46. NASRUDDIN’S SENSE OF ECONOMY
Nasruddin was acting even more strangely than usual. He had put a patch over one eye and stuffed cotton in one nostril and in one ear. He had also tied one arm behind his back and was hopping on just one leg.
“Nasruddin!” shouted his wife. “Are you alright? What’s happened to you?”
“I’m fine!” replied Nasruddin. “I was just thinking that since I have two eyes and two ears and two nostrils, plus two arms and two legs, I should save one of each for future use. That way, I won’t use them both up at the same time.”
This Tale is from “Tiny Tales of Nasruddin” by Laura Gibbs. The book is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. © 2019-2022 Laura Gibbs.
Today we are going to take up where we left off last week on the subject of China’s future. What is it to be? Economic decline, as frequently predicted by Western pundits? Or is China going to be launching the next industrial revolution?… As we pointed out last time, China’s breakneck growth has not only aroused envy in the West, but also prompted the proliferation of doomsday predictions about China’s economy. We are told that we are at “peak China”, that China can only go downhill from here, that China’s property bubble is about to burst and throw China into a morass of Japanification and secular stagnation, that China has been stealing technology all these years, and the stolen technology has been powering the growth. And now that President Biden is going to make it impossible for them to do so, that China will stop growing, that China has a serious unemployment crisis, that President Xi’s authoritarian leadership is stifling growth by stifling innovation and entrepreneurship. China, of course, is involved in terrible things like debt-trap diplomacy vis-à-vis the rest of the world, etc., etc.
You know how it is. You’ve all seen the long list of accusations. And in the last show and this one, we are debunking these myths. — China In Charts by Michael Hudson
I have quoted only the closing to the essay, Lost Leaders, which I thought to be too long to copy in its entirety. You will have to get the book, Absolutely Postive Essays, by Dmitry Orlov to read all of it. There are many more that are just as good.
When things go horribly wrong, it is natural for us mere mortals to try to obtain a bit of psychological comfort by holding on to familiar images. A person who has totaled his car tends to continue to refer to the twisted wreckage as “my car” instead of “the wreckage of my car.” In the case someone’s wrecked car, this may be accepted as mere shorthand, but in many other cases this tendency results in people working with an outdated mental map which leads them astray, because the properties of a wreck are quite different from those of an intact object. For example, our lost leaders are continuing to refer to “the financial system” instead of “the wreck of the financial system.” If they had the flexibility to make that mental switch, perhaps they wouldn’t insist on continuing to pump in more and more public debt, only to watch it spew out again through a tangle of broken pipes so horrific that it defies all understanding, with quite a lot of it mysteriously dribbling into the vaults and pockets of bankers and billionaire investors. It will be interesting to watch their attempts at a financial “top kill” or “junk shot” to plug the ensuing geyser of toxic debt.
It is natural for us to naïvely expect our leaders—be they corporate executives or their increasingly decorative and superfluous adjuncts in government—to be our betters, having been picked for leadership positions by their ability to lead us through difficult and unfamiliar terrain. We expect them to have the mental agility and flexibility to be able to revise their mental maps as the circumstances dictate. We don’t expect them to be stupid, and are surprised to find that indeed they are. How is that possible? Mental enfeeblement of the ruling class of a collapsing empire is not without precedent: the British imperial experiment was clearly doomed as early as the end of World War I, but it took until well into World War II for this fact to register in the enfeebled brains of the British ruling class. In his 1941 essay England your England, George Orwell offers the following explanation:…
[T]he British ruling class obviously could not admit that their usefulness of was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate… Clearly there was only one escape for them—into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though it was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on [a]round them.”
And so it is now: as the American empire has been crumbling, its leaders, both corporate and corporatist, were being specially selected for being unable to draw their own conclusions based on their own independent reasoning or on the evidence of their own senses, relying instead on “intelligence” that is second-hand and obsolete. These leaders are now attempting to lead us all on a dream-walk to oblivion.
This morning I saw the largest herd of elk, maybe 40, since I have been here this year. Last year I saw a herd of about this size very frequently, this year I have not. The herd this morning was in the trees so I didn’t get a good count but could see that they were cows and calves, no bulls that I could see.