I should start this out with a disclaimer. I worked as a financial planner and stock broker for 25 years and really didn’t begin to grasp the true mechanics of the financial system until nearly 10 years in. It took even longer for the magnitude of the crony capitalist corruption to sink in. I was indoctrinated by book and exam, scored extremely high in the various licensing and accreditation examinations (meaning I had fully swallowed my programming) and successfully parroted what I had learned.
It was only when the stink from the long dead skunk in the woodpile became overwhelming and could no longer be ignored did I begin to probe and seriously question both the financial ‘authorities’, the prevailing financial meme and myself. So when I come across others who are following the same path while blindfolded I am not casting stones. Instead, I am illustrating how we are all deeply immersed in many alternative reality memes even as I focus on this one in particular.
Ultimately we all have a multitude of cognitive filters, some finely woven and carefully discriminating, other as coarse as a heavy metal screen at a stone crushing plant. We pass everything we see, hear and experience through these filters before actually computing what we just encountered. Mix in heavy dollops of cognitive bias, wishful thinking and selective hearing and the results is often a cognitive Molotov cocktail with an already lit fuse.
Now imagine engaging in an earnest conversation about an emotional issue with a terribly conflicted and self interested third party acting as the messenger/translator between the principal parties. If that’s not bad enough, now that the factions are separated by the third party, it is now perceived by all interested parties (including the ones who consider themselves the innocent victim) to employ deception, dishonesty, propaganda, feigned sincerity and abject apathy as a negotiating tactic in an attempt to leverage any and all poker chips to their side of the table. Continue reading Straight from the Horse’s Mouth→
We are so inured to the present day socioeconomic system of exploitation and control that it has become seamless and mostly invisible to 'We the Walking Wounded'. Passed off as just the way things work, nothing to see here so move on, we sooth our crushed soul with the ego saving lament you just can't fight city hall.
It rarely occurs to us there is no need to actually fight at all, that what we dimly perceive as the enemy, the thorn in our paw, is doomed by its own dominance of an industrial age soon to be left behind.
Two Ice Floes welcomes back Joe Withrow, a long time TIF guest author, with another insightful and timely article outlining what is happening and how to navigate the fall of the industrial age and the Rise of the Individual.
