Why Nuclear Threatening Won't Work

It appears finally that the West is going to get off the dime and send Ukraine the heavy weapons it needs to defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Putin has responded by using his flying monkeys to send a message to the West that if Russia loses, the result will be nuclear war.  There's just one problem.  Putin's Russia has shown what it will do to all those whom it conquers by its treatment of Ukrainians in Russian-occupied territory.  By the pronouncements of not only Putin, but of fascist thugs like Aleksandr Dugin, Russia has shown what it wants to do to the entire world.  If Russia is allowed to win, Russia will turn the entire world into the toilet bowl of Russia.  That is unacceptable.  Given a choice between this option and nuclear war, frankly, I'd rather take my chances on nuclear war.  I do not say this lightly.  Because of my moral stance, I would much rather see a nonviolent solution, especially if that nonviolent solution was achieved through the coercive use of nonviolent economic power to destroy Russia's ability to make war.  But allowing Russia to have its way is not an option.  Russian power must be destroyed.  And those in the West who continue to make excuses for Russia or to play telephone tag for Russia or to be sock puppets for Russia must learn to shut their mouths.

The West must stop allowing its fight against Russian imperialism to be dictated by the rules the Russians seek to impose on us.  In other words, we must do whatever it takes to destroy Russian imperialism.  Whatever it takes.

The Global Origins And Spread of the Precariat (Part 1)

Last week's post described my own experience of precarity - an experience which continued in surprising ways even through the world of white-collar professional work.  This week's post will begin to explore the theoretical foundations for understanding the precariat, and will begin to trace the present existence of the precariat in the societies of certain nations of interest.  

Precarity can be understood as a social bargain that has been lost.  The loss of this bargain can be described thus: "The emergence and strengthening of [the] precariat are associated with regulatory dysfunction . . . Precariat is a consequence of the lack of effective institutions for regulating emerging new social relations. Such institutions cannot be replaced by designing effective market mechanisms . . .   Precariat is formed wherever stable forms of employment are destroyed."  [Emphasis added.]  ("Socio-Economic Sustainable Development and the Precariat: A Case Study of Three Russian Cities," Volchik, Klimenko, Posukhova, International Journal, Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues, September 2018)   Precarity is therefore the loss of the social bargain between workers and employers which was forged in the labor movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries in industrial nations.  It can also be seen as the destruction of the social arrangements which were forged and codified into law (such as antitrust and anti-monopoly laws) between ordinary people and the rich.

The destruction of this pre-existing social arrangement has been documented by observers such as economist Guy Standing, a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London.  Mr. Standing did pioneering research into the topic of precarity and the precariat, and captured his observations and conclusions in two books which he wrote, titled, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, and A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens.  To quote from a 2018 essay by Mr. Standing, "Since 1980, the global economy has undergone a dramatic transformation, with the globalization of the labor force, the rise of automation, and—above all—the growth of Big Finance, Big Pharma, and Big Tech. The social democratic consensus of the immediate postwar years has given way to a new phase of capitalism that is leaving workers further behind and reshaping the class structure. The precariat, a mass class defined by unstable labor arrangements, lack of identity, and erosion of rights, is emerging as today’s “dangerous class.” As its demands cannot be met within the current system, the precariat carries transformative potential . . . "

In his essay, Guy Standing traces the beginnings of the precariat to the deliberate dismantling of social arrangements between owners of big business and workers at the start of the 1980's.  This dismantling was part of the process of radical, rabid free-market capitalism pushed by people such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.  According to Standing, those who pushed this process ". . . preached 'free markets,' strong private property rights [at least for those who were filthy rich!  Not so much for little people . . .], financial market liberalization, free trade, commodification, privatization, and the dismantling of all institutions and mechanisms of social solidarity, which, in their view, were 'rigidities' holding back the market. While the neoliberals were largely successful in implementing their program, what transpired was very different from what they had promised."

Standing describes the process of precarization as it began in the West (especially the United States, the other nations of the Five Eyes, and Europe) and as it was promulgated by various institutions of Western economic hegemony such as the World Trade Organization.  But the precariat has also arisen outside of the West.  What has been striking is its origin and spread in those regions which withdrew themselves from global capitalism in the early 20th century only to return to the capitalist fold near the end of the 20th century.  Indeed, it can be argued that wherever there is a society characterized by connection to the global economy, extreme levels of inequality, and a very small class of plutocrats who control an enormous percentage of that nation's economy, there you will find the precariat in existence.  What is more, you will find that the plutocrats of each of the world's major societies share a lot in common with each other.  So I'd like to take this post and the next post in this series to describe the process of precarization as it has worked itself out in other regions of the world.  Let's start with Russia.

