Danny Rodrick might have been right after all when he argued in his 1997 book (titled Has Globalization Gone Too Far?) that we should be careful how far we are pushing the boundaries of globalization. Globalization inevitably gave rise to some tensions and facts, such as skilled vs. unskilled workforce, wealth and income inequalities, social inequalities, job insecurities, the power of the state vs. the power of intranational and multinational organizations, tech-savvy vs. tech-ignorant labor force, all of which have contributed to an advanced form of disintegration and rising social entropy in an age that glorifies and worships at the altar of Nietzsche’s deconstruction.
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made,” Immanuel Kant wrote, not as a praise to perfection but as a prelude to the reality of human nature. Isaiah Berlin — one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century — borrowed Kant’s metaphor in order to help us understand the links between the cataclysms (economic, technological, political, social, cultural, etc.) that surround every generation, and the ideas/standards of the past that can enlighten and anchor our understanding of the future.
The unfortunate thing is that nowadays we have been worshipping at the altar of Nietzsche’s deconstruction — where ideals, heroes, standards, and anchors have been eliminated, and where our relationship to the means of production, pleasure, instantaneous gratification and quick profit determine who we are, what we believe, what our values and priorities are. In a nutshell, the adoption of deconstructive thinking has been degrading our capacity to think, and therefore we are becoming traders rather than investors.
Returning to a prior dispensation rarely — if ever — makes a lot of sense. However, evolutionary thinking — and to that extent investing — does not mean that we abandon all principles and for the sake of the new we forget the anchoring truths. In investing we do not go after lost paradises because that is ahistorical. However, that does not mean that we are able to create our own truths in a Nietzschean universe. The alpha (A) always will be alpha (A) and not beta (B). Stratospheric Price-to-Earnings and Price-to-Sales ratios are indicative of the deconstruction that has prevailed in our thinking, and follows in a Freudian subconscious instinct a distorted animal spirit where in politics the party comes before the country, and in our investment thinking a nihilist approach prevails over valuations based on fundamentals.
This nihilist approach to investing, politics, and to life, reflects nothing but an amor fati (fatalistic) cynicism that enslaves us to realities that we create out of disillusions. The liberation sought after with deconstruction has created in us chains of illiberalism, and the result is that we have illiberal brains, illiberal politics, illiberal economies, and illiberal schools. We have killed Homer and with him the heroes and the standards of life and consequently of investing.
When we exclude the transcendental from our thinking process and from our world, we abandon ourselves to the amor fati nihilistic delusion where accommodation and passivity preclude the possibility of co-authoring our history and our investments. The disruptors, in that case, may advance technology but they leave us poorer in terms of our intellectual and moral capacity, and sometimes even in terms of material well-being. In such a case, the disruptors do not behave like the steam engine, the invention of electricity or the telecommunication advancements of the past. Twitter is not as important as the invention of printing. They rather emphasize the I, the me, the self as the center of the universe where the reality of the self has no root outside of its own deconstructive and nihilistic self-universe, the revolution becomes a devolution, and the I via the social media enthrones itself and demands “likes” given that the digital power in the palm of the hand is greater than the computers who sent Apollo 14 into orbit. In the age of artificial intelligence, programmers drift into obsolescence as they may be working as office temps. By skewing the gains of the disruptors to a few, robots and our robotic nihilistic and deconstructive thinking, as well as our politics, have been weakening the engine of growth which traditionally has been the middle class.
Technology and globalization go together: Just recall the first great phase of globalization — which disappeared after WWI — that was driven by steam power. Is it an accident that the Opium Wars started amidst the steam revolution? Industrialization and globalization even made slave ownership uneconomical, demonstrating the healthy moral and intellectual — let alone political — cohesiveness that can be achieved by elevating standards. Disruptors transformed and advanced politics and diplomacy. Can we say the same nowadays?
Continuous growth has not been the human story. Just look at England whose growth was so insignificant in the Middle Ages that the doubling of per capita income took 400 years! Growth has been absent for most of human history. The story changed in the 19th century at the intersection of energy transformation (wood-burning gave its place to coal and the latter to oil in the 20th century), technology, and health sciences. The great leap forward empowered by electricity, the internal combustion engine, refrigeration, penicillin, synthetics, and the telephone, disrupted and elevated standards of living while advancing knowledge, literacy, understanding, and critical thinking.
If we had maintained the pre-1970 productivity growth rate our median income in the US would have been close to $100,000. Now, it is close to $52,000. Who has switched the value tags?
We are advancing in our robotics, and in our gene-splicing techniques. Will any of these advancements be a game-changer like electricity? Will the advancements in medicine treat ailments for those who can afford them? If the iPhone did not help in lifting the rate of productivity, are we placing our hopes in a cryonic leap into immortality? Remote intelligence, holographic presence will soon be creating high-skill offshoring possibilities. As this is progressing, a good chunk — if not the majority — of Westerners will be trying to earn their living in a gig economy out of necessity rather than out of choice, and the time for contemplation and critical thinking will be gone. Creativity does not necessarily drive our disruptors. It is mostly the application of digital networks to different economic sectors (e.g. Uber), and as our dreams of the future are supplied by cyber-utopians, I am just wondering:
How much of this solipsistic and deconstructive mentality can we afford when figures already show that deglobalization is taking place not because of the populists’ policies and their misconceived trade wars but because of the rising illiberalism in our deconstructive thinking?
