If Only We Knew What We Know

Renewable pipe dreams, the Great Transition and the looming molecule crisis...

Joel Bowman, reckoning today from Buenos Aires, Argentina...

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” ~ The Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

Welcome to another Sunday Sesh, that time of the week when we pull up a barstool, take stock of the moment and, in today’s case, give thanks where it’s long overdue. (Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of time for grumbling, kvetching and curmudgeonly indulgences in future issues...)

Nary a day goes by that we are not invited to suspend disbelief, to take leave of our senses, and to accept on the one hand the utterly preposterous, and on the other the inexplicably divine. 

We rise every Sunday, a small miracle in itself. Like many Dear Readers, we take our coffee (flat white, extra shot) as if it were a matter of course, scarcely appreciating the many hands that went into its careful production. Our eggs, likewise, arrive on our plate, hearty and nutritious, as if delivered by angels in aprons. As for the bacon, it is as though Demeter herself husbanded the perfect breakfast drift, with our very taste buds in mind. 

Our clothes, too, are delivered from exotic lands... Bangladesh, Vietnam, Sri Lanka... sewn by gentle hands, packed by calloused ones, then shipped and freighted across the wine dark seas to anonymous nobodies, hunched in front of laptop screens. 

These gadgets, in turn, are assembled, meticulously and expertly, by people we will never meet, in factories we will never visit. They are imagined by futurists, engineered by geniuses, and distributed to the far reaches of the known world on vessels and vehicles of unimaginable complexity. 

And yet, what have we done to deserve such a bounty? What new land did we discover? What disease did we cure? What invention did we bestow upon mankind, that we are lavished with such luxury? 

Nada. Nil. Zilch. 

No Ode to a Grecian Urn flowed from our pen. No Eureka! moments sprang from our cranium. No complex machines, statues of David or unfinished symphonies emanated from our hallowed being. 

And still, we can summon a private chauffeur with the click of a button, as easily as a king might command his cavalry. Expert chefs will prepare our meal, in any cuisine of our choosing, and deliver it to our door within the hour. And if we so wish, we can do as poor Dedalus only dreamed of: board a flying contraption and soar through the heavens to any destination on God's green earth. 

We mention such wonders, if only in passing, to underscore the precarious nature by which the global economy hangs together... and how easily it can all be disrupted, especially by well-meaning world improvers, who would ignore the lessons of history only to impose their top-down, command economy style “solutions” to problems of their own making.  

Earlier this week, we spoke to Harvard-trained geologist, geopolitical expert and all round man-of-letters, Byron King. What Byron doesn’t know about the energy markets may well not be worth knowing. And what he sees coming down the proverbial pike should alarm people who enjoy things like... oh, functioning light switches, buttons on their shirts, antibiotics, white in their paint, landing gear on their aircraft, steel in their bridges. You know, the kind of stuff we are routinely invited to take for granted, until it disappears. 

Over the course of a freewheeling hour or so, Byron warned of the impending molecule crisis (“it’s not just energy, there’s a shortage of everything...”) the folly of the Great Energy Transition (“turns out you can’t power the world with Facebook ‘likes’ and invitations to your birthday”) and the geopolitical risk of offshoring critical industry, particularly in the “stuff economy.” 

You’ll find our conversation with Byron in this week’s episode of the Fatal Conceits podcast, below. But first, in case you needed a gentle reminder of just how gullible man is when it comes to going along with cockamamie schemes and whackjob theories, we table the following essay for consideration in this week’s Sunday Sesh. Please enjoy and let us know your own thoughts in the comments section, below... 

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Homo Credulus

By Joel Bowman

Man: He’ll go along with just about anything.

Given the right circumstances… a little programming… and enough time for it all to marinate in his soft, mammalian brain… there is almost nothing Homo Credulus will not learn to embrace.

Don’t believe us?

Take a look at the historical record; you’ll soon wonder how we ever got this far.

Sure, you’ll discover gizmos and flying contraptions… art and agriculture… music and mathematics. You’ll witness spectacular scientific breakthroughs, the number “0” and a man’s footprint on the moon. You’ll also find automobiles with so many cup holders, you won’t know where to holster your oversized 7/11 Big Gulp.

But you’ll also scratch your head. Perhaps you’ll even weep. And if you think hard enough, you’ll put a few things to serious question…

“Central banks?” “Modern democracy?” “The Ellen DeGeneres Show?”

How has mankind survived such atrocities? Self inflicted, no less! And why, moreover, does he rush so earnestly to repeat and replay his worst mistakes? (Ellen has been on air since 2003!)

Don’t be too hard on yourself, Dear Reader. After all, repetition is nothing new…

You’ll recall that it was the Greeks who first gave the world democracy – from the Greek, dēmokratía, literally “Rule by ‘People’”. (And yes, it was those very same Greeks who put their own beloved Socrates to death… by a majority vote of 361-140.)