"Funeral for the Middle Class", a protest which took place 

in Russia in 2015.  In the picture, the "casket" being placed

by the man in the center has the words "средний класс" ("middle class")

written on it.  Image retrieved from Obschchaya Gazeta on 21 January 2023.

In Russia, the transition from Soviet communism to free market capitalism was a transition from the Soviet arrangement where "formalization, legal confirmation, and guarantee of a workplace for a worker were the methods which prevented the spread of precarization.  The system was oriented toward distribution of social benefits, consolidation of the worker's professional status in the consequent sphere, and work, labour, employment, and housing related stabilities . . ." (Quote taken from "The Precariat In The Socio-Economic Structure of the Russian Federation," Maria Fedina, International Department of Movement for Decent Work and Welfare Society, September 2017.)  It was a transition into an employment market which has ". . . 'responded to unfavorable economic transformations by such means of adaptation as part-time and seasonal work, forced vacation leave, secondary employment and employment in the informal sector'. Other forms of adaptation include fixed-term employment contracts, outsourcing of workers, employment on the basis of employment contracts with a condition of work outside the employer’s location, and employment of individual entrepreneurs who have no possibility to run their own business by other entrepreneurs." [Emphasis added.]  To break this down into plain language, Russians moved from an economic environment in which housing and employment were stable and secure, and moved into an environment in which many Russian workers today may be forced to work part-time, may be forced into involuntary unpaid time off, or be forced into gig/temporary work where they must assume all of the liabilities of being "independent contractors" yet have no legal way of acting as actual entrepreneurs.  

According to the sources cited by Maria Fedina in her essay, up to 85 percent of the Russian labor force faces the possibility of falling into the precariat, while 30 to 40 percent of the labor force belongs to the precariat at any one time.  A large percentage of the Russian precariat consists of highly skilled professionals and highly educated people, having achieved at least a bachelors degree.  However, the prestige of their professions has been devalued in the minds of the Russian public as a tool to force these professionals into precarious, low-wage arrangements.  This is especially true of teachers, as noted in the paper by Volchik, Klimenko, and Posukhova cited above.  Also of note is the fact that a large number of the members of the precariat are involved in the informal economy in Russia, where legal workplace and worker protections are entirely absent.

Precarity is therefore a design feature of the present system of Russian capitalism.  The origins of this system lie with the Russian oligarchs who arose from the wreckage of the crashed Soviet system.  (To see where these oligarchs came from, please read "The Role of Oligarchs in Russian Capitalism," Guriev and Rachinsky, Journal of Economic Perspectives - Volume 19, Number 1, Winter 2005).  These oligarchs controlled betweewn 70 and 90 percent of the Russian economy by the time the transformation to a capitalist society had been completed.  (See "The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry," F. Joseph Dresen, Wilson Center.)  In the early years of the 21st century, Vladimir Putin used Russian state power to transform these oligarchs into Putin's pillars of support.  (To see the definition of "pillars of support", click here.)  Therefore, the birth and growth of the Russian precariat can be quite accurately seen as part of the goals and policy of the Russian elites both in government and in the private sector.  For their overarching goal is to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense.  And Putin truly has shown himself to be a thieving little man in a bunker.  For when Putin's government arrested (or in many cases killed) those oligarchs who dared to oppose him, it was not to fight corruption, but rather to establish a loyal base of Russia's wealthiest citizens.  The Russian oligarchy is alive and well under Putin (although during the last year they've begun to feel a bit ill.  Sanctions can lead to indigestion . . . ).

For members of the Russian precariat, life has become surprisingly similar to life for members of the precariat in the rest of the developed world.  These include long working hours, an absence of benefits, no guarantee of employment stability, and a refusal of employers to manage the safety and work environments in which their employees must operate.  In an increasing number of cases this has led to deaths of workers and of bystanders, as documented by Katya Zeveleva's piece titled "Russian gig economy violates worker rights with society’s tacit acceptance" (Oxford Human Rights Hub, July 2019).

Russia is but one example of the re-creation of the precariat in a non-Western context.  Next week, we shall consider other cases, God willing.

