I remember well the days of 2005, 2006 and 2007: I was telling everybody within earshot that we were in a massive bubble that had been engineered by reckless Fed loose-money policies. But very few would listen.
House prices were going up, the stock market was powering to new highs, and I guess I was just that cranky guy. The oddest part was, I was only trying to help people avoid pain; kind of like telling them the candy bar they'd just bought was actually filled with broken glass.
And yet the vast majority of folks resisted the data I was presenting. The reason, I soon learned, was that people do not make decisions based on information, but rather on emotion. And few emotions are as powerful as greed. Or envy.
Combine those two with what we call the 'financial markets', and you quickly learn why bubbles happen. And why so few are willing to see them.
And yes, the use of the word 'willing' there is both intentional and accurate. It's a matter of choice whether people face up an uncomfortable truth. Quite often they aren't willing to, even if doing so could help them avoid experiencing even pain in the future.
Smokers who received a lung cancer diagnosis, alcoholics who hit rock bottom, and farmers that finally cannot pump any more water from an over-tapped aquifer are all examples of individuals who could have made different — and more prudent — choices sooner. And thereby save themselves a future of hurt.
That is, had they been willing to make different choices, their destinies would have been vastly different.
Unwilling to Face the Truth
In order to believe the main narratives being pumped out by the Western media, like a four-packs-a-day smoker, you have to have a pretty large disregard for consequences.
First, there's the obvious denial of our slavish devotion to a system that has to grow exponentially forever in order to function. It can't grow this way forever; and we don't have a backup plan for when the growth peters out.
More and more people are awakening to the folly of this, and it's even finally getting some limited play in the media:
It's simple. If we can't change our economic system, our number's up (The Guardian)
May 27, 2014
To succeed is to destroy ourselves.
by jcat3022 
