Amerika

The thing to understand about most humans: they are LIFO (last-in, first-out) buffers. That means the last thing that the mind stores, it repeats in response to any new stimulus unless contradicted.

And it only recognizes contradiction when a massive failure occurs, like a plane crash, economic depression, world war, or mass starvation. Otherwise, the brain maintains itself; remember the Iron Rule: all things act only in their own self-interest alone.

The brain maintains its self-interest, which is feeling good about itself so that it can function.

In other words, you should not feel shocked when you see people following trends, panics, or manias because this is normal operation for the humonkey. In fact, this is typical simian behavior of follow-the-leader:

Success required astute mutual observation between both monkeys and the ability to read body language cues so they could gauge each other’s readiness to act.

How? By employing what the researchers have dubbed “the social gaze.” Specifically, the monkeys cooperated by continuously gathering and interpreting social information. The animals especially focused on eye gaze and body movements to predict what each other was about to do.

This can help explain how the primate brain transforms social information into cooperative action, a big part of social behavior in both humans and animals, and an underlying factor in some psychiatric conditions, the researchers say.

People feel safe going ahead with things in groups because no individual inherits the full loss, and the social group blames no one for doing what the group considers normal.

Consider that LIFO buffer. As the old joke goes: ask someone to say “toast” twenty times, and then ask them what goes into a toaster. Most will say “toast” again, even though the answer is “bread” (or as I answered, “your penis”).

But in reality, we are so risk-averse that we rely on social cues to make us brave enough to stop being timid repetitive LIFO buffers:

In practice, participants always had a safety valve. If the investment performed poorly, they could simply pull their money out later. Knowing that, most people should have felt comfortable investing more from the start.

But many participants still acted as though they would be stuck with a bad outcome, even though they repeatedly proved to themselves that they would avoid it.

About 60% of participants changed their investment based on a number that, logically, should have had no effect on their decision at all. They were reacting to a bad outcome they would never actually accept.

Of course, there is an amplification effect as well: two LIFO buffers in a feedback loop with each other will be more prone to repetition, but there is always the chance that whoever is the copilot may notice a fatal spin and pull out early.

In the bigger picture, this means that humans are ruled by trends. At first, they resist anything different from what they have been doing because of the risk, but once an example succeeds, they gamble on it and then keep gambling on it until jolted by the plane crash.

For example, Beanie Babies: these were stupid little toys until someone pronounced them “collectible” and suddenly, tens of millions of people were buying these things (as bad as Cabbage Patch Kids) in the thought that someday, they would sell them for big money.

But trends have an arc which heads upward until it becomes dominant, and then it curves downward screaming to Earth. When enough people own Beanie Babies, the value of any specific toy reduces until it approximates zero.

And now? You can find heaps of Beanie Babies are your local used store or more likely, the dumpster out back. Nature absorbs another million tons of human castoffs. We should have used the fake Auschwitz designs from Russia to incinerate them!

However, someone profited, and it was not solely the company that made them. The people who got in early and bought Beanie Babies cheaply were able to unload them on others for high prices and then get out of the market. They knew the trend had a lifespan and was not infinite.

In the same way, people who got into BitCoin early, sold out, and then transferred the money into other forms did really well, but people who got into BitCoin late leveraged their homes and cars for something which declined in value as the trend died.

The value of the trend is the number of participants, and at a crucial point, this value inverts because they have reduced the exotic to the commonplace. The same was true of the Tulip Mania in Europe a few centuries back which became a tulip panic once they flooded the market.

Value follows rare things, which in technology means useful things, but even those decline in value over time as they become commonplace. The telephone that was expensive rare technology a decade ago is now more like a utility or purchasing a newspaper, and profit margins are thinner.

In the same way the San Francisco goldrush started out with someone scoring big, and then “everyone else” showed up to emulate the same method, with most of them striking out. The big scores went to the people who sold them the equipment.

Internet idiots will tell you that “stagnation is death” but forget that constant change is stagnation, and it is a deadly deceptive trap because at first change seems to be working, but then it hits that midpoint and the trend becomes a good way to get ripped off and busted.

Now consider another trend: liberalism. Starting a millennia ago, people in what became the modern West became enthralled with the idea of a middle class who were neither aristocrats nor serfs, but also not like freeholders who had farms.

They were villeins who made their money off of others in their towns:

a free common villager or village peasant of any of the feudal classes lower in rank than the thane

The freeholders had their own homesteads and farms and might have side businesses like running inns, making bridle-straps, or the brewing of ales. They were rural and isolated. But the middle classes came from the villages and towns becoming small cities.

This produced a surplus of people in jobs, or repeated work tasks given a title, instead of freely-contracted artisans. Many of these jobs, increasingly, were in the bureaucracy, which needed scribes and paper-filers.

In order for this to work, psychologically, the middle classes needed to believe in bourgeois (cityish) individualism, or the idea that they did not need to consider the whole, only their paycheck, their lawn, their shopping and retirement funds.

Individualism starts as anarchic benevolent pluralistic libertarianism, in the form of not caring what others do so long as you can do what you need to do.

That however produces a vicious cycle where lots of losers at the job-system gather in tenements, so it naturally transitions into a socialist-style warlord-favor system.

As this gathers momentum, since it now needs to manage not just society but the subsidy-state it has created, it evolves into a large state that motivates its people by a militarization-style ideology and symbolism.

This started with the power of the middle class in villages making feudal lords disobedient to their kings, accelerated with the Magna Carta and Peasant Revolts, and flowered in the French Revolution, its descent into Jacobinism, and the Bolsheviks (etc) that followed.

It was spurred on by the attacks by first Muslims and later Mongols on Europe. Costs rose, and people wanted to avoid more great wars like WW0, the Crusades. But in the long term, Europe fell to fighting each other instead of colonizing the restive middle east and east.

The big point here however is that we are still living in this trend, but it inverted some time ago, probably before the founding of America, even. Equality was the new big thing and you could make good money off of it, so everyone invested in it and later, civil rights.

Like any trend, they succeeded at first, but once they became distributed/commonplace enough, the cracks showed and the smart money got out. The first person to own BitCoin becomes a millionaire, the last person to own BitCoin dies in poverty.

As marketers like to say, there is a “long tail” to trends which corresponds to the Bell Curve. The right side wing gets in early and profits, the middle stagger along and basically escape with most of their money, but on the left side, they get sacrificed to the momentum and lose.

The people supporting equality now are the long tail losers. Not hip or smart, they jumped on a trend because every other monkey seemed to be doing it, but in doing so they “bought high, sold low” which is a formula for bankruptcy.

Many people made careers out of working for the bureaucracy, equality, civil rights, Keynesian socialism, and DEI hiring. However, eventually this trend showed us that it was not in fact going anywhere good, and it collapsed.

This is why these dumb ideas endure: the people who grew up as children watching others make money from these things relied on them as “jobs.” They saw this as a path to prosperity, and so they perpetuated it.

Now we see that our trajectory in fact is screaming toward Earth like an airplane that has lost ballistic control. The smart money is betting on other things, but the majority still wants to keep repeating its LIFO pathology.

Tags: crowdism, demotism, liberalism, LIFO