Precarity - My Own Experience

Last week's post presented a few definitions of precarity as a social and economic phenomenon.  Today I'd like to present a definition which overlaps the definitions previously given while expanding a bit on the personal side of this phenomenon.  From the standpoint of those who experience it, precarity is a state of being in which a person can't be sure that they will have enough money each month to make rent or mortgage payments, to go places by other means than walking or riding a bicycle, to keep the utilities connected, or to cover groceries for the entire month.  This can be due to not earning enough each month for the expenses listed above.  It can also be due to having a job which is in danger of disappearing even though for the present it does provide enough money to cover the bills.

Although I am an African-American and my family is African-American, I was not born into precarity, even though I was born into a time in which I and my family had to face an environment of racial hostility which was as bad as or perhaps even worse than the worst which the Trump years produced in this country.  My life from birth to adolescence was relatively secure because my dad was an officer in the military.  However, once I reached adolescence, my siblings and I found ourselves living in a broken home.  It is not my desire now to describe how this happened or who was at fault.  Indeed, at the time our home was breaking, I could not have provided such a description, as a lot of what was happening went right over my head.  All I knew at the end of it was that I was now living with one parent instead of two.  

I do not want to say anything that would be dishonoring to either of my parents.  However, for the purpose of this post, I must say that the parent with whom I ended up living chose to approach the new, constrained life we faced with a rather - shall we say, interesting - perspective.  Looking back, it seems to me that some of the elements of that perspective consisted of the notion that we should live as luxuriously as possible even if it required Divine miraculous intervention, combined with a belief system and theology heavily influenced by holy-roller Pentecostalism.  Mistakes and bad choices were therefore made, and we suffered consequences such as occasionally running out of food before the end of the month, having utilities turned off, having a car repossessed, and finding it hard to buy clothes for rapidly-growing children.  This parent was not the only source of my personal sufferings during that time.  I too was a complete and utter doofus.  To explain this further, I was an underachiever and quite lazy.  Partly this was due to the fact that I could not stand school, although I was able to do well enough when I applied myself.  But I preferred to spend my time either watching TV, listening to public radio, reading science fiction, or just prowling the neighborhood during the hours when my parent was working swing shift.  Therefore I was definitely not on the college prep track.  

During my freshman and sophomore years in high school, this sort of life was tolerable to me.  But as the Good Book says, "Whatever a man sows, that he shall also reap."  After a while the reaping grew more and more painful.  I therefore started looking for work at a local swap meet, and later got a job at a local drive-in movie theater.  And I began to worry about my future beyond high school.  I knew that I had not prepared myself adequately for college, let alone for any kind of scholarship money.  So it seemed to me that my best chance for eating and having clothes to wear after high school lay in joining the military myself.  Therefore I enlisted.

Thankfully, during my tour of duty I was never in combat and never had to shoot at anyone.  But I quickly got tired of spending my time sleeping in the woods with people whom I could hardly stand, people who got drunk at every possible opportunity.  So I served only one tour and then got out.  My experiences of adolescence had combined with my military experience to produce in me something that had not previously existed, namely a strong desire to better myself and to leave completely behind a lifestyle of just barely getting by.  So I decided to put myself through college.  My heavy exposure to science fiction moved me to choose engineering as a major.  I knew I was in for a long and hard slog to reach my goal, but now I was determined to get there.

I entered my college years with a certain perspective on the world and on the place of educated people in the world.  Part of that perspective consisted of the expectation that corporations and their white-collar workers would continue the same occupational culture which my dad had experienced during his career.  He had served in the military as an officer until he had reached the point where he could retire, then had switched to white-collar managerial work as an employee of a large defense contractor.  Later he retired from that job also and entered into a well-endowed post-retirement life.  He was part of a corporate and occupational culture in which corporations lasted for decades and entered into what I call long-term care arrangements with their best and most loyal employees.  This meant that those who worked for these corporations for a long enough time could expect a guaranteed pension and the sort of stereotypical retirement send-off in which the boss would give the new retiree a gold watch.

The reality I experienced was rather different from this, to say the least.  When I first left the military and moved back to Southern California, I got a job at a defense plant in order to support myself while I was in school.  This was in the last years of the Cold War, and we thought the Cold War would last for decades more.  Therefore we thought our defense plant and others like it would continue in much the same way that public utility companies continued decade after decade.  But then the Berlin Wall fell, and for a time, geopolitical shifts destroyed the economic security of a number of defense contractors.  The plant I worked for was eventually converted to a shopping center.  Many, many people were laid off.