Today, democracy is a cherished tenet of “the West.” It is woven into the civic religion, sewn into the social fabric. Men march off eagerly to fight for it, to proselytize it … and to die in forgotten ditches defending it.

At least, that’s what they believe they’re doing. As usual, the poor saps have been duped. Herewith, a little historical context…

The phrase “Making the world safe for democracy” was actually a marketing slogan, coined back in the 1910s, as a way to sell “The Great War” to America. Weary from their own disastrous Civil War just a few decades earlier, in which hundreds of thousands of (mostly) young men gave up the ghost, Americans were mostly inward looking at the time. That is to say, they wanted little to do with what they largely saw as a “European affair.”

Polls might have indicated no appetite for battle… but the nation’s politicians were nonetheless starved for military misadventure. They sensed big profits abroad, both in manufacturing armaments and making onerous bank loans to foreign lands. Sure, “the nation” would have to fill tank and trench with warm young bodies… but very few soldiers would carry senatorial surnames along with their rifles.

And so, after a public relations campaign of truly epic proportions, America marched off to war… wrapped in the delusion they had freshly been sold.

Eddie Bernays, the man who coined the phrase and, thus, peddled the war to America, made a fortune for his efforts. He was even invited by Woodrow Wilson to attend the Paris Peace Conference, in 1919, as a show of gratitude for his services.

There, Bernays learned the full impact of his “democracy” slogan. An obviously bright fellow, the surreal experience caused him to think…

If people will line up to kill one another under the influence of a mere marketing campaign… they could surely be convinced to do, say and buy just about anything!

Bernays was right. In fact, he wrote a series of books, detailing his insights. They included Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), A Public Relations Counsel (1927) and a neat little number titled Propaganda (1928), in which Bernays laid out the blueprint for mass social and psychological manipulation.

The collected works went on to become a huge success… and the favorite of none other than Joseph Goebbles, Reich Minister for Propaganda in Nazi Germany between 1933-45.

Bernays himself, writing in his 1965 autobiography, recalls a dinner at home in 1933 where…

Karl von Wiegand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Wiegand his propaganda library, the best Wiegand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Wiegand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. […] Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.

It is indeed chilling to think of such a heinous undertaking as being engineered, blueprinted, premeditated and carried out according to some kind of script. And yet, there it is… in Bernays’ own words, the “Father of Propaganda.”

Having acquired somewhat of a tainted reputation-by-association, propaganda, itself, underwent a “strategic rebranding” after WWII. But make no mistake, the very same métier thrives to this day, under the more socially palatable designation, “Public Relations.”

Still, a ruse by any other name…

“Could we be so stupid again?” wonders the gentle reader. “Might the mob still be swayed by what Charles Mackay termed ‘extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds?’”

Why, of course! That’s the nature of the mob!

Whether in love, finance, politics or any other matter, man is wont to be convinced, assured, persuaded, often against his own best interests. Few are the absurdities in which he will not take refuge, invest his hard-earned capital or squander his morality.

All he needs is a good story, something to arrest his imagination and cauterize his capacity for reason. A distraction from his lonely, quotidian existence.

That, and a few crumbs to pass his lips.

The Roman poet, Juvenal, recognized as much when he mocked the panem et circenses (bread and circuses) stratagem almost two millennia ago. In his Satire X, he referred to the Annona (a kind of grain dole) and the famous circus games, held in the Colosseum and elsewhere, as designed to keep the unthinking population fed and happy.

Look around you today, Dear Reader. What do you see, two millennia later, in the Year of Their Lord, 2022 AD?

We’ve got reality television and stadium sports matches… food stamp programs and an Everest of transfer payments… we’ve got mask mandates at schools and the whole pretense of safety and security… there’s $30 trillion in national debt and government spending out the wazoo... plus a collapsing workforce, an opioid epidemic (out-killing COVID-19 in < 65s) and Whoopi Goldberg in the sin bin...

And behind it all, the greatest bread and circuses show ever: modern representative democracy.

Now, as then, the show goes on!

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And now, it’s time for more Fatal Conceits - the podcast about money, markets, mobs and manias...

Joel Bowman and Byron King: If we only knew what we know

Finally, a quick reminder to paid readers that we’ll be hosting another private Zoom call this coming week, this time with Bill’s family fund manager and long time friend, Chris Mayer. The live video chat will be similar in format to our Winter Catastrophe call and will take place Thursday, February 17th, at 9am EST. (There will also be an audio recording and transcript of the event, in case you are unable to make it on the day.)

Readers who have been following Mr. Mayer’s work over the years know that there are few investors in the business better equipped to deal with the turbulent market conditions such as we’re lately witnessing. If you’re not already a happily paying subscriber, but would like to rectify that flagrant oversight in time to join the call, you can do so here...

And that’s all from us for another week. We’re off to enjoy an unhurried lunch with friends at one of our favorite neighborhood parrillas: Lo de Jesus. Whatever you’re up to, and wherever you're up to it, enjoy your weekend. 

Cheers,

Joel Bowman