Always Wolf

The three Little Pigs
The first little pig builds a house of straw, but a wolf blows down that house and eats the pig. The second little pig builds a house of sticks, but the same wolf blows it down and eats the pig. The third pig builds a strong house of bricks, so when the wolf comes to the door, he can't blow the house down.

We all know the story of the Three Little Pigs, but what is the moral?

Moral?
The lesson from the fable is that hard effort and perseverance pay off, and that preparation is necessary for success. The story tells us that taking shortcuts or taking the easy way out can have major consequences, and that we must be prepared to confront life's problems.

I call Bullshit.

The real moral of the story isn't about being smart and working hard, it is about ownership and creating wealth. Look at the story from a resource perspective and it is pretty easy to see that pig number one only had straw to build with, pig number two was middle class and had sticks, and pig number three had everything needed to build a solid foundation, and a house out of bricks. The two pigs eaten by the wolf didn't take the easy way out, they did what they could with what they had, which wasn't much.

Whose fault is it?

This is an interesting question for Finland at the moment, because there are protests against the government as they introduce different kinds of austerity measures, as they cut costs across many sectors, including social support. And, of course people are going to protest, as cost of living increases and incomes decrease relatively. But, what is interesting is that some people think that taking on more debt is the answer, even though Finland will be paying around 5 billion alone in interest repayments on its debt this year. That is about 1000 dollars per capita, and there is nothing to show for it at all. But, where does it go?

To the owners. The people who build brick houses.

However, we are increasingly living in a world where people have been encouraged to be consumers, not owners. Earlier, I wrote an article about there not being an overarching purpose in life, and this article is related. In the past, when there was an overarching purpose of survival, it meant establishing resources, building and supporting a family, and having some kind of continuance that went beyond an individual life. This meant that working value was transferred into financial value, which was then sunk into stores of value - house, car, investments etc. This meant that large amounts of wealth were locked up across a wide spread of points, like carbon sinks around the world.

However, when there isn't the "survival" purpose and people feel that they will be somewhat looked after, it turns into a consumer mentality, which means that instead of planting trees that will grow to lock up wealth, it is burning all the seedlings, and whatever else can be turned into value to consume more. What this means is that increasingly large portions of the value that people generate through their work, immediately gets transferred into the pockets of the owners of the endless stream of consumer targets. These people then sink that value into their sinks, trapping it out of reach.

Building brick homes.

When the big, bad wolf comes blowing at the door, they are secure in their holdings, because no matter what happens to the economy, people will still have to consume somewhere. And, to keep the game going, the governments will borrow more and more money (future taxes), hand it out to the people who are then going to use it to survive, which means consuming more. They will never have enough to become owners, because even when times are good, they have the mentality to consume, not invest.

This is encouraged.

In the article I linked above, I was talking about how many people today are living an unstoried life, meaning that it is a lot of random and independent experiences clumped together. But, break each event into their individual parts, and realize that pretty much all of them are consumer items designed to provide some kind of dopamine kick, to make us feel like they matter.

Buy experiences.

The experience that most people are buying is one where they are destitute and struggling, unable to support themselves and looking to the government for handouts. They are buying the experience of a renter, not an owner, someone who has all the freedom in the world, but not the resources to be free.

Pigs to the slaughter.

The wealth gaps are increasing rapidly, and they will continue to do so because so many people will never start becoming their own wealth sinks. Instead of starting to claw back wealth and slowly turn the culture into one where there is again distributed wealth holdings, the transfer into a decreasing number of wealth pools will continue. The rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer, until the wolf consumes them from the bottom up.

People seem to believe that they are safe, that there is some kind of rule that the government, or someone authority is obligated to look after them. But this is not the case. We don't live in a utopia of human nature, we live in a society of trade, and there is no economic reason to support anyone who isn't adding value into the system. The business model is for profit maximization and efficiencies, which means that people will just be left to die, or to kill themselves, or be "removed" to improve distribution, as we have seen in the past.

No one is going to save you. Or me.

Expecting that a wolf isn't going to try and eat a pig, is folly. To believe that a pig is going to look after other pigs, is folly. Yes, there are alternatives out there than the economic processes we currently employ, but we don't support them, so they aren't going to work. All of the economic processes rely on ownership, but not all of them require distributed ownership to work as intended.

The economy is working as intended.

The current economy is one that looks to monopolize resources continually to the point that it is like Highlander, and there is only one. While it hasn't got there yet because the more it happens the more unstable the system becomes and failure sets in through war, it is getting there again - approaching one.

The last house standing - the brick house.

There is always a wolf.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]