After I obtained my bachelors degree, I went to work for an engineering firm which had once done cutting-edge work for the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA during the space race and the arms race.  However, both national and global political shifts had caused most of that work to dry up by the time I came on board.  The military work never completely dried up.  However, during my first few years at that firm, we worked on prisons (a fact of which I am now ashamed), as well as MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) design for a number of fast food joints (we're talking about places as small as a typical Taco Bell or McDonald's), gas stations, and amusement parks.  When I first joined that firm a new employee could enroll in the company pension program.  But within a few years, the pension program was replaced entirely by a 401k/ESOP program.  Only the old-timers got anything like a gold watch.  And not a few of those old-timers got the ax during one of several down-sizing periods.  There were times when the cubicle farm in which I worked looked to me like a town in Europe of the Middle Ages must have looked after the bubonic plague had swept through it.  Picture a town with lots of suddenly empty houses.

A major factor which began to affect my engineering discipline (and hence the stability of my career) was the beginning and later acceleration of the automation of many elements of the design process.  This took place as design software companies added functions in their software for the rapid performance of both drafting, layout, and computational tasks which had formerly required humans to do things by hand.  Some of those people I knew who got the ax had been among those who refused to learn the new technology.

My first experience of precarity had been due to personal foolishness on the part of myself and my relatives.  This led me to take the path of education as a means of escape.  I do not in the least regret taking that path.  However, in leaving one realm and entering another, I unwittingly entered a realm of accelerating precarity caused by accelerating large-scale economic and technological shifts outside of my control.  Those shifts were driven by the following factors:

• The destruction of restrictions on capital flows as a result of the deregulation that began under former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980's.  This led to the following:
• An increasing attempt by corporations to try to grow profits by financial trickery, by mergers and acquisitions, and by cutting costs related to long-standing covenants with workers.
• An increasing volatility in the corporate landscape, with long-standing publicly-traded firms suddenly being threatened by either the consequences of ill-advised decisions, or the threat of hostile takeovers, or by the blowing and bursting of economic bubbles, or by the saturation of existing markets.
• The shrinkage of available resources for large-scale transformative megaprojects.  This shrinkage was driven by:
• The political and economic conservatism of Republican administrations in the United States from 1980 onward.  This conservatism tended to lead to cuts in any kind of programs (such as the space program) which had aspirational goals related to the betterment of humankind, although the Republicans always seemed to be able to find money for national defense and law enforcement.  (Unfortunately, however, due to recent Russian thuggishness, it appears that the generous U.S. outlays for defense have been necessary!)
• The beginning of the actual shrinkage of the resource base available for the global and national industrial economies.
• The beginning and later acceleration of changes wrought in work (both manufacturing and knowledge work) wrought by the introduction of automation, advances in telecommunication technology and artificial intelligence.

These factors include things that society can and should collectively decide to reverse, such as the choices and policies of rabid free-market late capitalism.  However, some of these factors should be regarded as inevitable factors that are leading to inexorable changes in the way we procure a living for ourselves and the landscape in which we earn that living.  Seeing such factors in this way should motivate each of us to make whatever personal and communal changes we need to make in order to survive the coming changes.  The technological changes are especially significant, since those who refuse to adjust themselves to prepare for these will wind up being steamrolled by the technological juggernaut.  Each of us may find that he or she needs to engage in a process of constant personal re-education and reinvention.

As for me, I have worked for a few engineering firms since that first firm I encountered after graduating from college.  Some of their offices have gone out of business due to the flat-footedness of managers who were not able to make the mental adjustment to rapidly changing markets and circumstances.  Some of these firms continue to do well to the present day, although their employees must pay certain costs in terms of extensive travel and sometimes long hours.  The challenge for employees is to find an occupational path which provides economic security without working a person to death or imposing unacceptable costs in other parts of the person's life such as his or her family life.  In a future post I will argue that the Great Resignation has provided a temporary boost to workers seeking to navigate such a path.

The West Must Defeat Russia

Please note the title of this post.  Note that it is not in the passive voice, but the active voice.  Russia has launched repeated all-out assaults in an attempt to break Ukrainian defenses.  The latest assault is against the Ukrainian town of Soledar.  The Ukrainians have repeatedly proven time and time again that they are willing to fight with valor and determination against thuggish Russian aggression.  However, the West has repeatedly been somewhat timorous and restrained in supplying weapons to Ukraine in order that Ukraine might drive Russian thug invaders from its territory.  So the world has had to witness repeated cliffhangers in the story of Ukraine's fight to liberate itself.

