I have learned that climate change is a hoax, but a useful one. Anything that keeps people in a constant state of fear is useful to the ruling class. I grew up during the (fake) Cold War and in a state of fear, the bomb and communism being so evil. That is how they controlled us in those days. (Running out of oil was a useful scam too. I lived through two Arab boycotts, both fake. I thought they were real.)
These days it is climate change, ISIS, terrorism in general, but I noticed something else yesterday – fear of financial collapse.
Here’s something to think about: Don’t invest in the stock market. Avoid consumer debt, student loan debt, anything that puts you in a position of having to produce a sum certain every month that has to be given over to people who did not earn it.
If that means owning a smaller house than you’d like, that is reality. Drive a heap – old cars that run well are treasures. (Ours are 11 and 10 years old, Japanese, and so well-built, and paid for.)
Are you afraid of what your life will be if you don’t get that college degree? You’re better off without the degree and the debt. You’re left to your own devices. Who ever said that learning only comes from college?
This sounds like heresy, even unrealistic, but what it means is you need to do everything possible to avoid the financial grid. It is a trap. It is meant to be a trap. It is no accident that student loans are handed out like candy with no expectation of performance or even a job on the other end. They are meant to be hung around your neck to keep you in debt and under control throughout your life. Avoid them. (In a sane world college would be based on ability and performance, the tab picked up by all of us via taxes. There are remedies aplenty for slouches.)
Is there another financial collapse on the way? Of course! They are planned. A change of administration often signals the timing, though I don’t know why. With each one the most powerful people go around behind sweeping up the wreckage. The big eat the small.
But truth be told, we have an economy of people making, growing and selling things that are not nail salons or massage parlors. We are all in some form talented enough to survive. We are taught not to develop our real talents, but rather to learn to be good employees, take on massive debt, and lead lives of quiet desperation.
The answer, don’t do that, sounds trite and unworkable. But it is not if you start today. If you are already in the student loan trap, your impetus, your first step should be to shed that burden. If it were me, I would look first to convert it to a form of debt that I can walk away from if I am trapped.
Think about it. Nobody on the other end “earned” that annuity that has you strapped down. It’s all in your head.
I apply it to the field of journalism, where so many thousands of reporters at all levels all over the country intuitively know not to go near certain stories, or types of stories, and who will crush anyone in their profession who does.
To have been young, in my twenties, during the time of Watergate, was fortunate. Of course I did not understand it – very few did then, and possibly fewer now. The obvious object was removal of a president, replacement by a cardboard cutout. But the psychological aspects are far more intriguing than the outcome. For a period of two years we were hit with a barrage of false news, false hearings, liars telling liars about other liars, and the news media positioning itself as an investigative body.
Observe the scene, August, 1971, when five CIA operatives broke in to the office of Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Set aside for the moment the strange notion of a man of such high intellect and position needing a shrink. That was probably an invention. The important thing was the break-in. It was sloppy, meant to be discovered, and its discovery got Ellsberg off the hook. As was intended from the beginning. Like a TV sitcom, it was the last-minute wrap-up that resolved all the problems.*
That is all just to lay groundwork for the next false leader I want to expose, Jenny McCarthy.