Bread & circuses
Sunday Serendipity - Volume 5
Hola amigos,
Welcome back to Sunday Serendipity.
Despite there being SO MANY THINGS TO TALK ABOUT, I’m going to keep today’s post short and sweet. On my flight back to Barcelona, I started Ray Dalio’s new book titled "How Countries Go Broke”.
In it, he explains how Big Debt Cycles are often ignored because they only happen once in a lifetime and we don't get to learn about them through direct experiences.
I'm planning to do a more in-depth review, but for now the main point I've taken away is that it would be negligent to think that a similar cycle is not playing out in the U.S.
How Countries Go Broke — that’s the theme of this weeks Sunday Serendipity…
Dalio has studied Debt Cycles for decades and we know that they always lead to bubbles and busts. This is nothing new, changes from one set of orders to another have always happened in highly predictable ways but because they happen so infrequently it's difficult for us to understand them.
These cycles have played out in Chinese Dynasties and various Empires since the beginning of recorded history.
Almost 2,000 years ago, a Roman poet by the name of Juvenal came up with the term "bread and circuses." It describes how easily people can be manipulated with with cheap substance and entertainment to keep them distracted from the bigger picture.
He observed societal habits that would lead to collapse and warned that Roman society had lost its civic soul. He saw the cracks in the system hundreds of years before the fall of the Roman Empire1. Watch this scene from the Gladiator and tell me it doesn’t seem eerily relevant…
What a great movie, re-watching that scene gave me goosebumps.
I’m deeply concerned that the current administration is a destroying the country and our entire planet along with it. They claim that climate change is a “side effect” of building the modern world.
It reminds me of this clip I saw a while back:
What lies ahead in the coming years is so uncertain, but what we do know is that the next 5-10 years is going to feel like going through a time warp into a different reality.
All signs point to the fact that w're reaching the end of a Big Cycle. Many countries, companies, and people who are up will be down, and many of those who are down will be up.
On a lighter note, I hope my friends in the U.S. have been enjoying the 4th of July celebrations just as much as these guys:
I’ll leave you with one last quote I read earlier this week from
:Instead of clinging to obsolete institutions or falling into apocalyptic pessimism, we must treat this as a time to prototype new ways of living, working, and organizing.
What a time to be alive.
Until next time my friends,
<3 B
P.S. - If you enjoyed this, consider hitting the ❤️ button, it helps get the message out.
He wrote his satires around 100-130AD and the empire collapsed right around 500AD.
I sent my older brother the "Honest Government" video on climate change as an example of extremist propaganda. He is a member of a climate change activist group in the US. They are currently reading "Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters," by Steven E. Koonin, PhD.
Dr. Koonin was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech for almost thirty years, after which he served as Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy under President Obama from 2009 to 2011, where his portfolio included the climate research program and energy technology strategy. Dr. Koonin was the lead author of the US Department of Energy’s Strategic Plan (2011) and the inaugural Department of Energy Quadrennial Technology Review (2011).
According to my brother, Dr. Koonin's book (which I have not read) offers a nuanced view of climate change, suggesting that scientists do not precisely know how much of it is caused by humans and how much occurs naturally.
The video you included in your post is designed to excite and disturb, as most videos of this type are, and requires an investment of only a few minutes of one's time, and far less intellectual rigor than reading a whole book on science. The video is the Twinkie of educational offerings, lacking any real nourishment, not to mention being grossly misleading.
However, the media, both mainstream and social, have been dominated for years by such easy-to-consume idiocies, which is what many people want to consume. They want Twinkies, and so that is what they are given. You have helped in that regard.
If Trump is the fascist dictator in the making that so many claim he is, then he is a very poor one, for he has failed dismally at one of the critical steps of tyranny: taking absolute control of the media. Outside of Fox News, most media have been vehemently anti-Trump and pro something else, a new ideology that has wormed its way into every nook and cranny of the Western world, from the streets of Los Angeles to the music festival of Glastonbury, UK.
For those of us not drinking the Woke flavored Kool-Aid, we wonder: Who is really in command of the global narrative? Who develops the technology that controls every aspect of our lives? Who dominates social media? Who dominates mainstream media? How many conservative voices do our young people hear? How many conservative professors are on staff at our universities? Who is fanning the fires of fear and panic with clever memes and glossy videos? Is it Trump and his goons, or is it another group entirely, with a different blueprint for how the world should look?
Like me, you moved outside the US to gain a broader perspective of the world. Now do it.
Although this is a sobering essay, I admire your willingness to tackle a such a difficult subject.