This has got to stop.  I cannot believe that we in the West have allowed Russia's dangerous aggression to go on for so long!  The West must have the courage to do whatever it takes to swiftly destroy Russia's military power.  Those in the West who are afraid of what Russia might do if it is defied and confronted should rather consider what Russia will certainly do if it is allowed to win.  Narcissists, bullies and thugs always escalate when they are not soundly and effectively stopped at the first sign of aggression.  Appeasement never works.  We must ask ourselves whether the cowards among us are paving the way for a world in which we allow ourselves to be trashed by Russia.  Russia must be stopped dead in its tracks.  The West must at the very least send to Ukraine whaever weaponry it takes for Ukraine to drive Russian thugs out of its territory and keep them out.  Please write your Congressional representative or senator and write the President also to ask that the United States send whatever weaponry Ukraine needs - including both long-range missiles and heavy tanks - and that this military aid be sent swiftly.  

The Advance of Decompensation

A quick post tonight: there are two things worth mentioning.  First, Russian mercenaries claim to have captured the Ukrainian town of Soledar.  Yet these claims have turned out to be so far from reality that even the Kremlin has denied them.  Putin is perhaps discovering the weakness of relying on mercenaries to win an unrighteous war.  Russia is looking increasingly ill.

Second, the Republican members of the Missouri legislature have introduced legislation requiring women who attend legislative sessions to wear clothing that covers their arms.  These are the same Republicans who threw a wobbly when state health officials tried to impose mask mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19.  These are the same stupid people who applauded the stupid white males armed with assault rifles who stormed state houses in Midwest states with Democratic governors when those governors issued public health decrees that sought to keep these doofuses from getting sick and dying.  Evidently COVID was not as much of an existential threat as women with bare arms.

Both Putin, Russia, and the U.S. Republican Party are examples of people who are at war with reality.  Unfortunately for them, it's a war they're losing.

Precarity - An Introduction

Certain events from the past several weeks have provoked me to think about a topic which I have not studied in depth up to this time.  Those events are largely focused on the collapse of the cryptocurrency bubble last year and the corresponding destruction of the "investments" many poorer people made in "crypto" in order to increase their wealth.  (See "FTX Crypto Crash Threatens Life Savings of Working People", Truthout, November 2022, and "The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as Possible", Foreign Policy, May 2022.)  The collapse of economic bubbles in capitalist societies is a worthy topic of consideration in its own right  But my interest now lies in the motives and vulnerabilities of the ordinary people who were led to invest in "crypto" in the first place.  Their choice to invest was one of several coping mechanisms which they employed in order to try to deal with their social and economic situation.  That situation can be described by a single word: precarity.

Precarity is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse," and, "a situation in which someone's job or career is always in danger of being lost."  The Journal of Cultural Anthropology describes precarity as ". . . an emerging abandonment that pushes us away from a livable life . . . [It is] the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks . . . becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death."  The University of Georgia has an article on its "Neoliberalism Guide for Educators" webpage which describes precarity in concrete human terms, starting with the questions "Have you ever or do you currently live paycheck to paycheck?  Do you work 40 hours a week or more and still can't afford rent?"  We who live in the United States may be tempted to look on precarity solely in its American-style manifestations of inequality such as racism and the effects of tycoon capitalism, neoliberalism, privatization, and the destruction of social safety nets.  But precarity is a global phenomenon which can be seen even in ethnically homogeneous societies, as described by Hao Jingfang's "near science fiction" novelette titled, Folding Beijing.  (You can listen to an audio recording of her story at StarShipSofa.)  Precarity naturally arises whenever the people at the top of a society concentrate nearly all of the wealth of that society in the hands of a chosen few, thus creating a massive underclass out of the many who are not of the chosen few.  Those many become the precariat.

It is quite natural to assume that the precariat consist primarily of those historically marginalized populations without access to higher education, whose historical economic and social standing has condemned them to a blue-collar or manual labor or McJob sort of existence.  But while this is true, it is also true than an increasing number of white-collar, college-educated workers have found themselves forced into the precariat due to the destruction of long-standing arrangements between corporate masters and skilled professional labor.  For a recent example of this, consider the large number of lawyers who were laid off in 2022.  This progression of precarity among white-collar workers has been taking place for at least three decades.  (Four decades actually, if one counts the day that former President Ronald Reagan fired all of the air traffic controllers who were part of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration staff.)

