(2024-07-16) Hunt This Is The Great Ravine

Ben Hunt: This is the Great Ravine. This is all going to get much worse before it gets any better....In The Dark Forest, volume 2 of the Three-Body Problem science fiction trilogy, Cixin Liu mentions almost in passing a 50-year period of immense social upheaval, destruction and (ultimately) recovery across the globe. He never goes into the details of this period that he calls the Great Ravine.

Why? Because the Great Ravine does not advance the plot.

Like the Cultural Revolution of Cixin Liu’s real-world history, the Great Ravine is ultimately just a tragic waste

There is nothing to be learned from our time in the Great Ravine; it must simply be crossed. And cross it we will.

Eventually we will come out on the other side of our Great Ravine to discover a new age where the small-l liberal virtues of personal autonomy and the small-c conservative values of social community are reclaimed, where inspiration is rekindled, ingenuity is rewarded and integrity is recognized.

But until that day, which I think is probably decades away, some version of an FN SCAR-armed Jesse Plemons asking for our papers and a political loyalty test is 100% part of our American future.

The truth is that political violence on party lines is inevitable when everyone knows that everyone knows the Other Party is an existential threat to the ‘real’ America.

• (see related (2024-07-01) Hunt Joe Biden And The Common Knowledge Game)

You think any of these people, least of all Donald Trump, are going to “tone down their rhetoric” once he’s back in the White House? LOL.

And it’s not even these guys. Not really, anyway. These guys are just the most visible manifestations of the Beast — the monstrous hydra of Big Politics, Big Tech and Big Media that leads us to focused anger at the Other Party, that devours us whole as it marches us headlong into the Great Ravine. (BigWorld)

We are totally immersed in the common knowledge that the enemy is the Other Party, and until that common knowledge is weakened substantially, any direct challenge to the Beast is a suicide mission

I’m asking you to see the Beast.

I’m asking you to see how the Beast transforms our sadness into anger with stories, which it has renamed as ‘news’.

But soon you discover that sadness is not your only constant companion in the Great Ravine. Anger is there, too.

They were locked in on the guy! Locked in on a guy with a rifle, lying prone on a roof, aiming at Donald Trump, locked in before he fired a shot. And yet he shot.

I’m sure everyone did exactly as they were ‘trained’. Don’t care. This was bullshit, and it made me so freakin’ angry.

Just like Uvalde. Man, I can hardly look at this photograph without waves of anger just washing over me

Just like Jeffrey Epstein’s death while in federal custody. Sadness and shock at first, followed by sheer white-hot anger. Was it suicide? Was it murder? I don’t care! An ‘unlucky accident’ like this is the ONE THING that a non-corrupt State must prevent. It’s the non-corrupt State’s ONE JOB to keep Epstein alive for trial, and everyone knows that everyone knows this is their ONE JOB. It is impossible to violate this common knowledge without premeditation and malice, without conspiracy and criminality aforethought

It was after Epstein’s death that I started saying BITFD — Burn. It. The. Fuck. Down. — because I was just so angry at the necessarily corrupt system of wealth and power that would allow this to happen. And once I started saying it, I found myself saying it more and more about smaller and smaller things

I was slowly but surely led from a shared sadness over a terrible event to an inchoate anger with the overall system to a focused anger at specific people and institutions.

It is the optimized algorithmic solution to a duopoly of two political parties and an oligopoly of a handful of giant tech and media companies who want to minimax regret their status as the most powerful institutions in the world.

What does “minimax regret” mean? It’s a decision-making strategy for games where you minimize your maximum regret

*Shared underperformance is fine, because that’s just sadness. Relative underperformance is not fine, because that’s what generates anger.

This is true for every professional career and every institution, from finance to politics to medicine to law to tech to education to sales to administration. Whatever ‘client’ means in whatever human field of endeavor you want to examine:*

• You will not lose your clients if they are sad with you.
• You will absolutely lose your clients if they are angry at you.

In a system with a winner-take-all payoff structure and a captive client base (like American politics!), you maximize payoffs by creating client anger at your competitor, not by efficiency and performance gains that reduce client sadness across the board.

eventually the entire game breaks because the anger you’ve created can’t be contained by the rules of the game. And that’s when you are well and truly in the Great Ravine.

I’m asking you to see yourself as an autonomous human being, brave enough to own your anger and your sadness, brave enough to refuse the Beast when it offers to exchange your well-earned sadness for a delicious new anger that is not your own

maybe the oldest question, how we get to the other side without becoming the baddies ourselves. The answer then is the answer now.

We make a community of those who see with clear eyes and love with full hearts. We protect our autonomy of mind and our community of spirit. We teach anyone who will listen. ((2019-10-17) Hunt The Long Now Pt3 Is This Normal Asking For A Friend)