This is the second instalment of The Jackpot Chronicles: Four Possible Post-Coronavirus Scenarios.
Force Majeure means:
a chance occurrence or superior force that renders a contract unenforceable and frees all parties from their obligations under it.
We are frequently told that there exists some manner of “Social Contract” to which we are implicitly bound by virtue of being alive. This implied Social Contract confers legitimacy upon the institutions that order our world, the national governments, the central banks, the miltary and police. And by extension certain communication outlets and media are endowed with a status of official curators over the narratives around institutional power.
Under the Force Majeure Scenario, the first of four possible Coronavirus aftermaths posited in “Welcome to the Jackpot”, the overwhelming or superior force is not the pandemic itself, but rather the collapse of the debt supercycle, the monetary system that derives from it, and the structure of nation states that are burgeoned by it.
The last time we were here, when a systemic crisis has shaken the foundation of the social order, the policy response was favourable to one party of the social contract at the expense of the others.
Under Force Majeure the public begins to understand that the people who populate institutions are just that, people. Despite specialized training perhaps, they are not endowed with any superhuman intellect or wisdom. Success within the matrix of the institutional elite comes from proxemics and adroitly navigating the system itself, not much more.
An era like this comes to an end when the public realizes that their betters aren’t intellectually superior but rather institutionally privileged. Now facing an existential crisis of their own making, they are completely out of touch with the public mind and out of their depth to deal with it.
It will not be long before citizens will face the dilemma of continuing to observe the edicts of their governments, whose policies inexorably stripped them of their ability to weather any kind of economic speed bump. They will come to realize that despite what the government decrees, especially if that means keeping their businesses closed or their jobs on hold for much longer, they may be better off working around that.
That’s when myriad alternative economies and ecosystems will explode, black markets, grey markets, Local Exchange Currencies, private blockchains, invisible agoras.
As governments at all levels teeter on insolvency and their ability to control their own populace everywhere or to be in a position to guarantee security and order, I could envision neighbourhood watch groups morphing into localized militias. I would anticipate an explosion in private security and ex-military contractors.
However it plays out, the key points to bear in mind are that:
- It would be a mistake to think of the next 20 years as a linear, albeit accelerated version of the previous 20 years (a la Chris Martenson)
- We are about to undergo a change in secularity from deflation to inflation (a la Grant Williams, Peter Schiff and many others)
- The incumbent institutions of the fiat currency era are about to be swept away, akin to the way the royal houses of Europe were after World War 1 (the last major “Force Majeure” transition period that comes to mind for me).
No comments:
Post a Comment