Precarity is quite naturally a highly uncomfortable way of life.  This discomfort - frequently amounting to great pain and distress - quite naturally provokes a search for coping mechanisms from the people who comprise the precariat.  The usual suspects among coping mechanisms include things like the abuse of alcohol, opioids, and other drugs, or drowning oneself in other passive entertainments.  But my focus is on those more active attempts to cope which members of the precariat employ in trying to transform their situation.  So I am planning to write a series of posts on precarity, on the precariat, and on the attempts by members of the precariat to transform their situation.  A tentative outline of that series is as follows:

1. The Precariat - An Overview (This has been partly covered in today's post.)
2. My own experience of precarity
• As a teen
• As a college student
• Surprising encounters in the white-collar world
3. Origins and Spread of the Precariat
• The Link Between the Origins of Precarity and the Rise of Neoliberal (that is, radical libertarian free-market) capitalism
4. The Composition and Location of the Precariat
• Its global nature
• Its local expressions
5. The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat
• What Doesn't Work
• Unwise "Side Hustles"
• The False Promises of Bubbles
• The Role of the "Advice" (Motivational Speaking) Industry and "Influencer" Culture
• Political Dead-Ends
• What Does (or May) Work
6. The Precariat And the Great Resignation
7. Future Directions Of The Precariat
• As Passive Victims of Forces Outside Themselves
• As Active and Activized Agents Who Take Charge Of Their Own Future
• The Potential for Such Action
• The Possible Constraints Preventing Such Action
• The Precariat in "Babylon"

Each major heading in this list will be covered in a separate blog post.  Each major heading will also require some research in order to do it justice.  But fortunately, the extreme busyness which characterized my life during most of 2022 seems to be easing up.  (I have rediscovered the fact that sleeping, for instance, is delicious!  And I look forward to chillin' with my guitar in my backyard when the weather warms up . . . )  The time taken in researching each of these topics will be time well-spent, and hopefully it will prove useful to the readers of this blog, as I believe that an increasing number of us will be forced to deal with precarity (or even be swept involuntarily into the precariat) in the days to come.

Chastised By A Bursting Bubble

No, the burned hand teaches best.  After that,

advice about fire goes to the heart.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Ours is an age in which there is frequently a great deal of confusion about what constitutes true wealth.  This is especially true in the United States, and has been historically true of this country for at least a century.  Therefore, when I learned about the recent collapse of much of the cryptocurrency "industry", I was not surprised.  A long time ago I started expecting something like this to happen.  (For more information on the collapse, see the Washington Post article "Crypto 'Winter' has come.  Will it become an ice age?" and the European Central Bank essay titled, Crypto dominos: the bursting crypto bubbles and the destiny of digital finance" also.) 

I was slow to hear about cryptocurrencies when they first made waves, and I never really developed any interest in them.  A big turnoff was that they seemed to me to be simply a vastly more complicated way of doing what regular money was supposed to do - namely to act as a medium of commercial exchange.  And the schemes for making money from investing in cryptocurrencies (or as those who were 'hip' and 'with it' called them, "crypto") seemed to me after a while to be more complicated than even fluid mechanics calculations like the Navier-Stokes equation.  I swiftly came to the following conclusions regarding crypto:

• It was a means of promising early "investors" the chance to get something for nothing.
• It therefore had no intrinsic value or essential use in the world.
• It was therefore the perfect material for blowing financial bubbles.
• One day the bubbles would pop.

The recent pop of these bubbles (along with the accompanying pictures of people being led away to jail) has confirmed all of my conclusions.  It has also confirmed my belief and assertion that we live in a moral universe, and that those who violate the moral standard of that universe sooner or later must face the outworkings of their own damnation.  You really do reap what you've sown.  This has been true of the crypto schemers who set up the schemes by which they sought to defraud others.  But it is also true of many of those who were defrauded, for they were hooked by the promise of easy money - that is, by the promise of obtaining something for nothing.  Had they themselves not been led astray by their own evil desire, they would not have fallen prey to those who were more clever in doing evil.  The fact that bubbles like these continue to be blown speaks volumes about our present society - both about its perpetrators and about its victims.  The fact that an entire industry has arisen out of the desire to use mathematics as a tool of swindling speaks volumes about our misplaced collective values.  Bubbles like crypto are an inescapable feature of a society whose economy is built on usury.

So for those of us who seek to build true and lasting wealth in the midst of uncertain times, what should be our strategy?  As I have said before on this blog, our strategy should consist of the following elements:

• Do not desire to get rich.
• Learn essential skills.  Or, to put it another way, learn to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, that you may not be unfruitful.
• Live simply.  Focus on the essentials.

Do these things and you will go a long way toward bubble-proofing yourself.  You will also save yourself from the ravages of late-stage capitalism.