Positive feedback loops build on themselves, until they become negative feedback loops.
The problem with outside regulation, rather than allowing the process to go through the cycle, is that it empowers a similar dynamic, at a higher order, which leads to an even greater crash. Think the Fed trying to cure market cycles has simply created more appetite for risk and an emerging metastatic financial crisis.
What you need to challenge the particular cycle you find yourself caught in is to step back enough to ask yourself if the rewards offered make the costs bearable. If not, how to branch out organically enough to give yourself sufficient degrees of freedom and become part of other cycles, going more productive directions.
The evident goal in today’s culture is to extract more signal of money from the noise of society and the underlaying economy to afford all the bling necessary to feed one’s status. While there are myriad ways of going about this, it is becoming evident the system has become increasingly gamed, especially by those managing the financial system. Such that the rest of the economy has mutated from sustaining itself, to manufacturing abstractions of wealth as the end goal.
The basic problem with this is that money largely functions as a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt. So in order to create the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated.
For one thing, this causes a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of the community, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Given finance functions as the value circulation mechanism of the community, this is akin to the heart telling the hands and feet they don’t need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.
The Ancients used debt jubilees to reset this dynamic, but our fast paced and short term culture lacks even that degree of perspective.
The other consequence is that government has been manipulated into being debtor of last resort. Where would those trillions go otherwise? Could Wall St function, without the government sucking up so much surplus capital? Basically public debt backing private wealth is the elephant in the room for capitalism.
That is why we can have endless, strategically inept wars and no one is held accountable, as what drives them is the need to borrow and spend this money in ways which don’t compete with the private sector for limited investment opportunities, in a society where everyone wants infinite wealth.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is the resulting atomized culture is more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system. The fact is that networks matter as much as the nodes.
We all save for many of the same reasons, such as raising children, housing, healthcare, retirement, etc, so that if ways could be developed to invest in these as community assets, we would have stronger, more organic cultures and the healthier environments that would be worth investing in directly. Rather than everyone trying to save individually, with our bank accounts as our personal economic umbilical cord.
What if the government was to threaten to tax out what it currently borrows? Then people would understand they have to find other ways to save for the future, than blowing up other countries.
The functionality of money is in its fungibility, so we own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the fluids passing through our bodies. Consequently it needs to be regulated as a public utility, like roads are a public utility. Not just pouring more vodka in the punch bowl, when it runs low.
The fact is that the future we have been borrowing against is here. So my recommendation is to sit back, take stock of the people you know, appreciate them for who they are and accept the thin ice over the abyss is cracking.
Time isn’t so much the point of the present, moving past to future, as it is change, turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. So there is just this physical state, which we, as mobile, intentional organisms have to navigate, creating the need for this sequential thought process and the narrative effect of our lives as journeys.
Since we are the only life forms to escape the present, through our story telling, our tendency to focus on dangers and goals can become something of an obsession. So when the brain starts spiraling into its particular feedback loops, that means it’s just time to go for a walk.
Like a bicycle; Keep moving forward, or you fall over. Not too fast and not too slow.