Deglobalization and Disruption Meets Deconstruction: Isaiah Berlin and the Crooked Timber of Trading
Author : John E. Charalambakis
Date : July 24, 2019
Danny Rodrick might have been right after all when he argued in his 1997 book (titled Has Globalization Gone Too Far?) that we should be careful how far we are pushing the boundaries of globalization. Globalization inevitably gave rise to some tensions and facts, such as skilled vs. unskilled workforce, wealth and income inequalities, social inequalities, job insecurities, the power of the state vs. the power of intranational and multinational organizations, tech-savvy vs. tech-ignorant labor force, all of which have contributed to an advanced form of disintegration and rising social entropy in an age that glorifies and worships at the altar of Nietzsche’s deconstruction.
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made,” Immanuel Kant wrote, not as a praise to perfection but as a prelude to the reality of human nature. Isaiah Berlin — one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century — borrowed Kant’s metaphor in order to help us understand the links between the cataclysms (economic, technological, political, social, cultural, etc.) that surround every generation, and the ideas/standards of the past that can enlighten and anchor our understanding of the future.
The unfortunate thing is that nowadays we have been worshipping at the altar of Nietzsche’s deconstruction — where ideals, heroes, standards, and anchors have been eliminated, and where our relationship to the means of production, pleasure, instantaneous gratification and quick profit determine who we are, what we believe, what our values and priorities are. In a nutshell, the adoption of deconstructive thinking has been degrading our capacity to think, and therefore we are becoming traders rather than investors.
Returning to a prior dispensation rarely — if ever — makes a lot of sense. However, evolutionary thinking — and to that extent investing — does not mean that we abandon all principles and for the sake of the new we forget the anchoring truths. In investing we do not go after lost paradises because that is ahistorical. However, that does not mean that we are able to create our own truths in a Nietzschean universe. The alpha (A) always will be alpha (A) and not beta (B). Stratospheric Price-to-Earnings and Price-to-Sales ratios are indicative of the deconstruction that has prevailed in our thinking, and follows in a Freudian subconscious instinct a distorted animal spirit where in politics the party comes before the country, and in our investment thinking a nihilist approach prevails over valuations based on fundamentals.
This nihilist approach to investing, politics, and to life, reflects nothing but an amor fati (fatalistic) cynicism that enslaves us to realities that we create out of disillusions. The liberation sought after with deconstruction has created in us chains of illiberalism, and the result is that we have illiberal brains, illiberal politics, illiberal economies, and illiberal schools. We have killed Homer and with him the heroes and the standards of life and consequently of investing.
When we exclude the transcendental from our thinking process and from our world, we abandon ourselves to the amor fati nihilistic delusion where accommodation and passivity preclude the possibility of co-authoring our history and our investments. The disruptors, in that case, may advance technology but they leave us poorer in terms of our intellectual and moral capacity, and sometimes even in terms of material well-being. In such a case, the disruptors do not behave like the steam engine, the invention of electricity or the telecommunication advancements of the past. Twitter is not as important as the invention of printing. They rather emphasize the I, the me, the self as the center of the universe where the reality of the self has no root outside of its own deconstructive and nihilistic self-universe, the revolution becomes a devolution, and the I via the social media enthrones itself and demands “likes” given that the digital power in the palm of the hand is greater than the computers who sent Apollo 14 into orbit. In the age of artificial intelligence, programmers drift into obsolescence as they may be working as office temps. By skewing the gains of the disruptors to a few, robots and our robotic nihilistic and deconstructive thinking, as well as our politics, have been weakening the engine of growth which traditionally has been the middle class.
Technology and globalization go together: Just recall the first great phase of globalization — which disappeared after WWI — that was driven by steam power. Is it an accident that the Opium Wars started amidst the steam revolution? Industrialization and globalization even made slave ownership uneconomical, demonstrating the healthy moral and intellectual — let alone political — cohesiveness that can be achieved by elevating standards. Disruptors transformed and advanced politics and diplomacy. Can we say the same nowadays?
Continuous growth has not been the human story. Just look at England whose growth was so insignificant in the Middle Ages that the doubling of per capita income took 400 years! Growth has been absent for most of human history. The story changed in the 19th century at the intersection of energy transformation (wood-burning gave its place to coal and the latter to oil in the 20th century), technology, and health sciences. The great leap forward empowered by electricity, the internal combustion engine, refrigeration, penicillin, synthetics, and the telephone, disrupted and elevated standards of living while advancing knowledge, literacy, understanding, and critical thinking.
If we had maintained the pre-1970 productivity growth rate our median income in the US would have been close to $100,000. Now, it is close to $52,000. Who has switched the value tags?
We are advancing in our robotics, and in our gene-splicing techniques. Will any of these advancements be a game-changer like electricity? Will the advancements in medicine treat ailments for those who can afford them? If the iPhone did not help in lifting the rate of productivity, are we placing our hopes in a cryonic leap into immortality? Remote intelligence, holographic presence will soon be creating high-skill offshoring possibilities. As this is progressing, a good chunk — if not the majority — of Westerners will be trying to earn their living in a gig economy out of necessity rather than out of choice, and the time for contemplation and critical thinking will be gone. Creativity does not necessarily drive our disruptors. It is mostly the application of digital networks to different economic sectors (e.g. Uber), and as our dreams of the future are supplied by cyber-utopians, I am just wondering:
How much of this solipsistic and deconstructive mentality can we afford when figures already show that deglobalization is taking place not because of the populists’ policies and their misconceived trade wars but because of the rising illiberalism in our deconstructive thinking?