Whole Truth
Integrity in an Age of Fractures
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit.”
This is an age of fractures.
This generation is the most impoverished, disenfranchised and structurally disadvantaged in more than a century. They are about to become the largest voting block in the country, and the largest cohort in the industrialized world.
They are anaesthetized by devices and media, cynical about the fate of the community and the nation, often rootless and lost in the magnitude of a world accessible at the fingertip.
The debt bubble began in 1971. It should have ended in 2002. The boomer generation refused to recapitalize the country and shunted it to Millenials instead. The banking system lost more wealth in 2008 then had been made in the history of banking. This capital should have been available for the next wave of business formation. Another pass, another bailout. The state, major firms, anyone with influence, made the choice to favor perpetuating the debt bubble above people.
And not just any people, on the people who had yet to accumulate any assets, who were not yet even invested in the system.
Boomers engineered the multi-decade series of bailouts to cover up profligacy and unproductivity, and orchestrated a complex, systematic theft to fund it all. They offered all liabilities and no assets. The liability to keep the oceans safe for Chinese trade, for Saudi oil. The liability to keep stable a pension system loaded with taxpayer-funded bonds. The liability to prosecute foreign war to enforce the petrodollar. The liability to keep millions permanently on the welfare roles. The liability to provide universal healthcare to a country whose foreign-born population is larger than their own. The liability to prop up a housing market they themselves can't afford.
It's no wonder they treat the stock market like a casino. It's the only keyhole. It's no wonder they are rootless, cynical and anaesthetized. They have no stake in a continental apparatus exploiting them since elementary school. It's a kind of demographic ghetto. Investment in system-beating strategies and decentralized finance are seen as the only way to create freedom from a system built to extract their income in service to debts created by and owed to a previous generation.
Millenials are fully aware of this. They are in no way ok with it.
The most vigorous voting block in this country is a generation of often-nihilistic speculators with no trust in government or the "global order," who see their best option as exit from a system which requires their very participation to function - financially, politically, geostrategically.
So they must be indoctrinated, shunned, their identities assaulted and confounded. A war must be made on their speech and their conscience, their thoughts must be sanctioned, to keep their veins hooked into the dead arteries of a failing global regime. They must be agitated to fight with one another so their energies won't be directed at the real antagonists.
The Chinese Communist Party wants a civil war and breakup of the United States. The European Union, dependent on American military and financial largess, needs Washington to yoke Americans into another generation of status quo exploitation. Everyone needs a constant outflow of US dollars racked up on Americans' private credit cards. All of them are against Millenials maintaining a sense of their culture and sense of place in the world. They are all against a sense of intact interiority.
What has been lost in all the exploitation, debt, defrauded elections, corruption, financial malfeasance, war adventurism, screen addiction, the synthetic of infinite choice, and war on sense-making, is what it means to be who we are.
Millenials must rebuild a wholesale view of what it means to be who we are. Free from bolshevik propaganda. Free from the miasma of Freudian Marxist agitation against the soul, against the internal guidance system, against metacoginitve integrity. A view of the goodness of our culture and the gifts we possess, of what is exactly our very own.
Cynicism in the face of these challenges is a dangerous resignation. It relegates everything to politics and discounts the immense bounty we own upstream from it. This decade will likely be the most consequential of our lifetime.
The fight for wholeness is the fight of a generation.
-RC
Ross Calvin is a technology entrepreneur, global macro investor, bespoke hospitality developer and executive director of the American Colossus Foundation
Please visit www.rosscalvin.com to learn more.