world.

This is a visual representation of what happens when a system "trains" on its own output: GDP is rising, so everyone's doing great, money solves all problems, except moral decay and the other sources of our hallucinations, and so on:



Here's a list of the model-collapse hallucinations we now trust as reality to our future detriment:

1. The entire global financial system is a hallucination generated by model collapse. This hallucination is most easily visible in bubbles, credit, "banking" and "money."

2. The entire AI bubble, including AGI (artificial general intelligence), is a hallucination generated by model collapse that is being purposefully obscured to maximize private gains from the public's embrace of the AI-bubble hallucination.

3. Social Media is a hallucination generated by model collapse that is being purposefully obscured to maximize private gains from the public's addiction to the social-media hallucination.

4. The entire status quo of Ultra-Processed Life is a model collapse hallucination, including the delusions that all our problems can be resolved with an "abundance of money" and "energy."

This is why "knowledge is power": those who define what is "knowable" and "known" shape the reality of everyone in the model / system. The result is we're living in a Mouse Utopia that is in late-stage model collapse that is largely unrecognized by the inhabitants but acutely visible to those keeping it glued together long enough to amass private fortunes before it all implodes.

It's highly profitable to maintain the illusion that these hallucinations are "the known world," but when the model implodes, you'll want to be outside the ruins rather than buried beneath rubble. It is only then that we'll realize that what we "know" is more dangerous than the unknown.




My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)


Check out my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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