"In the Beginning..."
What words can tell us about the future of progress.
by Bill Bonner
‘In the beginning was the word.’
~ John 1:1
Baltimore, Maryland - "We all have to play our roles. Citizens of a late, degenerate empire have to act like citizens of a late, degenerate empire. And talk like them. For one thing, they have to stop using words such as “progress” and “future.”
That, at any rate, is the gist of John Burn-Murdoch’s piece in the Financial Times. He studied the use of words and found that people on the way up use different words than they do on the way down. England industrialized long before Spain, for example. Just looking at the word counts, he found that the English used many more words that suggested optimism – such as “progress” and “future” – than the Spanish. He believes the words show a mindset…which may lead or even cause actual material progress.
But words do not come out of nowhere. They reflect what people see…and hear…and what they think about. Yesterday, came this story from the Wall Street Journal: "Congressional Negotiators Reach Agreement on $1.6 Trillion Government Spending Level for 2024. Deal paves the way toward full-year package averting a shutdown, but much work still needed."
Where the Desert Ends: Good news? Shutdown averted…spend, spend, spend. And here is our old friend, John Mauldin, writing in Forbes: "We have no good choices left. It is as if we are on a trip through a desert and know for certain we don’t have enough water to go back. We have to go forward, not knowing where the desert ends.
That’s the reality. Unless you want to cut Social Security and Medicare, ignore military pensions, sell the national parks, abolish departments like State and Treasury, cut the defense budget in half along with Homeland Security, Education, Labor, the Justice Department and the FBI, etc., we are going to have to live with the $2 trillion deficits. And the debt will go to $50 trillion by 2030. That’s the reality too."
The rest of the news is not exactly uplifting either. CNN: "One in every 100 people in Gaza has been killed since the war between Israel and Hamas erupted on October 7, according to Palestinian statistics. The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah announced in its daily update on Monday that at least 22,835 people have been killed in the besieged enclave since the beginning of the war."
A Gloomy Shade: So, what do the word counts show today? Just what you’d expect. Comparing the optimistic words to words the negative words - those that suggest “caution, worry or risk” – in books in English, French and German, Burn-Murdoch found ‘The West’ turned gloomy in the late 20th century and continues to walk on the shady side of the street ever since. The author may believe that the choice of words – illustrating a widespread belief that the future could be improved – actually led to improvements. More likely, people came to think what they must think when they had to think it…or when it paid to think it.
Markets make opinions, say the old timers. When tech stocks are soaring…and people are getting rich on Apple, Meta, or Nvidia…what do people think? They think they can get rich with tech stocks!
We take it for granted that reality changes opinions. What we don’t know is how much opinions change reality. There must be some power in ‘thinking positive.’ And if you’re going to lead the world in technological, manufacturing, and military power…like the English in the 18th century…it’s probably a good thing to believe that there’s a bright future ahead.
But as James Nielson, columnist at the Buenos Aires Herald, reports, people in The West are no longer optimistic: "Of late, there has been much talk about the rapid decline of the West which, in addition having to deal with a league of “autocracies” convinced that their moment has come, is being undermined from within by influential individuals who insist it is, in large measure, a criminal enterprise which owes its existence to the vile behaviour of slave-traders, white-supremacist racist bigots, imperialists, colonialists and other equally despicable beings. For those who think this way, and there are millions of them entrenched in academia, the media and national bureaucracies, the West and its indigenous inhabitants thoroughly deserve the unhappy fate they see fast approaching."
Wracked and Wrecked: Many in ancient Rome believed the empire was doomed because the people stopped believing in the old gods and stopped respecting the old customs. Gibbon, too, thought that Christianity was partly to blame. Its praise of ‘the meek’ and turning the other cheek, were not compatible with running a great empire, he thought.
But a lot of water had run under the Ponte Sant’Angelo by the time Romans had been Christianized. Many bodies had been tossed into the Tiber - victims of civil wars and political purges. The economy, too, had been wracked and wrecked, from inflation and overspending. If more words of the Romans were available on an electronic database we would probably discover that they too had, by the 5th century, lost their upbeat tone.
Just like printing paper money doesn’t make you rich, believing in a bright future doesn’t make the sun shine. And now, if the sun sets on the Great Western Empire, it’s probably not because the positive word count has gone down."
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